Surely there ought to be some analogy and resemblance, some proportion and harmony between the public worship which is paid to God in the Church militant on earth, and that which is offered to Him in the Church triumphant in heaven. Strange would it be if God, who, in the dispensation past and that to come, is seen delighting in external majesty, should have deprived the Christian Church (the living link between the past and the future) of all external glory. “For,” as St. Paul says, “if the ministry of condemnation is glory, much more the ministry of justice aboundeth in glory.”(419) It is true that God uttered this complaint against the children of Israel: “This people draw near Me with their mouth and honor Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me.”(420) It is also true that He was displeased with their sacrifices and religious festivals.(421) But He blamed them not because they praised Him with their voice, but because their hearts felt not what their lips uttered. He rejected their sacrifices because they were not accompanied by the more precious sacrifice of a penitent spirit. The same Lord who declares that the true adorer shall adore the Father in spirit commands also that public praise be given to Him in His holy temple: “Praise ye the Lord,” He says, “in His holy places.... Praise Him with sound of trumpet. Praise Him with psaltery and harp. Praise Him with timbrel and choir. Praise Him with strings and organs.”(422) If He says in one place: “Rend your hearts and not your garments,”(423) immediately after He adds: “Blow the trumpet in Sion, sanctify a fast, call a solemn assembly. Gather together the people, sanctify the Church.... Between the porch and the altar the Priests, the Lord’s ministers, shall weep and shall say: Spare, O Lord, spare Thy people!”(424) The Prophet first points out the absolute necessity of interior sorrow and contrition of heart, and then he insists on the duty of performing some acts of expiation, penance and humiliation, as you do when you have your forehead marked with ashes on Ash Wednesday, and when you observe the fast and abstinence of Lent. When St. Paul says that though he speak with the tongues of angels and of men, and distribute all his goods to feed the poor, and deliver his body to be burned, and have not the love of God, it profiteth him nothing,(425) he points out the necessity of interior worship. And when he says elsewhere that “in the name of Jesus every knee should bend of those that are in heaven, on earth and under the earth,”(426) he shows us the duty of exterior or ceremonial worship.