Fifteen years after my visit to my friend’s church, I found myself living in England. The natural thing was to attend the Church of England, and happily for me there was an evangelical one nearby. It was dedicated to the apostle Andrew, as churches I had known were dedicated to men like Moody or Adoniram Judson. This church honored the same gospel that my church at home had honored and spoke our language and kept in touch with the same mission organizations that we had supported. They understood the Scriptures and held the Faith in a manner virtually indistinguishable from all that I had known all my life. I was at home.

But St. Andrew’s Church had been built eight hundred years ago, I was told. This datum had an effect on me; it opened my imagination backward into history. I could not kneel on the same stones where Christians had been kneeling for eight centuries and stay trapped in recent history. I knew that the first Christians to use this building had knelt for the Mass and that the Reformation had changed all of that. Nonetheless, there was a history here and even a continuum. The mysteries of the gospel had been proclaimed and celebrated here during all these centuries.

I had always had some sense of Christian history, thanks to my father. The figures who loomed the largest in my own imagination were men like Spurgeon, D. L. Moody, Hudson Taylor, and, somewhat further back, Charles Simeon, John and Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, and eventually Calvin and Luther. Before them there was a blank until I came to the apostles, who were almost as remote as Hercules or Zeus, since they existed in a sort of “holy” history. The lonely figures of Augustine and Bernard of Clairvaux (because he had written “Jesus, The Very Thought of Thee”) stood in solitude in the fifteen hundred years that lay between the apostles and the Reformers.

Here, suddenly, I was hailed with a somewhat more crowded picture. I had never been to any church dedicated to “Saint” Anybody, for a start. Furthermore, there was nothing strange to these evangelicals about the feet that the roster of priests who had served this church went straight back across the Reformation to include Catholic priests. The present clergy and congregation were altogether Protestant in their own piety and doctrine, but this link was there. An immense antiquity stretched backward. The very stones, ancient and moss-covered, seemed to hold that antiquity and to present it to us, silently, without striving. (Some years later I was vastly impressed to hear the Bishop of Norwich, himself an evangelical of the most fervent order, thank God in his prayers for his twelfth-century predecessor, Herbert de Losinga. He acknowledged a lineage and a responsibility.)

The first thing that struck me about this church was that the people knelt. They knelt to pray when they first came into their pews, and they knelt for all of the prayers during the service.

I myself had always desperately wanted to kneel in church. Most American evangelicals did not do that, however; so I had attempted a compromise at one point in my life, striking a somewhat stiff semi-kneel by sitting forward in the pew with my forehead on my hand, grasping the back of the pew in front, my knees angled down toward the floor but not quite touching it. I had seen dowagers do this in the Congregational Church (very modernist) that we attended in the summers in New Hampshire, and I thought it looked more reverent, or at least more elegant, than the stolid sitting posture that most evangelicals maintain for prayer.

But here were my own evangelicals, kneeling. What joy. I could kneel with impunity.

An open-minded evangelical from one of the free-churches in America that do not kneel may read the account of a trivial matter like this and say, “Fine. If the lad wants to kneel, by all means let him. It’s a very fine posture. And no doubt there is something to be said for such a practice in the Church. Certainly we free-churchmen have much to learn about reverence in worship from the ancient churches.”

A response like this is a charitable one, but under the ensign of broad-mindedness it may be missing a point. It is not quite a trivial matter of mere taste or whim. To treat it so is to fall into the error of supposing that physical attitudes do not matter. It is once again to locate faith and piety in a disembodied realm. We know that this is false. Our innermost attitudes cry out for a shape. They long to be clothed with flesh. We can see this wherever we turn: we are happy and our face muscles stretch into smiles; we are sad, and our tear ducts go to work; we are ashamed, and our neck muscles incline our heads forward; we are awed, and our mouths gape open; we are exasperated, and we throw up our hands; we are angry, and we clench our fists.

