that we are justified in. It is so with much that we admire; we have never tried to justify our admiration, have never thought that it needed an explanation; and then, unexpectedly, we find ourselves challenged, we find our taste criticised, and in our efforts at self-defence we blunder and stumble and hesitate about what we still feel that we are quite right in holding fast.

It is common things that we thus take for granted; it is daily activities that we thus assume need no explanation. For us who habitually gather to the services of the Church there is no more taken-for-granted act than worship. Worship is a part of our daily experience. At certain times each day we offer to God stated and formal acts of worship. Many times a day most likely we pause and for a moment lift our thought to our blessed Lord for a brief communion with Him. It is a part of our settled experience thus to draw strength from the inexhaustible source which at all times is at our disposal. We know how the tasks of the day are lightened and our strength to meet them renewed by these momentary invasions of the supernatural. There are also special times in each week when we meet with other members of the One Body of Christ in the offering of the unbloody Sacrifice. We know that in that act heaven and earth join, and that not only our brethren who are kneeling beside us are uniting with us in the offering of the Sacrifice, not only are we one with all those other members of the Body who on this same morning are kneeling at the numberless altars of Christendom, but that all those who are in Christ are with us partakers of the same Sacrifice, and that in its offering we are joined with all the holy dead, and by our partaking of Christ are brought close to one another. We therefore lovingly take their names upon our lips, and enkindle their memory in our hearts; and find that death, which we had thought of as a separation, has but broken the barriers to the deepest and most blessed communion, and that we are now, as never before, united to those whom we find in Christ Jesus our Lord.

And then comes the unexpected challenge: "what does all this mean: these repeated and diverse acts that you are accustomed to speak of and to think of as acts of worship? What, ultimately, do you mean by worship, and can there possibly be found any common feature in these so diverse acts which can justify you in regarding them as essentially one? This act which is in truth presenting yourself before the majesty of God in humble adoration, in the guise of a suppliant child depending upon the love of the Father for the supply of the daily needs; or this other act which is of such deepest mystery that we approach any attempted statement of it with awe, which is in fact the representation of the sacrifice of Calvary; and then these invocations by which we ask the loving co-operation of our fellow members of Christ that they may associate themselves with us in the work of prayer and mutual intercession--how can all these acts be brought together under a common rubric, how can they all be designated as worship? What in fact is it that you mean by worship?"

So are we challenged. So are we thrown back, and in the end thrown back most beneficially, to the analysis of our acts. Worship, we tell ourselves, is worth-ship; it is the attribution of worth or honor to whom these are properly due. "Honour to whom honour is due," we hear the Apostle saying. Worship is therefore not an absolute value but a varying value, the content of any act of which will be determined by the nature of the object toward which it is directed. It is greatly like love in this respect; its nature is always the same, but its present value is determined by the object to which it is directed. We are to love the Lord our God, and we are also to love our neighbour; the nature of the love is in each case the same; and yet we are not to love our neighbour with the limitless self-surrender with which we love God. The love of God is the passionate giving of ourselves to Him with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our mind and with all our strength. The love of the neighbour is measured and restrained, having in view his good that we are seeking, the promotion of his salvation as our fellow member in the Body of Christ. In the same way worship will take its colour, its significance, its tone, its intensity, not from some abstract conception, but from the end it seeks. This is made plain, too, when we look at our Bibles and Prayer Books for the actual use of the word. There we find much of the worship of God: but we also find a limited use of the word. "Then shalt thou have worship in the presence of them that sit at meat with thee." (S. Luke, XIV, 10.) And in the marriage service of the English Prayer Book we read: "With this ring I thee wed, and with my body I thee worship." The same limited content of the word is found in the old title of respect--"Your Worship."

But so thoroughly has the word worship become associated with our approach to God, that we still, many 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 our Lord's offering of Himself, and as members of His Body share in the sacrifice of the Body which is the supreme act of worship. And our other acts of worship lay hold on and proceed from this which is the ground of their efficacy. All our subordinate acts of worship, so to call them, have their character and vitality as Christian acts of the worship of God because of the relation of the worshipper to God as a member of the Body of His Son. They are offered through the Son and derive their potency from their association with Him and His sacrifice. They reach God through