“When it is real worship, common worship may take the individual soul a good deal further than it may go alone. We make the atmosphere for one another—courage, depression, hope, study, reflection or whatever it may be; and faith is, as a matter of fact, as liable to be helped as hindered by environment. Prayer, when it is reality, and when it is the common activity in one place at one time of a community of like experience, may reach a higher plane than we have known before, not as a matter of mere emotion but with results that do not pass away.
“Love is reinforced by this solidarity of the Christian communion, for in it Christ becomes more real, and things are apt to be seen here _sub specie aeternitatis_ in their true proportions. Such vision of reality will over and over again be translated into action and consecration. The common worship, if it is the act of all, and done in deep seriousness, passes out of the formal into the effective, with or without mystical rite or element, it becomes communion, and we understand in a new and quieter way what the early Church meant by its doctrine of the Holy Spirit. God’s Spirit is not bound by our choosing, but it is possible for us to become more receptive. It is easy to see how men have come to the view that through the Church the gift of the Spirit is mediated.”[6]
[Footnote 6: Swarthmore Lecture, 1912, pp. 68, 69.]
He has to add however, “It is, I think, right to say here that these paragraphs are an epitome of my observations and experience of the Student Christian Movement;” a statement which may well suggest to us in England that our Meetings have not been all they might have been in recent years. Although I do not consider the following statement as satisfactory as that previously quoted from the same source, I should like again to refer to the statement drawn up by the members of the Friends’ Mission in West China.
“1. United worship should provide opportunities for the Spirit of God to deal individually with each worshiper as well as for each worshiper to approach to God in the way best suited to his individuality.
“2. Each individual has a ministry for the benefit of all, to be exercised in spirit, and the true worship of believers depends upon the faithfulness of each.