We might discipline ourselves to quell all of these motions so that, like a superannuated Tibetan lama, we could sit, petrified and inscrutable, registering nothing. The lama, however, would tell us that posture matters infinitely and that it had taken him years of discipline to reach this impassivity, one of the most rigorous exercises being learning to stay motionless. The motionlessness of his body had percolated inwards and assisted his soul to be motionless.

This last point is perhaps the one that might escape us. The question is not merely one of outward gestures and postures that express something interior. It works the other way around as well. The outward posture actually helps to create the inner attitude. We all know this from our Sunday school teachers who told us that if we could not quite feel love for somebody, at least we should act as though we love him. The external attempt would eventually have its effect on how we feel. Baron von Hügel remarked that he kissed his son because he loved him but that he also kissed his son in order that he might love him. The act dragooned his somewhat untrustworthy and wayward feelings and helped to bundle them along toward their true object.

All of this raises the question, however, as to whether kneeling is an absolute for prayer.

No. For one thing, we mortals know that some of our best praying occurs at excessively awkward moments. We find ourselves squeezed in a subway, or marooned in a traffic jam, or jogging, and we realize we might as well say our prayers as waste the time. For another, if we want to adopt the most ancient posture for prayer, we will stand, probably with our hands raised. As far as we know, this was the posture in the early Church for corporate prayer.

It cannot be argued, then, that we must kneel. But it can indeed be argued that posture is immensely significant and that if we find shallowness to be a problem in worship services then it may be worth considering the matter. We sit for a thousand things—to eat, to chat, to work, to write notes, to rest. It may be that our bodies cry out for an attitude that will pluck us by the sleeve, as it were, and assist our inner-beings in the extremely difficult task of prayer. If in any church the sitting posture exists only as a protest against kneeling because enemy Christians kneel, then what we have is protest carried to its most dismal and barren end.

In any event, I found the practice of kneeling to be a vast relief. But it turned out to be more than a matter of what I myself might like or even what might assist us all in the act of prayer. It presently began to lodge itself in my awareness that an entirely different notion of worship was at work here from any I had ever come upon.

I had been accustomed to hearing people speak of the blessings that they had received from a given service. One spoke of what one had “gotten out” of such and such a sermon or meeting. If things were especially impressive you might even hear the phrase “a beautiful worship experience.” Returning tourists sometimes told of being in Westminster Abbey or King’s College Chapel at Cambridge and of finding themselves overwhelmed by the beauty of the music and the solemnity of the liturgy and the general atmosphere of reverence and dignity. It had been a beautiful worship experience for them.

The phrase worship experience missed the point. Worship, in the ancient tradition, was not thought of as an experience at all; it was an act. Or, if there was an experience, that part of it was a mere corollary to the main point. At St. Andrew’s the people had come together to make the act of worship. They had come to do something, not to get something. They had not come to a meeting.

Several things testified to this. For a start, no one spoke of the church “auditorium,” as though it were a place one went to hear something. It was not an auditorium. Meetings did not occur here; an act occurred here. Furthermore, the vicar hardly ever addressed the congregation directly during the act of worship. Most of the time he could be seen kneeling at a small prie-dieu to one side of the chancel (the section of the church at the front, narrower than the nave and up some steps, that lies between the nave and the altar), facing across the front of the church, sideways to the congregation. He did not greet us, and he did not smile at us. No attempt was made to create a feeling of familiarity or welcome. And yet it was a vastly warm and friendly church. There was nothing cold or stiff there at all. These people were evangelicals.

Clearly, whatever it was that was happening did not depend in the smallest degree on atmosphere nor on the minister’s establishing any sort of contact with the congregation. The notion of group dynamics would have seemed grotesque, irrelevant, and embarrassing. We in the congregation were not auditors, nor spectators, nor recipients.

We had come to this place to offer something to God, namely, the sacrifice of praise. I came to realize that there was more than a mere difference in phraseology between this and what I had always thought of as worship. There was a difference in vision.

The vicar would begin with a scriptural bidding, directing our attention to the Most High. So far all was smooth sailing for me. I was familiar with this approach. But then he would say, “The Lord be with you,” and we would respond, “And with thy spirit.”

