who is the Ancient of Days, Infinite Watcher of the sons of men.  Only by acquaintance with the phrases, the petitions of the past, and only by a liberal use of them can we give background and dignity, or anything approaching variety and completeness, to our own public expression and interpretation of the devotional life.  If anyone objects to this use of formal prayers on the ground of their formality, let him remember that we, too, are formal, only we, alas, have made a cult of formlessness.  It would surprise the average minister to know the well-worn road which his supposedly spontaneous and extempore devotions follow.  Phrase after phrase following in the same order of ideas, and with the same pitiably limited vocabulary, appear week by week in them.  How much better to enrich this painfully individualistic formalism with something of the corporate glories of the whole body of Christian believers.

But, second:  there should be also the principle of immediacy in the service, room for the expression of individual needs and desires and for reference to the immediate and local circumstances of the believer.  A church in which there is no spontaneous and extempore prayer, which only harked backward to the past, might build the tombs of the prophets but it might also stifle new voices for a new age.  But extempore prayer should not be impromptu prayer.  It should have coherence, dignity, progression.  The spirit should have been humbly and painstakingly prepared for it so that sincere and ardent feeling may wing and vitalize its words.  The great prayers of the ages, known of all the worshipers, perhaps repeated by them all together, tie in the individual soul to the great mass of humanity and it moves on, with its fellows, toward salvation as majestically and steadily as great rivers flow.  The extempore and silent prayer, not unpremeditated but still the unformed outpouring of the individual heart, gives each man the consciousness of standing naked and alone before his God.  Both these, the corporate and the separate elements of worships are vital; there should be a place for each in every true order of worship.

But, of course, the final thing to say is the first thing.  Whatever may be the means that worship employs, its purpose must be to make and keep the church a place of repose, to induce constantly the life of relinquishment to God, of reverence and meditation.  And this it will do as it seeks to draw men up to the “otherness,” the majesty, the aloofness, the transcendence of the Almighty.  To this end I would use whatever outward aids time and experience have shown will strengthen and deepen the spiritual understanding.  I should not fear to use the cross, the sacraments, the kneeling posture, the great picture, the carving, the recitation of prayers and hymns, not alone to intensify this sense in the believer but equally to create it in the non-believer.  The external world moulds the internal, even as the internal