and lawlessness. Yet they are found not only in dramatic and unusual incidents, but in the ordinary service of every church. The great essentials to a religious service are the lessening-we may better say heightening of the single consciousness into a great collective consciousness, the swift running of feeling from man to man, and the susceptibility of the entire assembly to conceptions and impulses from the leader. Where these things exist, a true congregation comes into being, whether it number twenty or twenty thousand. The individual personalities are filled, transcended, and overborne, as all the little salt pools on the beach are filled and united by the rising tide.

By this submergence of private desire and will in the general consciousness a man may rise or he may descend in character. "The crowd may be better or worse than the individual." It is not true that the phenomena of great assemblies are merely pathological. It is mere intellectual snobbishness for the monk in his cell or the philosopher in his retreat to look down on great assemblies as mere flocks of heedless sheep. To speak of the "recognized lowering of critical ability, of the power of accurate observation, indeed of rationality, which merely being one of a crowd induces," is to exaggerate, and to ignore certain compensating facts. Of course the crowd is not the place for scientific experiment. One would hardly choose the center of Brooklyn bridge for an astronomical observatory. But on the other hand, one would not choose an observatory as the place to study human nature. If the crowd may descend under the spell of the demagogue, it may also soar to incredible heights of aspiration and devotion under the speech of the prophet. If the crowd cried "Crucify him," the crowd also cried a little later: "Men and brethren, what shall we do?" The man who imagines that it is the mark of superior intellect to build a cabin in the forest, as did Thoreau, and avoid all the massing of his fellows, is self-deceived and self-excluded from the most thrilling and energizing experiences of life. The man who has not quivered and glowed at the passing of the regiment, who has not shouted and sung with hundreds of others at some celebration by his school or college, who has not bowed with a great

multitude confessing its sin, is still a partial and isolated person, of limited and provincial experience. Shall he from his fastidious "palace of art" look down disdainfully on the robust and red-blooded men who sing and pray together on a Sunday? Rather let him look up to them, as to those who are entering into social and racial experiences to which he is a stranger.

Deep in human nature lies, therefore, the necessity for congregational worship. In spite of the printing of the books of which there is no end, in spite of the ubiquitous and monstrous Sunday newspaper, in spite of the tragic failure of many churches to feed the souls of men, it still remains true that apart from physical assembly some of the noblest religious experience of the race has been and always will be impossible. Whoever has heard Wendell Phillips in Tremont Temple pleading for justice, or Phillips Brooks in Trinity Church pouring out a soul that shrank from all private confession, has realized that the isolated man is a fragment and that only in union do we achieve highest vision and victory.

Yet these great possibilities are rarely realized, because of certain faults in the form of worship, which render it nugatory to some men and injurious to the finer feelings of others. Of these, two faults are the most common today-crudity and fragmentariness.

The crudity of many forms of worship renders them useless to persons of genuine sensibility. When the Scripture is read as if it were a railroad time-table, or on the other hand as if it were a textbook in elocution, the result is the reverse of devotional. When prayer ostensibly addressed to God takes the form of an harangue to the audience, the effect is the same as that produced by any other form of hypocrisy. In many churches the performance of the choir is admirable from an aesthetic standpoint, but quite irrelevant as an aid to worship. Indeed in most churches the task of the preacher is rendered vastly more difficult by the intrusion of incongruous or impertinent music. After the choir by elaborate performance has brought the congregation into the concert-mood, the preacher is expected to remove that mood and replace it by the temper of devotion. In some churches the ordinance of baptism is a mere survival of what was at the banks of the Jordan deeply and tenderly significant, but is now repeated amid such irreverence and vulgar curiosity as to make

it hardly more than a kind of amateur dramatics. The Lord's Supper is in some places so shabbily administered as to repel the worshipful mind, and a carelessness which we should not for a moment allow in our homes is not infrequently seen at the table of the Lord. The invention of individual cups-in which the fear of microbes has proved stronger than love of the brethren-has converted the sacred Supper from a symbol of a common life and an all-embracing love into the extreme expression of a timid individualism and an unmistakable noli me tangere. When the common cup, which symbolizes undying unity, is split into scores of glass thimbles symbolizing hygienic protection from the contaminating touch of other men, is not the resulting ceremony an inversion of the original communion? Of course the Christian consciousness may in time adjust itself to this inversion, as to many other radical changes of symbol. But at present the most striking expression of modern religious separatism is in many churches to be seen at the Lord's Supper. In all worship due care should be exercised lest our most sacred ritual either become slovenly in method, or drift far away from its "inward and spiritual grace."

