it does not "" come without our coöperation. It is not thrust upon us without our choice and decision. Here again the weaving of the character and the writing of the name on the forehead are the result of saying "Yes" to God and of patient conformity to eternal laws of life.

CHAPTER II

THE WAY OF FAITH AND LOVE

I

THE CENTRAL ACT OF RELIGION

RELIGION is too rich and complex to be reduced to any one act or attitude or aspect of life. In so far as our religion is real and genuine, it will touch, heighten, and transform every feature of our lives, and, if that is so, we must not expect that we can pick out one feature and say here or nowhere the consummate blossom of religion is to be seen. But there is one act of life which does bring us in a special and peculiar way into the holy of holies of religion - - a central act without which any person's religion will always remain dwarfed and unfulfilled. This central act is worship. By worship I mean the act of rising to a personal, experimental consciousness of the real presence of God which floods the soul with joy and bathes the whole inward spirit with refreshing streams of life. Never to have felt that,

never to have opened the life to these incoming divine tides, never to have experienced the joy of personal fellowship with God, is surely to have missed the richest privilege and the highest beatitude of religion. Almost all of our modern forms of Christianity make too little of this central act, and, with some truth, it has been called "the lost art of worship." The main reason for the decline of worship is the excessive desire, so common to-day, to have something always happening or, as we often say, to have something "doing." Hush, waiting, meditation, concentration of spirit, are just the reverse of our busy, driving, modern temper. The person who meditates, we are apt to think, will lose an opportunity to do something; while he muses, the procession will go on and leave him behind. We hear all the time of the vast human tasks that are to be done; we are crowded with practical problems, and some of us are ready to identify religion with service; we would like to turn the church into a souphouse, or at least into an institution for ministering to the wants of the neighborhood.

Another tendency into which we easily fall is that of making religion consist of words, words, words. Talking about God, expounding the experiences of them of old time, saying apt and

lovely things about religion, occupy us much when we come together, and quite rightly so. But to what purpose do we "talk about God" if none of us can pause in our inward rush and find him, actually meet with him and enter into the joy of the Lord? What have we gained by recounting the "experiences" of past ages if nobody now is to have similar experiences? It is melancholy to hear of Bethels in the dim, far past if we are to conclude that that ladder between the soul and God has been pulled up, or pulled down, and that direct divine intercourse has ceased. The apt and lovely words about religion have place and meaning only if they create in us the passion and the positive intention to go ourselves on the spiritual pilgrimage, the goal of which is this holy of holies, where words about God fall away, since we have entered into the joy of his real presence.

In the right place and in the proper degree we may well consider what are the great truths of our religion, what are the structural ideas of our faith, and it is essential that we should work out, and work out intelligently, the ways and means, the plans and methods, of social service the practical application of our spiritual insight to the society of our time—but in all these matters do not let us make the fatal mistake of supposing that

religion is primarily either words or service. Religion is primarily, and at heart, the personal meeting of the soul with God. If that experience ceases in the world, religion, in its first intention, is doomed. We may still have ideas about the God whom men once knew intimately, and we may still continue to work for human betterment, but there can be living religion only so long as the soul of man is capable of experiencing the fresh bubbling of the living water within and can know for himself that a heart of eternal love beats in the central deeps of the universe within his reach.

To give up the cultivation of worship, then, means in the long run the loss of the central thing in religion; it involves the surrender of the priceless jewel of the soul. In its stead we may perfect many other things; we may make our form of divine service, as we call it, very artistic and very popular; we may speak with the tongues of men and sing with the tongues almost of angels, but if we lose the power to discover and appreciate the real presence of God and if we miss the supreme joy of feeling ourselves environed by the Spirit of the living and present God, we have made a bad exchange and have dropped from a higher to a lower type of religion.

There is no doubt that, as with all the su