Page:The kernel and the husk (Abbott, 1886).djvu/134

118 the Creator of so vast and orderly a machine, I might have adored Him as the artificer of the stars and this terrestrial globe. But now, Christ has made this kind of "natural religion" impossible. He, the ideal Man, has revealed to me depths of love, pity, mercy, self-sacrifice, in comparison with which the ocean is but the "water in a bucket," and the stars of heaven are as "a very little thing." If therefore I try to conceive of God as alien and apart from Christ, God becomes at once degraded and inferior to man.

How shall I try to express myself more clearly? Let me use words not my own, in which a man of recognized ability once summed up for me my own conceptions; "I see," he said, "you do not, as most do, worship Christ out of compliment to God; you worship God out of compliment to Christ." The words then sounded to me a little profane, though they were not meant to be so; but I had to confess that they exactly expressed my meaning. Since then, it has seemed to me that these words were but an incisive way of saying, what every one says and few realize, that Christ is the Mediator between us and God: we worship God the Father because we attribute to Him the character that we adore in God the Son.

By this time you will have seen that while answering the question, "Whom, or what, ought we to worship?" I have indirectly answered a preliminary question, "What do we mean by worship?" You have also probably noticed what answer I have given to this question: worship appears to me a combination of love, trust, and awe. Do you accept this? I have never seen any serious objection taken to this definition except by those who refuse practically to define it at all and who would simply say "Worship is the homage paid by man to the Creator: and it has nothing to do with, and cannot be explained by, the feelings with which we regard man." If I had