What was this rote formula? I wondered. It was an exchange that occurred again and again during the service. It seemed quaint at best and possibly gratuitous; the Lord is already with both of our spirits. Why this vocal wish for the obvious?

What I did not know was that this was a formula that reaches back certainly to the beginnings of Christian worship and possibly further. It builds into the very structure of the act of worship itself the glorious antiphons of charity that ring back and forth in heaven and all across the cosmos, among all the creatures of God. It is charity, greeting the other and wishing that other one well. In its antiphonal (“responsive”) character it echoes the very rhythms of heaven. Deep calls to deep. Day answers to night. Mountain calls to valley. One angel calls to another. Love greets love. The place of God’s dwelling rings with these joyful antiphons of charity. Hell hates this. It can only hiss, Out of my way, fool. But heaven says, The Lord be with you. This is what was said to us in the Incarnation. This is what the Divine Love always says.

In the act of worship we on earth begin to learn the script of heaven. The phraseology has very little to do with how we may be feeling at the moment. It does not spring from us spontaneously. We must learn to say it. It is unnatural for us, the way learning a polite greeting is unnatural for a child. But to the objection that we should leave the child to express himself in his own way we would all point out the obvious, that that sort of naturalness and spontaneity is a poor, poor thing and that the discipline of learning something else is both an enrichment and a liberation.

Antiphony deepens the shallow pool of our personal resources and sets us free from the prison of our own meager capacity to respond adequately in a given situation. Rather than mumbling fitfully, we learn to say the formula, “How do you do?” or “The Lord be with you,” and having learned it, we have stepped from solipsism into community. We have begun to take our appointed places among other selves.

Reflecting on this, I felt that the distrust of rigid forms of worship might spring from innocence if not from ignorance. Those who kept insisting that “the liberty of the Spirit” stood over against such forms were forgetting the architecture of the universe. The liberating Spirit who brooded over chaos brought an exact, elegant, and mathematical order out of that chaos, and it was good. It was beautiful and free and ample. That same liberating Spirit rushed down onto the Church at Pentecost and forged that random little band of individuals into a disciplined cadre that proved invincible against the whole might of the Roman Empire.

Clearly, to pit the liberty of the Spirit against set forms is to insist on a false distinction. In response to the fear that things become rote, we may omit theorizing and ask for plain testimony from Christians who, decade after decade, repeat the same formulas. We will find from them that the formulas stay alive and salutary and that the set forms weather the passing of years somewhat better than the attempts at spontaneity, which themselves inevitably fall into rote that has the added disadvantage of being bad syntax and uncertain sentiment.

I myself would have argued for extempore prayers, for example, since set prayers were by definition automatic, and hence dead, I thought. What I was forgetting was that the extempore prayers that I knew so well were themselves made up of stock phrases strung together. I could write one here: “Our dear heavenly Father, we just want to praise and thank Thee for all Thy many blessings to us. We pray that Thou wilt give us journey mercies and that all Thy mercies, which are new every morning and fresh every evening, will be with us. We ask it in Jesus’ name, Amen.” All of these phrases were common currency. One heard this or heard brave, if labored, attempts to break away from these tags and be original.

No one may mock another’s form of prayer. Extempore prayers and set prayers both reach the Throne if there is any spark of desire in the one praying that they do so. God is not a literary critic or a speech teacher. He does not grade our prayers. But it is for us to realize that there is great help available for us in our prayers. Spontaneity is impossible sooner or later; there only remains for us to choose which set of phrases we will make our own. The prayers of the Church lead us into regions that, left to our own resources, we might never have imagined. Also in this connection, it is worthwhile remembering that prayer is as much a matter of our learning to pray what we ought to pray as it is expressing what we feel at given moments. The prayers of the Church give us great help here.

At St. Andrew’s I encountered these set prayers. After the greeting and response, the vicar would say, “Let us pray,” at which point we would all kneel. He would then read a one-sentence prayer known as a collect (pronounced col-lect, not col-lect).

