hint that Christ laid any stress on liturgical or public worship at
all; he attended the synagogue, and went up to Jerusalem to the
sacrifices; but he nowhere laid it down as a duty, or reproached those
who did not practise it. He spoke vehemently of the practice of prayer,
but recommended that it should be made as secret as possible; he chose
a social meal for his chief rite, and the act of washing as his
secondary rite. He did indeed warn his followers very sternly against
the dangers of formalism; he never warned them against the danger of
neglecting rites and ceremonies. On the other hand, it may be
confidently stated that when religious worship has become a customary
social act, a man who sympathises with the religious idea is right to
show public sympathy with it; he ought to weigh very carefully his
motives for abstaining. If it is indolence, or a fear of being thought
precise, or a desire to be thought independent, or a contempt for
sentiment that keeps him back, he is probably in the wrong; nothing but
a genuine and deep-seated horror of formalism justifies him in
protesting against a practice which is to many an avenue of the
spiritual life. A lack of sympathy with certain liturgical expressions,
a fear of being hypocritical, of being believed to hold the orthodox
position in its entirety, justifies a man in not entering the ministry
of the Church, even if he desires on general grounds to do so, but
these are paltry motives for cutting oneself off from communion with
believers. It is clear that Christ himself thought many of the orthodox
practices of the exponents of the popular religion wrong, but he did
not for that reason abjure attendance upon accustomed rites; and it is
far more important to show sympathy with an idea, even if one does not
agree with all the details, than to seem, by protesting against
erroneous detail, to be out of sympathy with the idea. The mistake is
when a man drifts into thinking of ceremonial worship as a practice
specially and uniquely dear to God; every practice by which the