1924
Reading edition
Since spending the summer in Europe I have been devoting the entire fall to a development of our worship service. The various types of ritualistic services in non-conformist churches I heard over there appealed to me so much that I decided to imitate them. Of course the Anglican services have their own appeal, but the technique which makes them possible is beyond us. For some years I have been having a few prayer responses, but now I am developing a program with litanies, confessions, acts of praise and every other bit of liturgical beauty and meaning by which the service can be enriched.
It’s a shame we have permitted our services to become so barren. My only regret is that I did not wake up in time to build our church properly for liturgical purposes. There could be much pleasure in conducting a richly elaborated liturgical service without the restraint of the rubrics to which the Anglicans must submit. I do not know whether the people like the added beauty in the service as much as I do, but many have expressed appreciation. It seems to me to make a great deal of difference in the spiritual value of a service to have some unison prayer with an authentic religious emotion expressed in a well turned phrase, to have choir responses for the prayers and moments of silence for quiet prayer.
The idea that a formless service is more spontaneous and therefore more religious than a formal one is disproved in my own experience. Only a very few men have ever really put me in a mood of prayer by their “pastoral prayers.” On the other hand, a really beautiful worship service actually gives me a mystic sense of the divine.