There is a collect for every Sunday of the year in the Book of Common Prayer as well as for many other occasions. Here is a sample: “O God, who declarest thy almighty power chiefly in showing mercy and pity; Mercifully grant unto us such a measure of thy grace, that we, running the way of thy commandments, may obtain thy gracious promises, and be made partakers of thy heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Here is another: “Let they merciful ears, O Lord, be open to the prayers of thy humble servants; and, that they may obtain their petitions, make them to ask such things as shall please thee.”

Perhaps the best known of all Anglican collects is the collect for peace. “O God, who art the author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is perfect freedom; Defend us thy humble servants in all assaults of our enemies; that we, surely trusting in thy defense, may not fear the power of any adversaries, through the might of Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen,”

My distrust of such set forms was alleviated when I realized that I was already familiar with a similar phenomenon from my own church background. We had used hymns and psalms to assist us in worship, and they, like written prayers, were precast forms. We borrowed words from someone else when we used them, and, far from finding that this hampered the liberty of the Spirit, we found that our own capacity to give utterance to what was in our hearts was vastly enlarged.

The exercise held before us something to which we did not, as I recall, pay much attention, namely, the corporate nature of the Church. Most of the teaching that I remember stressed one’s own spiritual life. The heavy emphasis on personal Bible reading and personal testimony spurred us to individual vigor; but the great and ancient mystery of the Church was not a major thrust of this teaching, and hence, we had little appreciation for the whole Church as a praying body, with its own prayers suitable for perpetual use.

In hymn-singing and the reading of psalms, we acknowledged the principle, of course, that we were drawing on others’ words and making them our own. We would have acknowledged Charles Wesley and Isaac Watts as gifts to the Church, I think, but that is as far as the idea went. The notion of the Church itself did not reach much further than the rather diffuse idea of “the invisible Church,” which meant simply all Christians always and everywhere, or else the local assembly. Prayers for the Church itself to use would have seemed a somewhat odd notion to us.

After the collect, the vicar would say the bidding: “Let us humbly confess our sins unto Almighty God,” or a similar, much longer, bidding. Then came the famous General Confession, with its widely-known phrases, “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders. . . .” At the end of this the vicar would say the Prayer of Absolution.

The very word absolution gave me pause. It conjured tales of priests wielding the tyranny of the confessional over terrified women. No one but God can forgive sins, we would have objected.

If we had stopped to read the Prayer of Absolution, we would have discovered that this is precisely what is counted upon in this prayer. It is God who forgives sins. The minister’s is the voice we hear reminding us of this and declaring it to us. It lifts the whole transaction away from the broil of our own guilty consciences, so hard to pacify, and places it in the context of the Church, which is the Body of Christ and hence shares Christ’s priestly ministry. It is here that we receive audible assurance of what we know to be true, namely, that our sins are indeed forgiven. In our private prayers we find ourselves raking back through things in uncertainty. Here the declaration is loud and clear and without doubt.

Then, in another lovely antiphonal exchange, minister and people said, “Praise ye the Lord,” “The Lord’s name be praised.” At St. Andrew’s this exchange was sung, or rather chanted, as were all of the canticles and psalms.

If someone had asked me ahead of time about chant, I would, I think, have had an objection ready. Chant is analogous to Tibetan prayer wheels. The heathen chant. A chant is a monotonous, artificial, repetitious sequence of notes imposed on a text. It has the net effect of throttling whatever life there might have been in the text to begin with.

But here were evangelicals chanting! And not only that, I discovered that the chant tunes were beautiful beyond anything I had ever dreamed. They were extremely simple tunes, and indeed they were repetitious. A great number of words might be sung on one note before you moved on to the next. But the effect, far from throttling the texts, lifted them into what seemed the joyful solemnity of heaven itself. To the objection that to impose a rigorous meter and melody on biblical texts was to slay them, these people would have pointed us to hymns. There one finds highly stylized words set to rigorous melodies in exact meters. But all of us find that somehow the life of the words is thereby enhanced, not quelled. The structure is the midwife, so to speak.

