refore--an auxiliary and subordinate worth--in
these things, and in that respect they are _not_ nothing, nor do
they 'avail nothing.' But then all external rites tend to usurp more
than belongs to them, and in our weakness we are apt to cleave to
them, and instead of using them as means to lift us higher, to stay
in them, and as a great many of us do, to mistake the mere
gratification of taste and the excitement of the sensibilities for
worship. A bit of stained glass may be glowing with angel-forms and
pictured saints, but it always keeps some of the light out, and it
always hinders us from seeing through it. And all external worship
and form have so strong a tendency to usurp more than belongs to
them, and to drag us down to their own level, even whilst we think
that we are praying, that I believe the wisest man will try to pare
down the externals of his worship to the lowest possible point. If
there be as much body as will keep a soul in, as much form as will
embody the spirit, that is all that we want. What is more is
dangerous.

All form in worship is like fire, it is a good servant but it is a
bad master, and it needs to be kept very rigidly in subordination, or
else the spirituality of Christian worship vanishes before men know;
and they are left with their dead forms which are only
evils--crutches that make people limp by the very act of using them.

Now, my dear friends, when that has happened, when men begin to say,
as the people in Paul's time were saying about circumcision, and as
people are saying in this day about Christian rites, that they are
necessary, then it is needful to take up Paul's ground and to say,
'No! they are nothing!' They are useful in a certain place, but if
you make them obligatory, if you make them essential, if you say that
grace is miraculously conveyed through them, then it is needful that
we should raise a strong note of protestation, and declare their
absolute nullity for the highest purpose, that of making that
spiritual character which alone is essential.

And I believe that this strange recrudescence--to use a modern
word--of ceremonialism and aesthetic worship which we see all round
about us, not only in the ranks of the Episcopal Church, but amongst
Nonconformists, who are sighing for a less bare service, and here and
there are turning their chapels into concert-rooms, and instead of
preaching the Gospel are having 'Services of Song' and the like--that
all this makes it as