Has the worship of God through the mediation of Christ entirely
superseded—was it intended to supersede—the worship of God through the
mediation of the visible World? I think not yet. It will in the end but
not now. There may come a time, in some future existence, when we shall
see righteousness like the sun, when we shall have visions of the beauty
and order of holiness like the stars, and behold the glory of sacrifice
spread out before our eyes like the firmament of heaven; and then the
revelation of God through visible Nature will be swallowed up in the
revelation of God through invisible Nature. But now, not many of us can
pretend to such a power of spiritual insight. We feel that, if we
learned the story of Christ without the help of the commentary of the
awful powers of material nature, we might be in danger of repeating it
with a glib familiarity which would hinder us from penetrating its
meaning. Those who live in the stir of cities where they are doomed
never to be alone, never to realize perfect silence, never to see more
than a few square feet of sky, are living as the Word of God did not
intend them to live; they may have—they often have—great spiritual
compensations; they certainly have some spiritual disadvantage in these
unnatural negations. As long as we have eyes and ears and the faculties
of wonder and admiration, so long must we suppose that the revelation of
the Word of God through Jesus of Nazareth has not dispensed with the
revelation of the Word of God through the forces of material nature. If
we wish to approach God we should not despise the Mediation of the Word
of God in its entirety, that is to say, the mediation of “the World with
Christ.”
Now what practical inferences follow from our definition of worship, if
we are satisfied that it is roughly true? Here let me put in a caution.
Our definition cannot be exactly true; for, in its exactness, worship
means the sum total of all the feelings that should be felt by the mind
of man, when he contemplates God through the mediation of “the World
with Christ.” Who can enumerate these without confessing that he may
have passed over some so subtle and so deep that language itself has
left them unnamed? We must therefore be content with a rough definition.
But if it be roughly true that worship means love, trust and awe, what
practical inferences may we thence deduce as regards our own conduct?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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