Chant carries this phenomenon a step further than ordinary hymns do. It eschews the great sweep of melody available to hymns. Its thrift is its genius. Like a very simple frame around a picture, or an almost invisible setting for a diamond, it sets the text up and permits it to speak, or rather, to sing. The psalms, after all, were made for singing. Scottish meter is one way of perpetuating this, but it carries Hebrew poetry into the modern idiom of iambic tetrameter and trimeter. Chant, on the other hand, stays somewhat closer to the genius of the Hebrew, which depended on balance and repetition for its effect.

Gregorian chant, which is infinitely more austere even than the Anglican chant that I learned to sing at St. Andrew’s carries things even further. To an untrained ear it sounds artificial in the extreme, and so it is. But artifice is a very noble thing. God Himself appointed artificers and craftsmen to make cunning things for His own Tabernacle. Real craftsmanship, far from doing violence to them, works the materials so that their own properties are released. Gregorian chant, in its subtle austerity, performs this service for biblical texts. Whereas we commonly hear them read aloud by an individual who invests the words and phrases with his own rhetorical interpretation high-blown or understated, allegretto or largo, Gregorian chant lifts the texts away from this private milieu and arrays them, simply, out there, where we may encounter them the way we see the stars glittering on a clear night or hear the music of Bach so utterly satisfying to our deepest imaginings Chant belongs to the public, not the private, order of things. Very few Christians will want to chant their private prayers, and this is as it should be.

In the public order we are delivered from the small confines of our own breasts. We do not want intimacy here. The attempt to make public worship personal, intimate, and informal is misbegotten. It confuses the public with the private, and in so doing it betrays both.

The public is more than the collective. My recollection of public worship from my childhood is that at best it may be said to have been collective. A familiar note was struck; friendliness was important; even some jokes were admissible. Certainly we were all encouraged to do our best to concentrate on our own hearts and see that we got a blessing. There was little recognition, it seems to me, of an actual, qualitative distinction between public acts and private devotion.

I find it hard to suppose, however, that God would assign lower marks to my childhood church than He would to St. Andrew’s. But public worship, like the Sabbath itself, was made for us, not us for it. It seems a pity for us to struggle along with a sort of amalgam, cobbling up worship packages and programs with a view to meeting the “needs” of a collection of people.

The worship of the Church is an act—a most ancient and noble mystery—and almost nothing is gained by endlessly updating it, streamlining it, personalizing it, and altering it. The “ministers of worship” retained on the staffs of big churches have their work already done for them if they only knew it. Worship is not something like an automotive engine or a computer, which can be perpetually improved upon. Like marriage and family, it stands at the center of the carousel of life, if we will only return to the center and find it. Insofar as we move towards the circumference of things, we will find ourselves going faster and faster.

The actual chants that we sang at St. Andrew’s altered my whole vision, I think. Every Sunday we sang the Venite (pronounced ve-nighty). “O Come, let us sing unto the Lord: let us heartily rejoice in the strength of our salvation. Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving: and shew ourselves glad in him with Psalms.” It is a psalm of pure praise. (In those days in England, they forged straight on through to the bitter end of that psalm, however, with “Forty years long was I grieved with this generation, and said: It is a people that do err in their hearts, for they have not known my ways. . . .” I never found out why this grim half of the psalm had been retained as part of what was presumably to be used as an act of praise.)

Periodically we sang the great chant, Benedicite, omnia opera Domini: “O all ye Works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord: praise him, and magnify him for ever,” From any practical or scientific point of view, the whole thing is nonsense. On and on and on it goes, verse after verse, calling upon everything imaginable, animate and inanimate, with “Bless ye the Lord: praise him and magnify him forever,” repeated innumerable times.

