of us, no doubt, feel the shock of
the unaccustomed when we hear the worship of the Blessed Virgin or of
the saints spoken of. It does not help us much to fall back on the Latin
word, _Cultus_, for we understand that the meaning is the same.

We are helped, I think, if we substitute the parallel word honour for
worship in the places of its use. We meet in the Church to honour God,
and we offer the Blessed Sacrifice as the act of supreme honour which is
due to Him alone; but in connection with the supreme honour offered to
God we also honour the saints of God by the observance of their
anniversaries with special services including the Holy Sacrifice. The
word honour does not sound so ill to ears unaccustomed to a certain type
of Catholic expression as the word worship: but the meaning is
untouched.

Let us go on then to the analysis of the notion of worship. In the
writings of theologians we find an analysis of the notion of worship
into three degrees. There is, first of all, that supreme degree of
worship which is called _latria_ and which is the worship due to God
alone. If we ask what essentially it is that differentiates _latria_
from all other degrees of worship or honour we find that it is the
element of sacrifice that it contains. Sacrifice is the supreme act of
self-surrender to another, of utter self-immolation, and it can have no
other legitimate object than God Himself. The central notion of
sacrifice is the surrender of self. The sacrifices of the Old Covenant
were of value because they were the representatives of the nation and of
the individuals who offered them; because of the self-identification of
nation or individual with the thing offered, which must therefore be in
some sense the offerer's, must, so to say, _contain him_: must be that
in which he merges himself. So the one Sacrifice of the New Covenant
gets its essential value in that it is the surrender of the Son to the
will of the Father. "I am come to do Thy will, O God." Christ's
sacrifice is self-sacrifice: the voluntary surrender of the whole life
to the divine purpose.

And when we actually worship God, worship Him with the worship of
_latria_, our act must be of the same essential nature; it must be an
act of sacrifice, of self-giving; the offering of ourselves to the will
of the Father. So it is in our participation in the offering of the
Blessed Sacrifice. The full meaning of our joining in that act is that
we are uniting ourselves with