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saint or sinner, worshipper on Mount Zion or worshipper on Mount Grerizim, it is " a gift," a gift of God, a personal relation established between the individual soul and the Divine life-giving source of all. It is a secret between ourselves and God. ** God is a Spirit : and they that worship him must worship in spirit and truth."
Christ tells us here all that we need to know about the worship that is acceptable to God. He tells us — I. The Foundation of true Worship. II. The Nature of true Worship.
I.
Its Foundation.
The first essential of true worship is a true appreciation jof God's character. The foundation on which the new worship rests is a revelation made by Christ respecting the character of God.
1. God is spirit. We should greatly mistake the meaning of this if we took it as a theological definition of the Being of God. It is not theological, but practical. It is chiefly negative. It says what God is not. He is not matter. He has not a form. " A spirit hath not flesh and bones."
(1) What is meant by spirit ? There are false notions which regard it as attenuated gas, a wreath of air or vapour. This is only subtle materialism. Consider the universe, with the sun and stars, the harmony of the planets — all this force, order, harmony is from God. The spring season, with bursting vegetation — its life is God. Our own minds, their thought and feeling — that is spirit. God, therefore, is the Mind of the uni- verse. This, then, was the great truth, that God is^ind, not separated by conditions of space and time from His creatures.
(2) It is difficult for us to conceive of an absolutely spiritual being, without body, parts, or form; of One who is eternal as regards time, without beginning and without end ; and infinite as regards space, everywhere present, filling all things, or rather containing all within Himself. It is this idea, baffling to our imagination, of the infinite Being of God that is the foundation of
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spiritual worship. It is because God's Being is infinite that He is present alike to all, and takes cognizance of all persons and their concerns, the least as well as those which seem to us the greatest.
(3) The ordinary objector reasons thus: All the persons I know are visible, subject to the scrutiny of eye and ear and touch. I can well understand expressions of love, thanksgivings, cries for help, addressed to a being thus accessible to ordinary sense. But these people call when there is no one visible to hear and answer ; they address themselves to vacancy, and throw out their vain cries to the thin air. It is true they profess to be addressing a Spmt; but that means something which is not seen, heard, touched, handled, — an influence wholly beyond the scope of my senses. What evidence is there that such an impalpable Being hears and sees, knows, and wills, and acts ? How can I be sure that it exists at all ?
(4) Yet the facts of the universe are not altered by our incredulity, our unwillingness or incapacity to perceive them. The realm of Spirit is a reality, spiritual laws govern everything, though we ignore both. To vulgar scepticism it might suffice to reply that its argument confuses Personality with the sensible signs of its presence. Wedded to materialist ideas it mistakes the visible, the audible, the tangible, for that which manifests its own reality and activity through these, but is not itself identical with one or all of them. It confounds the outward form with the inward essence ; the symbol with the thing signified ; the shell with the substance. It grossly identifies the body with the man himself. It argues as if the eye were identical with seeing, or the ear with hearing. It confounds the organ and instrument with that which acts through it. If it is true, as St. John has written, that " No man hath seen God at any time," it is also true that no man hath at any time seen a person. Strictly ^^QBkmg, persons are not visible, tangible, subject to the scrutiny of sense. For a person is surely not the group of related impressions present at a given moment to my sensorium ; a man is not a certain outline or coloured surface stamped upon my retina, combined perhaps with certain vibrations of my auditory nerve and certain impulses conveyed through my nerves of touch. When we speak of a man or a person, we mean not these, but rather the unseen, unheard, unfelt reality which is the cause of them all, and which reveals its
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own existence to our perception through such mediating effects. Understand the terms of this statement, and it is impossible for us to deny its truth.
(5) In our conceptions of God let us have no images of the fancy, no material realization. Stop every attempt to give any kind of embodiment to the Father. Leave it all indeterminate ; put anything else away as a trespass and a presumption. The willingness to do this, the power to do this, is part of the discipline of the present life ; it is the faith of our worship. All that we can safely have before us is quality, attributes. God is wisdom, God is power, God is greatness, God is holmess, God is love. Enshrined in those, as in a deep sanctuary, is the Infinite, the Unsearchable, — that is God. But we can see the enshrining only, the rest is hidden. It is there, and we speak to it, and we hear it, and we deal with it, and we feel it ; but it is far above all sense, it is a name, it is a mystery, it is a Spirit, it is God.