To someone in a hurry, the repetition would be insupportable. The list is endless: Angels, Heavens, Waters, Powers, Sun and Moon, Stars, Showers and Dew, Winds, Fire and Heat, Winter and Summer, Dews and Frosts, Frost and Cold, Ice and Snow, Nights and Days, Light and Darkness, Lightnings and Clouds, Mountains and Hills, Green Things, Wells, Seas and Floods, Whales, Fowls, Beasts and Cattle, Children of Men, Israel, Priests, Servants, Spirits and Souls of the Righteous’ holy and humble Men of heart—and even Daniels’ three friends, Ananias, Azarias, and Misael.

This canticle takes us into very strange regions, remote from anything that our schoolbooks tell us of. All Christians believe generally that the Creation praises God in the sense that it exhibits His handiwork and rouses us to extol Him. But this canticle assumes more than this. It calls upon fire itself and frost itself to praise the Lord. If we dismiss the sentiment as metaphor or as mere Hebrew poetic convention, what are we saying? That these things are inert after all and do not praise the Lord?

If we say this, we admit to having succumbed to the lethal mythology of an era that dins into us, until we can hear nothing else, that the universe is a system. But this is not biblical language. The morning stars singing, the stars fighting against Sisera, the sun hiding its face at the Crucifixion, the rocks splitting, the floods clapping their hands, and the seas fleeing at the presence of the Lord: if we may dismiss it all as unscientific (and thereby naive and false), then we know more than the biblical writers did, and we disassociate ourselves from them But in Christian worship we take our place in their progeny keeping alive the vision of things as dancing in The Great Dance, and as singing “Laudate et superexaltate eum in saeculo.”

Evangelicalism predisposed me to embrace this vision, since it taught me to place the Bible above all other wisdom. But its frame of mind was a practical one that did not run along the visionary channels where frost praises God. Its public worship was modest and earnest; we would have been somewhat nonplussed if anyone had suggested we sing “Benedicite, omnia opera Domini,” even in English. To this extent, surely we drew the map too small. Surely we failed to nourish a vision of things that saw the thunderous canopy of plenitude arching always over us.

The other canticle that had an unmistakable effect on my vision was the Te Deum. It is a hymn of undiluted praise, very widely (but probably mistakenly) attributed to Saints Ambrose and Augustine on the occasion of Augustine’s baptism. It strikes a note like a tuning-fork, against which all Christian praise may test itself. It stands beyond testimony, and beyond personal experience, and even beyond thankfulness for God’s blessings. It addresses God and adores Him for nothing other than His glory.

We praise thee, O God: we acknowledge thee to be the Lord.

All the earth doth worship thee: the Father everlasting.

To thee all Angels cry aloud: the Heavens, and all the Powers therein.

To thee Cherubin, and Seraphin: continually do cry.

Holy, Holy, Holy: Lord God of Sabaoth;

Heaven and earth are full of the Majesty: of thy Glory.

The glorious company of the Apostles: praise thee.

The goodly fellowship of the Prophets: praise thee. The noble army of Martyrs: praise thee.

The holy Church throughout all the world: doth acknowledge thee;

The Father: of an infinite Majesty;

Thine honourable, true: and only Son;

Also the Holy Ghost: the Comforter.

Thou art the King of Glory: O Christ.

Thou art the everlasting Son: of the Father.

When thou tookest upon thee to deliver man: thou didst not abhor the Virgin’s womb.

On and on it goes, in phrases of almost insupportable majesty, bringing to a sharp focus exactly what worship is. In the precincts to which this canticle brings us, we find that all notions of worship as being a program or a meeting have fallen away. All notions of “sharing,” or even of getting a blessing, have been set aside. Now we address ourselves directly to the Sapphire Throne. What shall we say? What words shall we bring with us? Our own tongues, left to themselves, stammer, lisp, and mumble into silence.

