rn and magnificent are those utterances of the old Hebrew
prophet, who had so completely outgrown the common customs even of his
time, when he represents God as saying that he is weary of all these
external offerings. He says: I do not want the cattle brought to my
temples. Those that wander on a thousand hills are already mine. If I
were hungry, I would not ask thee. He does not want the rivers of oil
poured out. What does he want? The old prophet says, What doth the Lord
require of thee but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly
with God? And some of the later writers caught a glimpse of the same
spiritual truth when they said, Not burnt- offerings, not calves of a
year old; when they cry out, Shall I bring the fruit of my body for the
sin of my soul? No, it is a broken and contrite heart, a heart sorry
for its sin, a heart consecrating itself to righteousness and truth,
this inner, spiritual worship.

The prophets, you see, were climbing up to that magnificent ideal so
finely set up by Jesus as reported in the Gospel from which I read our
lesson this morning. They had not only believed that God was to be
worshipped after these external fashions, but that there was some
special place, not only where it was easier to think of him, but where
he demanded the offering should be brought. He said to the woman at the
well: You think it is Mount Gerizim where the people ought to worship,
and the Jews think it is Mount Moriah; but I say unto you that neither
in this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem shall men worship the Father. God
is spirit, the universal spirit, every place a temple, every spot
hallowed, if only those that worship him do so in spirit and in truth.

You see, then, how up these stairways of gradual approach the human
race, in the person of its highest and finest representatives, has
climbed, how near it has come to the spiritual ideal of God and the
spiritual thought of that which he requires at our hands.

Is worship, then, so far as external form is concerned, to pass away?
By no manner of means, as I think. As you analyze any one of these old
primitive acts of worship, no matter how crude, no matter how cruel,
how bloody, how repulsive it may be to-day from the outlook of our
higher civilization, you will note that it has in it an element which,
I believe, is permanent, and can never be outgrown. Whatever else there
is, there is always the sense of a Presence, Invisible, mighty, high,
and, from the