But the chief defect in worship is that it frequently expresses a fragment of our human nature, when in its ideal form it should gather up and express the total personality of the worshipers. That which impresses us in the worship of the Middle Ages is that it spoke for the whole man and spoke to the whole man. In the vast rituals of pagan Greece and Rome, poor as was much of the teaching, the entire nature of the worshiper was in play. A public sacrifice before the sailing of the fleet, or at the return of the conquering general, appealed to the whole nation and to the whole experience of every citizen. It was a proclamation of doctrine, an expression of gratitude and joy, an aesthetic triumph, a union of music and sculpture and all the arts in the service of religion, a union of all public and private institutions in symbolic action, and it spoke to the nation and for the nation with a comprehensiveness which has now become difficult or impossible. Our modern worship shows plainly its submission to the great command: "Come ye out from among them and be ye separate." It has gained moral purity by isolating itself from large sections of experience. Our problem is to preserve that purity and yet enable

worship to express the entire nature of man and the experience of the community.

Christianity appeals to the intellect, the emotions, and the will. It is at the same time a system of truth, a storehouse of feeling, and an ideal of conduct. To man's intellect it offers truths long hidden from the wise and prudent. To the emotional life it offers objects of deep devotion and lasting allegiance. To conscience and will it offers an ethical ideal imperative and alluring. And all three aspects of human nature the mental, the emotional, the volitional-must find adequate utterance in worship.

The Puritan made the intellectual element in worship supreme. With fierce zeal he broke the statues in the cathedrals, and built for himself a chapel where no image of man or tree or flower could distract, no stained glass could delight his vision, no swinging censer or tinkling bell could minister to the flesh, and no lust of the eye seduce his steadfast soul. He exalted the sermon at the expense of all other parts of the worship, because clear ideas of truth were essential to the moral life and instruction was the great task of religion. Knowledge of the true God was the chief essential, and to communicate such knowledge was the highest form of worship.

We who are the heirs of the Puritan tradition may well be thankful for this virile, if incomplete, conception of religious worship. At least it was not sensuous idolatry. It was free from sentimentalism and filled with robust and sturdy self-reliance. It would not be "carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease," but would patiently, logically, think its way to God, to righteousness and peace.

But the defect of Puritan worship was that it recognized only one way of approach to the city of Mansoul. Its exaltation of human reason as the central principle in man led to an exaltation of doctrine as of supreme value in worship. New England Christianity is bewildered today because New England is half filled by a foreign. population born of the Latin races, to whom the service of the Puritan meeting-house is quite unintelligible. To our Italian and French and Portuguese populations the worship of the average Protestant church, with its cool and logical process, makes little appeal, while deep in their hearts is an inborn longing for fervor and color and symbol and pageant. One trembles to think what would happen to

this great foreign population if the Roman Catholic church we suddenly to withdraw its ministry before Protestantism is ready discard its narrow appeal to the intellect alone, and is prepared address all the legitimate hungers and aspirations of humanity.

It is a curious fact that the Puritans went to the Old Testame for the commonwealth, their ideals of law and government, b refused to take any hint from it as to the organization of worshi They exalted Moses at the court of Pharaoh, and Elijah defyi Ahab, as models of popular resistance to tyranny. They soug o reconstruct the state as a true theocracy. How could they fail see that the Old Testament worship was aglow with gorgeous colo heavy with form and formula, rich in symbolism, and clearly p torial in its proclamation of every truth? The modern critic m indeed shake off every Old Testament suggestion or regulation, as species of materialism belonging to the early stages of religio development. But the upholder of the verbal inspiration and Mosa origin of the Pentateuch cannot disdain in modern worship the use such rich symbolism as he holds was divinely ordained for ancie Israel. We cannot affirm that Israel's use of sound and color af golden censer and embroidered curtain reveals the mind of God regar ing human approach, and at the same time affirm that the Purit abhorrence of all symbolism is likewise in accord with divine directio The so-called change of dispensations cannot mean a change human nature. Either the worship of Israel was puerile, pet materialistic, and tended only to hide Jehovah from the worship or there is inherent in human nature a demand for religious symbolis and a deep necessity for the concrete and visible expression of religio faith.

The position of the Puritan and the Quaker is a “reform again nature." In the justifiable revolt against ceremony that had beco magic, and formula that had become incantation, they treated m as disembodied spirits, or rather as pure mental processes, as m calculating machines. For children, and for men in the childi stage, logical demonstration of truth is both useless and repelle It is "truth embodied in a tale," or in a simple ceremony, that "ent in at lowly doors."

In our own time the Chautauqua movement would have be