To be sure, the Father loves that stammering and lisping as much as He does the exalted strains of the Te Deum set to music by Gabrielli and sung by a trained choir with brass, timpani, and incense. But the hymn is there to help us, not God. The words, coming from immemorial antiquity in the Church and sung in the Church for centuries upon end, articulate what we can only grope to say. It is a mere cavil that objects that this sort of thing is “highbrow.” It has nothing to do with brows, or with taste, or anything else. Only a sorry provincialism actually insists on camp-meeting songs, folk songs, or songs of personal testimony over the Te Deum because these songs are somehow more “relevant.” Relevance itself, in this light, becomes a pitiable thing. What is the touchstone of relevance: subjective sentiments or seventeen centuries of Christian worship?

The language in the Te Deum that refers to apostles, prophets, and martyrs opened up a vista for me. As an evangelical, I was aware of these figures, but I do not think I had a very lively sense of our worship now as being one with theirs. I doubt if I had thought much about them in connection with what we did on Sunday mornings in our church. The apostles and prophets were in the Bible, to be sure, and as such formed part of the story. The martyrs were somewhat suspect, having been pre-empted by the Catholic church.

The notion of ourselves, down in our little church, actually joining the chorus of adoration as it is sung in heaven, would have seemed especially vaporous to me. I had never heard the idea, taught in the Church for centuries, that in the act of Christian worship the scrim that hangs between earth and heaven is drawn back, and we in very truth join with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven who forever laud and magnify the Divine Name. It is an awesome picture of things, and it seems to be true. Evangelicalism had instilled in me a robust supernaturalism, so that I had no trouble, as a liberal Christian might, over this unabashedly apocalyptic language. It was, rather, that no one had ever bothered to open up the vision.

The invoking of that train of apostles, prophets, and martyrs also awakened in me a notion that would be theoretically affirmed by evangelicalism but which is not often dwelt on and is certainly not vivified in public worship. It is the notion of the unbroken train of the faithful on pilgrimage to the Mount of God, moving in a dazzling procession through history. In evangelicalism we had our own heroes of the faith, certainly. But the host of apostles, evangelists, fathers, martyrs, confessors, doctors, bishops, widows, virgins, and infants, recalled in so much ancient Christian hymnody and piety, was not really very present to us. The stress on our roots as going no deeper than the nineteenth century, or if we wished to go as far as the Reformation, the sixteenth, made it difficult for us to credit the ancient lineage of the faithful, even though we would have agreed that at least some faithful had been there all along.

It is more than a mere matter of sentiment. Surely one great antidote to the frantic efforts in our time, even in evangelicalism, to align Christianity’s apparently uncompromising moral absolutes with the insights of psychology and “the realities of the modern world” (as though something new has come along in our century) would be to hold up once more for our gaze this train of the faithful who have held to those absolutes through thick and thin. The well-meant effort to find the outermost borders of Christian morality and the nervous pecking at Scripture to see if we may not, after all, redraft things and bring them into line with new sexual codes are the activities of people who have been deracinated. Their roots in history have been pulled up, and they are left with nothing but the Bible and the modern world. They forget that the Faith has been borne on human shoulders and in human hearts for two thousand years.

Evangelicalism, stalwart as it is, had in effect left me with nothing but the Bible and the modern world. “Sola Scriptura!” we cried. But it is not sola scriptura. This is to ignore, with almost unpardonable hubris, the Church, full of the Holy Ghost, moving faithfully along through history. It is to pit the Bible against the Church, which is heresy. I was so fearful of the notion of “the saints” except as referring to saved souls in heaven, that I would have shunned every attempt of anyone to encourage me with the lives of people like Perpetua and Felicitas, or Boris and Gleb, or Cyril and Methodius, or Cosmas and Damian, or Martin of Tours, or Ninian, or Boniface, or Vincent de Paul.

