452 RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE: SOCIAL 



and worship exists to help men up to that clear and exalted spirit 

 and to keep ever before them a touching and inspiring example 

 of him who incarnated the genius of such a life. 



In one of the most extraordinary passages in the Fourth Gospel 

 Jesus is made to say to the woman of Samaria: " Woman, believe 

 me, the hour cometh, when neither in this mountain, nor in Jeru- 

 salem, shall ye worship the Father." The woman had asked about 

 worship in the conventional sense, as to the place and time of 

 it. Were her fathers or the Jews' fathers right in this old dispute? 

 How familiar it all sounds this puzzle of one whose notion of 

 religion is largely a reminiscence of past greatness and a preju- 

 dice against present facts. And how great is Jesus' reply! You 

 are both right in so far as he who worships in sincerity and in 

 truth may worship in any place and in any way. But yet, more 

 deeply than that, you are both wrong in supposing that religion is 

 something which finds all of its expression in such acts of worship 

 as those of which we speak. The time is coming and now is when 

 there will not be any temple, church, or sacred mount in this exclusive 

 sense; no one manner of worship alone acceptable, no peculiar 

 religious works, no specific sacred ideas. There will be ideas, sacred 

 if true, but not otherwise. And all true ideas will be alike sacred, and 

 only the false ones will be profane. And of all, the most profane 

 will be the false ideas which have been put forth concerning God 

 and man's highest interests. Works will be good works if they are 

 good, but not otherwise. And if they are good, they will be good 

 works, religion, holiness, the service of God, no matter where done, 

 or when, or how, or by whom. And all special acts of worship which 

 men call such will be only the kindling and sustaining of men's 

 minds to this true and good and beautiful life which is the great 

 act of worship. 



Religion is that which is illustrated in the tenderness of parental 

 and of filial affection, in the purity and happiness of marriage, in the 

 steadfastness of friendship, in the honesty of trade, in the loyalty of 

 citizenship, in the righteousness of political rule : in the prosecution 

 of reforms, in the furtherance of every kind of social good. Where 

 these are, God is, and the service of God is being performed. Where 

 these are not, God is not. A worship which does not aim at these 

 is an hallucination or an hypocrisy. A teaching which does not 

 sustain these is false and injurious. A life which is set upon these 

 things is the life in God, whether it knows itself by that name or 

 not. It would more frequently and more willingly call itself by that 

 name did it not so often hear that name applied to a type of life 

 which, while pursuing some remote ideal of its own, neglects these 

 fundamental things. 



And if the Church seems to set before men only things artificial, 



