Worship

Extract

“We went on up the narrow strait, thus anxiously. On this side lay Scylla . . . on that Charybdis.” In the Odyssey of every Christian there are times and places when the words of Homer strike home. Worship and personal prayer are essential to him as motive forces directing his journey “up the narrow strait”; and in his living experience both are beset by the two monsters that lie within bow-shot of his anxious passage, routine and pietism. The one springs from misapprehending the rôle of corporate worship, the other from over-absorption in individual devotion. As there is little steerage way there must always be sufficient impetus to keep the frail craft moving straight ahead, responsive to every touch of the helmsman. Individual temperament will give an inclination to one side or the other: the scrupulous towards self-absorption and the easy-going to mechanical routine.

The same difficulty holds good in some degree for group worship with its tendency to divagate towards high-and-dry formalism or towards an unstable revivalism. Each extreme marks the over-emphasis of one of the two essential coordinates of worship, a disciplined cultus and personal responsiveness. In the history of the Church the scales have moved successively up and down without irrevocably destroying the careful balance, though the individualist side has tended to be outweighed, since corporate devotion has a constant bias towards formalism, and the movements back have been sudden and violent in character.