Doctrinally, of course, evangelicalism may reply here and defend itself. But I am speaking of the shape of piety as it came to me. I am speaking of the net effect in my imagination of evangelical teaching. I can remember once coming upon the hymn, “Art thou weary, art thou languid,” in an old hymn-book. It was at my mother’s bidding; she told me that her mother had loved it and that I might find it helpful. After speaking for six exquisite verses about the difficulties of following Jesus, the hymn concludes, “Finding, following, keeping, struggling / Is he sure to bless? / Angels, martyrs, prophets, virgins / Answer, Yes.” I was overwhelmed by this picture. What solace! What encouragement! I was in an ancient lineage, and all of these forerunners knew everything I had experienced, and all of them would testify, “Keep going! It is worth it! Praise God!” Evangelical doctrine is correct, but there are immense treasures that it seldom dips into for the sake of its people. We were encouraged to read Christian biography, but mention of the train of the faithful did not form an organic part of worship for us, nor of our piety.

One further memory of St. Andrew’s Church remains with me as having presented something new to my gaze. The vicar wore vestments or, to be technically correct, “choir habit.” These were neither the richly brocaded sacerdotal vestments that I was to encounter much later nor the academic robes of Geneva worn by Presbyterians. The garb consisted of a black cassock and, worn over this, a long, rather full, white garment called a surplice. Around his neck the vicar wore a “scarf,” which was a wide black length of cloth, its two ends hanging straight down the front almost to the hem of the surplice, near his ankles.

I was aware that clergy put on all sorts of garb, but I had associated it all either with Catholic priests or with modernist Protestants. I was accustomed to our own minister, who presided from the pulpit in mufti. Fortunately for us all, his taste in clothes was reasonable, so no one had to suffer through terrible neckties and worse shirts. But here was an evangelical in cassock, surplice, and scarf.

It seems pettifogging even to mention a detail like this. And we may be sure that God has no view at all in the matter. But it lodged something in my imagination that made sense. It was of a piece with the rest of what I was encountering at St. Andrew’s. It had something to do with things’ being impersonal.

This is a cold word. It seems almost synonymous with heartless to evangelicals, so accustomed are we to the personal touch and group dynamics, the informality and friendliness, of many of our churches. But there is a very rich lode to be mined here, and it goes deep into what and who we are.

Here is one way of putting the matter. When we come together in the special act of Christian worship, we long to be delivered from all that is random and chatty and fortuitous, it is not John Smith whom we need up front there, with all that he may bring of friendliness and sympathy and earnestness. We are not here for a meeting. We have had fellowship, and we have had testimonies, and we have met in each others’ houses and shared our joys, griefs, and problems. Now we return to the center, to this act in which the Church appears most clearly for what it is. Now we are “the faithful,” and he, whoever he may be (and it is altogether irrelevant), is “the minister.” This is truer, and more profound, than that we are Tom, Dick, and Harry, or Mabel, Ruby, and Crystal. There is a sacred and liberating anonymity here. I am not primarily conscious of my own agenda of troubles now. I am a Christian, bringing the sacrifice of adoration to the Most High, as all other Christians have done before me. It does not mean that I may pretend to ignore my troubles or the troubles of others. Indeed, those burdens form part of the offering that we lift to the Throne. But our attention is now on God Himself.

For this reason, the less individuality we have to cope with in the minister, the better. His taste in clothes, his syntax, his personality—these are all very line things. But not here. Here they only create a diversion. It was not for nothing that the priests in Israel were dressed as they were. Their garments were symbolic, to be sure, but they also cloaked the oddities that made Aaron Aaron, or Levi Levi.

This is a small point and not one that any Christian may quarrel with another Christian about. But it touches, as do all the details of anyone’s customs, on matters that go deeper than the surface.

I owe thanks to St. Andrew’s Church for permitting me to participate in worship as that act has been practiced by the Church for centuries. I had not known that a “worship service” was more than a meeting. I had not known that it was more than an “experience.” I had never seen it very clearly as being carried on under a canopy of glory, as it were. Nothing in the public customs that I had known had pointed very far in this direction. I had not heard the old notion that the scrim between earth and heaven is drawn back during the Church’s worship and that we with the liturgy, may say, and mean, “Therefore with Angels and Archangels, and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy glorious Name; evermore praising thee, and saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts, heaven and earth are full of Thy glory: Glory be to thee, O Lord most High.”