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ART. VIL-THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF WORSHIP.

AN adequate means of public worship was the particular element in religion which the early Christians, so lately emancipated from Judaism, were most in danger of neglecting. And the stately and noble worship of Zion was the par ticular thing in the old religion which they were likely most to miss, and look back to with longing. Accordingly, we find the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews trying to strengthen the faith of the new converts at this weak point. The old ritual had been built up and elaborated about the priestly and sacrificial idea. Indeed, sacrifice was the central act of worship in all pre-Christian religions. Christianity, however, repudiated and abolished sacrifice and priesthood. It preached an ethical gospel. It knew nothing of altars and bleeding victims and presiding priests making atonement for sins. It found all the aspirations which these things so blindly strove to express more than satisfied in the living Christ. By far the greater part of the service of worship on Mount Moriah was thus utterly superseded and abolished for the Christian. Its sacrifices were useless, and worse than useless. Its sacrificial ritual and all the symbolism of Levitical atonement were but meaningless and empty forms. What was he to do, then, to find satisfaction for the instinctive desire for common worship? The ornate ritual of Levitical sacrifice was not for him; the beautiful temple with all its sacred furnishings was henceforth not for him. What could take its place? This was a great danger point for the early Church. The danger was twofold. On the one hand, there was danger of reacting entirely away from the idea of common worship, an excessive individualism denying the necessity of public assemblies for worship each man feeling sufficient unto himself in all things spiritual. This danger had actually begun to realize itself when this epistle was written, for the writer warns against it in these words: "Not forsaking our own assembling together, as the custom of some

is." The other danger was that men accustomed to priestly and sacrificial religion should be unable to comprehend a faith so purely spiritual and ethical as Christianity, and hence introduce these elements into Christianity. And this indeed did happen; and original Christianity has had loaded upon it the pre-Christian ideas of sacrifice and priestliness which Christ came to supersede. As it has been said:

And so, by and by, the men who felt the vacancy or bareness of a worship which knew not these things brought in the idea and the name of priest, and with him all the furniture which he so loves, and which constitute to him religion. ... The only altar Christ knew was the altar of the pure heart, the altar where the living God himself did dwell. But when they ceased to understand his mind they changed his worship. And they surrounded him with various influences that shut out man and made it difficult for man to reach him.*

The writer to the Hebrews clearly saw this tendency and lifted up his voice to encourage these recent converts from Judaism to rise to such a height of spiritual vision that they could dispense with sacrifice, and worship God with praise and thanksgiving rather than with materialistic symbols of atoning blood and smoking altars: "Through him then let us offer up a sacrifice of praise to God continually, that is, the fruit of lips which make confession to his name;" and he immediately adds this touch, emphasizing again the ethical character of Christianity: "But to do good and to communicate forget not: for with such sacrifices God is well pleased” (xiii, 15, 16). It took courage; it took real spirituality to rise above the venerable and universal ideas of sacrificial worship and learn to worship God through Christ by means only of the sacrifices of praise and thanksgiving; and to do this without any of the magnificently sensuous and artistic aids to devotion that the old religion had at its disposal. It is to encourage this confidence and this spirituality that the writer of this epistle says again, "Wherefore, receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us have grace, whereby we may offer service well-pleasing to God with reverence and awe."

*Fairbairn, Christ in the Centuries, p. 14.

Rightly understood, the new worship, though without temple, altar, and priest, was more majestic and divine than all the venerable pomps of Zion.

