^ Christ came to bring man's spirit into immediate contact with God's Spirit; to sweep away everything intermediate. In lonely union, face to face, man's spirit and God's Spirit must come together. It is a grand thought ! Let us aspire to this, to greatness, goodness ! So will our spirits mingle with the Spirit of the Everlasting.2
3. The law of acceptable Christian worship is briefly this: it must be the worship of " tlie heart," that is, of the will. Not of the voice merely; not of the hands merely; not of the bended knees merely ; not of the decorously and comprehensively expressed prayer merely ; not of the sweet incense merely ; not of the lamb slain and burnt on the altar merely; not of the gorgeously- arrayed High Priest, nor yet of the simply-robed Scotch minister merely; not of feelings touched by old memories of our own departed days, and of those who used to worship with us long ago, but who will worship with us on earth no more ; not of any or all of these things merely — but of the will.
If our worship is of " the heart," it follows that to be real we must have a real religious experience. Experience is the very
* Dean Fremantle, The Oosptl of the Secular Life, 209. ^ y. W. Robertson,
ST. JOHN IV. 24 255
soul or religion. Properly speaking, we do not begin to be religious until God and the soul have somehow come face to face. It is true that as children we are taught religious truth, but we have not experienced it, we are taught it ; and there is a sense in which, if we receive that truth as little children, humbly, trustfully, teachably, we are truly religious and belong to the Kingdom of God. To very few is God more real than He is to the little child. But when that has been said, it needs to be repeated that there can be no real religion without a real religious experience. Keligion is not in word alone ; it is not in the hear- ing of the Word, it is not in the explanation of certain truths, but it is profoundly and most practically in spirit, in experience. God is not real to us until we have made our own discovery of Him in our life.
1] This Pearl of Eternity is the Church or Temple of God within thee, the consecrated Place of Divine Worship, where alone thou canst worship God in Spirit and in Truth. In Spirit, because thy spirit is that alone in thee which can unite and cleave unto God, and receive the workings of His Divine Spirit upon thee. In Truth, because this Adoration in the Spirit is that Truth and Reality of which all outward Forms and Eites, though instituted by God, are only the Figure for a Time, but this Worship is Eternal. Accustom thyself to the Holy Service of this inward Temple. In the midst of it is the Fountain of Living Water, of which thou mayest drink and live for ever. There the Mysteries of thy Eedemption are celebrated, or rather opened in Life and Power. There the Supper of the Lamb is kept ; the Bread that came down from Heaven, that giveth life unto the world, is thy true nourishment : all is done, and known in real Experience, in a living sensibility of the Work of God on the Soul. There the Birth, the Life, the Sufferings, the Death, the Resurrection and Ascension of Christ, are not merely remem- bered, but inwardly found and enjoyed as the real states of thy soul, which has followed Christ in the Regeneration.^
ii. Worship in Truth.
Our worship must be " in truth " ; truth as regards God Him- self, and truth as regards our own state.
1. We need to have a true conception of God, as far as we know Him, as He is revealed to us through Christ. The Samaritans
1 William Law.
256 TRUE WORSHIP
had not a true knowledge ; the Jews knew more, they knew Him through the Prophets, though their knowledge was incomplete. They knew that Messiah should come. To worship the true God and not idols, that was the elementary teaching, the preliminary idea. But to us it is given beyond this to conceive aright of the living and unseen God. The Father is revealed to us in and through the Son — on whom human eyes have dwelt. And prayer becomes a different thing when it is a child's cry to a Father's heart, a child clinging to Him in His paternal character ; and it is through this sense of filial relationship that we approach that inner embrace of the Father's heart. The Son sympathizes with us in our hardness and pain. He has tasted all our trial, only without the sin, and our prayer through Him reaches the Father's Heart through the sympathetic agency of the Son, the Spirit helping our infirmities and giving force to our prayer.
^ Eecent researches into the origins of the Old Testament have proved that the factor in the extraordinary development of moral and religious truth, which is so discernible in the history of Israel and in their gradual ascent to the loftiest heights of spiritual knowledge, from the low levels of life which they had once occupied with their Semitic neighbours, was the impression upon the people as a whole through the wonderful deeds of their history and the experience of their greatest minds, of the character of God.i