As heaven or hell depends on the choice between self-giving and self-seeking, so does the worship of the true God or the false. Names may be mockeries here. The self-seeking Christian, worshipping, as he may tell us, the God and Father of his Lord Jesus Christ, is doing nothing of the kind. He is worshipping that which he serves. If he could really use the true God as a means towards the end he has at heart, that is, make God serve him, he would do so. This, in fact, is what he tries to do. Naturally he cannot succeed. And the God whom he thinks he worships is fiction and an idol; it is one who is his instrument in self-seeking, and that is a fictitious God. 'God is a Spirit; and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.' 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.' Here is the first clue to Christian worship. And the second is 'like unto it':—'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.' The Christian comment on this is characteristic:—'He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen how can he love God whom he hath not seen?' And the test is crucial. There is no true worship without love, and no love of God without love of the brother-man. So the argument works itself out and finally excludes the consistent and impenitent self-seeker from the worship of God.

Indeed, in the nature of life in man, this exclusion is inevitable. Unless a man makes his neighbour and that neighbour's interests his own, he necessarily excludes him from himself. In the nature of living personal beings this must be, for only in harmony do persons coincide, only by the stretching out of my interests and myself to embrace do I include. I must grow if my neighbour is to become for me 'as myself' and be loved as myself. So that love of myself which is evil when confined to interests solely mine, becomes good as it expands. So the contracting of life within my narrow boundaries is escaped, and although I still love myself I love a self that grows out and forth to the inclusion of all, even to the inclusion of God, whom then I shall love with the ardour which in the contracted self is the very torment of its hell. Only the directing of that ardour beyond the self can prevent it from being a consuming fire within the self. Therefore unless I learn to worship God (and here again words, names may mock at realities), I shall 'perish' in my own flame.

Worship is no pious luxury: it is a necessity of the spiritual life. Every man who is growing in the spirit is a worshipper of God. He may never use the name, he may be one of those who would say 'Lord, when saw we thee?' but his love is showing him the true God in his own spirit and his own truth, and, in showing him too the divine way of Love with men, commands his worship. He has discovered the marvel of self-giving, and in that discovery the marvel of the divine way he cannot but adore; his life, in fact, is adoration.

From other men this way is hidden; and a God that may command their worship must be a different God and take another way. He must declare himself in a power they can recognize, that kind of power which has kinship with the forces of men's machines and has uses like the uses of machines. This God, who may perhaps, through what seems to them worship, be made a means towards their own ends, is above all a God of an all but material power. So, may be, they cringe before him, pour out praises, make sacrifices, pay a dutiful service such as a supreme power of that kind may well call forth in the men they are. And then, if there comes among them a prophet, he pleads with them in God's name, 'I will have mercy and not sacrifice.' 'To what purpose cometh there to me incense from Sheba, and the sweet cane from a far country? Your burnt offerings are not acceptable, nor your sacrifices sweet unto me.'

Just such men as these self-seekers came to Jesus, asking for a miracle, a sign. 'An evil and adulterous generation,' he said, 'seeketh after a sign.' Why 'evil and adulterous'? Surely because in seeking a sign such as would please them they were blind to the divine truth in the presence of which they stood, and, open-eyed for their own interests, were in their hearts trafficking with a false God.

That the craving for such signs, such miracle, is always evil and adulterous can hardly be said. Yet truly it partakes, in large measure, of the nature of sin. And at best it is blindness, blindness to the true marvels of God in his manifestation through 'the things that are made' and are being made. We who have learnt of the history of earth have our souls filled with marvel, and with mystery too. It is not easy for us to see how any generation that looks for more, while it has that, can be other than evil and adulterous. But the fact is that familiarity does blind men to both marvel and mystery. If it did not, the very stones we tread under foot would proclaim their witness to God, and every moment of our own life would call forth adoration of him.

In regard to this matter there is a pressing need for the meeting of science and philosophy with religion. Science and philosophy tear away the veil with which familiarity hides from us the mysteriousness and marvel of all things and of our own personal and common life. They show us unfathomed depths for wonder where we had seen nothing but a smooth accustomed surface. But it is religion that shows us God in all those depths, God made known even by the very surface, and turns our wonder into worship. It is science and philosophy that shall purge religion of the taint it has derived from both the ignorant, and the evil and adulterous, generations after generations who have made it seem what it seems. I say 'seem what it seems,' for this is not what it is. That is no true religion, certainly no religion after the mind of Christ, which passes over the marvels of the lily of the field and of the man indwelt by God and one with God, taking them as things that are of course; while making much of signs interpreted as 'intervention' and therefore taken as the only signs of a God who is nowhere and nothing to us unless he intervenes.

We stand amazed, we who have learnt now to see God everywhere. Can any religious man open his eyes, we ask, and not see signs of God? Can he search in any human life without finding signs in abundance there, signs of the life-giving presence or of the dreadful death-dealing absence of God? What more can he ask or desire? 'Lord God of hosts,' we exclaim, 'heaven and earth are full of thy glory!'

Then we turn to history, the long history of man, and the long history of the Christian religion which goes back, beyond the sublime figure who proclaimed it in Palestine, to the beginnings of the worship of God. We discover those beginnings in the first men who turned their eyes from self to the brother. We look along the ages and cease to be surprised. In his long-drawn education man has but slowly learnt to find God in more and more of his own life and the world. Step by step he has felt his way, led by the spirit given him, to the knowledge of the God and Father of Jesus Christ, the incarnate and redeeming God of all men, the God who comes to indwell all things. Only now, in a new fulness of time, are the teaching of Jesus and the revelation of his life and death finding a new context in new knowledge and reflective thought. Only now are we beginning to see why, if knowledge and reflective thought have so far done their work, it may well be an evil and adulterous generation that seeks for any other signs than those which they and Christ reveal. Just what the earthly presence of the God-revealing Jesus was to that generation—a test of their single-mindedness and will to receive and welcome divine truth—so, when his life and witness meet with a new emphasis in the less but concurrent witness of new knowledge, this generation of religious men is put to the same test. Will they receive new witness to his truth and to God? or will they reject it because it has no likeness to those signs that to their minds are alone fitted to show God? Will they or will they not have humility enough to learn of scientific and philosophic 'builders of Jerusalem' concerning the true methods of God?

We cannot tell; that is, of this generation. But we may trust in the prevailing strength of truth. Generations pass, but that endures. And the prophet's word goes on:—'the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth.'