By this time you will have seen that while answering the question,
“Whom, or what, ought we to worship?” I have indirectly answered a
preliminary question, “What do we mean by worship?” You have also
probably noticed what answer I have given to this question: worship
appears to me a combination of love, trust, and awe. Do you accept this?
I have never seen any serious objection taken to this definition except
by those who refuse practically to define it at all and who would simply
say “Worship is the homage paid by man to the Creator: and it has
nothing to do with, and cannot be explained by, the feelings with which
we regard man.” If I had not seen this in the columns of a theological
journal, I should not have believed it possible that modern
superficiality and conventionalism could achieve quite so transparent a
shallowness. The sum total of our feelings towards God—more especially
our awe for Him—cannot indeed be adequately expressed in the same
language which expresses our feelings for men: but that is a very
different thing from saying that the former “have nothing to do with”
the latter. I believe that a large part of most men’s worship consists
of a shrinking from an Unknown, the sort of dread that children feel for
“the dark.” But righteous worship must imply other feelings; and these
feelings—some of them at all events—must have names; and whence are the
names to be derived but from our feelings towards men and things—towards
men, surely, as well as towards things? We must either love God, or hate
Him, or be indifferent to Him; we must either trust, or distrust Him. I
do not see how the people who would sever worship from all reference to
human relations can look upon it as other than a mere homage of the lips
or knees, a going to church, and attendance at religious services. Need
I say that, when I define worship, I am defining the worship of the
heart, not the attitude of those who honour God with their lips but
whose heart is far from Him?
Now the attitude of man to God has varied greatly in accordance with
their conception of God, according as they have conceived Him to be
Moloch, or Apollo, or Jehovah, or the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ.
In some men worship has been mere terror; in some, it has been a desire
to bribe; in some it has been faint gratitude and strong admiration; in
some it has been intense awe and reverence. All such forms of worship
have been imperfect, and some have been very bad. At the best, none of
them have combined all the best and noblest feelings of aspiration which
Nature tends to develop in us by means of human and non-human agencies.
Human nature—acting through the relations of the family—should elicit
love and loving trust; non-human nature—acting through the seas and
skies, with their suggestions of vastness and power—should elicit awe
and awful trust; and the combination of these two natural influences
should elicit love, trust and awe, which three-fold result constitutes
worship.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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