ments than any of the arts, but also to claim the moral
supe-
riority of its exercise of worship as having a definite
intel-
lectual content and suggesting a definite practical issue.

Anyone who has attempted to improve an order of wor-
ship is well aware of many practical problems involved.
People do not wish to stand up and sit down too many times
in a service. There must be opportunities for late comers to
be seated with the least possible intrusion upon the
attention
of all. The order must be easily followed. Strangers and
visitors do not enjoy the embarrassment of intricate cere-
monies which can be followed easily only by those familiar
with them.

Whatever forms are used, their purposes and functions
should not be too critically understood by the people. They
should get the effect without being called upon to notice
the
management that produces it. It is easy for the planners of
public exercises to produce an artificial effect. This is
the
risk of all analysis and of all painstaking. But the lack of
analysis and of painstaking has in many churches brought
about usages which are ugly and unendurable to larger and
larger numbers of people.

I am not claiming that the most beautiful order of wor-
ship can cause everybody to worship. The experience is in-
effable and awful, mysterious and blessed always. But very
much can be done to help people to have it. The experience
may not move concurrently with its expression in the
service.
But I am entirely persuaded that no other suggestion will so
help us in arranging better exercises of public worship as
this principle to which details can be referred and by which
simplicity and unity may be maintained--the parallel ex-
pression in the order of worship of the most significant
elements in the experience of worship.

-165-