And what feature of worship was it, we may ask, that enabled Christianity to make the transition from the old idea of worship to the new, and that gradually enabled the new religion to develop such rich and worthy forms of worship? The answer is, Christian song. Denied the spectacular pomp of altar and priestly attendants, the early Christians turned to a nobler expression of the soul's love for God-music. They kept the music of Zion, even though compelled to discard its priests and altars. Among the few references in secular history to the early customs of Christians is Pliny's significant statement that it was the custom of these worshipers to assemble and sing hymns in praise of one Christus, their founder, as to a God. There is abundant evidence in the New Testament that the first forms of Christian worship consisted almost exclusively of the liberal use of the Psalms. The sacrificial idea about which gathered the cumbersome and elaborate service of Judaism was transcended, priesthood was abolished, and when these came in afterward, they came not as a progress but as a relapse. Architecture they had not as yet. The conversion of the Roman basilica or law court into the typical Christian church, and the birth of the Gothic, the preeminent expression of the Christian faith, were yet things of a distant future. And so song, prayer, and exhortation were the forms employed. The writer to the Hebrews bids the early Christians use these and find in them that expression for worship which the soul of man must have. The Christian is urged not to neglect this prime essential of all religion. St. Paul writes both to the Ephesians (v, 19) and to the Colossians (iii, 16) exhorting them to "speak one to another and admonish one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your hearts to the Lord." And so, clinging to this most fruitful source of worship, Christian song, the poor and weak Christian communities without temples or altars were able to develop and

give worthy expression to the idea of worship, without which organized religion cannot exist.

A like age of transition, beset with like dangers, occurred at the time of the Protestant Reformation. At this time, also, it was found to be necessary once again to transcend and repudiate the sacrificial and priestly idea of worship. The notion of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper as a sacrifice, carrying with it by implication the hierarchy with all its grades, was the central idea about which the old worship had developed. Of course, the repudiation of this idea involved the breaking up of the venerable worship, dear as it had become through long and hallowed association, and the return to the simplicity and, as it seemed to many, the poverty of early apostolic days. This change inevitably meant the loss of much that was beautiful and noble; but, as in the breaking down of Judaism and the formation of the Christian Church, it carried with it potentialities of a still higher and nobler worship to be realized in distant days. For centuries the reaction has gone on, often to extreme and wanton excess, until at last in our own days we see its force spent, and many of the possibilities of Christian worship, long neglected, beginning to blossom forth in new and beautiful forms. And, as in the early days of Christianity, the holy power that has helped the Church to make the transition without fatal loss has been Christian music. Denied the ornate splendors of sacrificial altars with their richly vested priests, Protestant Churches have turned their attention to the writing of hymns and the cultivation of sacred music. And how rich has been the fruitage of that endeavor! Let Protestant Germany speak, with her Bach and his stately chorals that move with the tread of a great army; with her Handel who wrote the sublimest expression of Christian worship and faith the world has known-"The Messiah;" with her Mendelssohn with his "Elijah" and "St. Paul," whose inspired measures fill with praise the souls of Christians of all faiths. Let England answer with her Wesleys and Watts, Cowper and Montgomery, with their glowing hymns; with her great composers who

have produced the most stately and churchly school of music the Christian Church has ever known.

If we may call our own age an age of transition in worship, it is only transition toward a more fitting and complete expression of praise to Almighty God our Father. Beautiful forms and noble music are no longer feared as lurking snares of the evil one, to drag the Church back into bondage to a formal and dead ecclesiasticism. It is sometimes assumed by certain zealous sectarians that the most "spiritual" service is the one farthest removed from that which is orderly and artistic. Now and then one hears a remark like one reported to have been made in a Western city of late, that "nothing will draw our attention away from God quicker than a beautiful, artistic form of worship." Truly a most astonishing statement! Is it not a fearful assumption to make that it is more "spiritual" to sing cheap and bad music than to sing true and artistic music-music built upon rational and approved principles? One might as well say that it is more "spiritual" to build a church after the model of a barn than after the churchly models hallowed by centuries of worship. Is it not a fearful mistake to array art and music against the worship of God, rather than to make use of these ministries as allies and handmaidens of religion? It reminds one of the remark of Matthew Arnold, who said that to prefer the barren worship of Puritan Dissenters to the forms and music of the Church of England is to prefer the rhymes of Eliza Cook to the poetry of Milton. It is quite impossible to make a virtue out of bad form and trashy music. The testimony of nineteen centuries is against it. Christianity, both Roman and Protestant, has been the mother of art, and always its truest inspiration and friend. Really great reformers like Luther and Wesley have always been friends of art-men of taste and culture as well as champions of liberty; men who grieved to see so many worthy and edifying forms of worship ruthlessly flung away by unstable fanatics who did not know how to use liberty and who did not see clearly enough to distinguish the nonessential from the essential. In days of re

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