The Need of Worship

In a recent magazine article, a pastor stated clearly the fact that at his best man longs to worship some power above him. And it is this capacity for worship which is the measure of man’s self-culture and the test of his character. It is the touchstone by which to test the ideal nature of the individual and the trend of a whole civilization. A man may be a source of beneficence, he may be a reservoir of practical social effort; he may through the power which he possesses, and therefore the influence which he wields, make himself the object of universal acclaim. And yet there is something intensely distorted in his character if he feels not by some impulse of humility the desire to worship the Maker, whose creation he is. For otherwise the deepest fact in his experience is not a sense of responsibility to a higher authority, but rather a complacent self-reliance and self-sufficiency. In every act of worship, however crude and mistaken, there was some liberating influence, through which man was led away from his egoism, and experienced the restraint to his power and the quickening inspiration to his stirring virtue. And today it is the same ability to acknowledge the existence of an Infinite Perfect—beside whom our brightest virtues pale, and to whom we stretch out our hands in reverence and worship—that is the salt that protects the health of the soul and gives to life an unfailing, because a never completely realized, purpose.