by all natural scenes
of beauty and peace and glory. Are not these men in their degree
worshippers?

Take the feeling that is expressed in those beautiful lines of Byron.
We do not think of Byron as a religious nature, but certainly he had in
him the heart of worship when he could write such thoughts as these:

"'Tis midnight.
On the mountains brown
The cold, round moon shines deeply down;
Blue roll the waters; blue the sky
Seems like an ocean hung on high,
Bespangled with those isles of light,
So wildly, spiritually bright.

Whoever looked upon them shining
And turned to earth without repining,
Nor wished for wings to flee away
And mix with their eternal ray?"

And Wordsworth says he feels a Presence that "Disturbs him with the joy
of elevated thought, A sense sublime of something far more deeply
interfused."

And so you may run all through the poets, these simply as hints,
specimens, every one of them worshippers, touched by the beauty, glory,
uplift of the natural world.

And then pass to the next stage, and come to the worship of the human,
to the admiration of the highest and finest qualities that are
manifested in the lives of men and women. Who is there that is not
touched and thrilled by some story of heroic action, of heroic self-
sacrifice, of consecration to duty in the face of danger and death? And
no matter what this manifestation of human goodness may be, if you can
be thrilled by it and lifted by it, then you have taken another step up
this ladder of worship which leads you into the very presence chamber
of the Divine.

Let a boy read the life of Lincoln, see his earnest thirst for
knowledge, the sacrifice he was willing to pay for it, his consecration
to his ideals of truth, the transparent honesty of the man, the supreme
contempt with which he could look down upon anything poor or mean or
low, the firmness and simplicity with which he assumes high office, the
faithfulness, the unassuming devotion, that he carries into the
fulfilment of the trust. Take him all the way through, study his
character and admire, and you are a worshipper of that which is divine.

So in the case of Jesus, the supreme soul of history in its
consecration to the Father, its simple trust in the divine love, its
superiority to fear, to question, to death. When we bow ourselves in
the presence of the Nazarene, we are not worshipping another God. We
are worshipping his Father and our Father as lie shines in the face of