From Thanksgiving to Fast Author:Edward Everett Hale Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: RITUAL. If thou shalt seek the Lord thy God, thou shalt find him, if thou seek for him with all thy heart and all thy soul.— Deut. iv., 2g. The eighth of J... more »anuary will be the seventeenth anniversary of the dedication of this church. We invite you all to meet on Thursday evening, as the evening most convenient, for a social celebration of the seventeenth birthday. And, as it is my duty, as the year begins, to collect and arrange the annual reports of your several agencies, I am going to-day a little beyond the range of their statistics to state what seem to be the principles on which public worship in our time must adjust itself, and in what directions we are to look for the improvement in our community of the administration of religion. For those men deceive themselves who seek the perfection of worship in the repetitions of the customs of the past. The law of selection applies in such matters, as in all others. Let the Pharisees of the world, eager to copy the past, do their very best to retain customs which have no merit but their antiquity, and they fail. For instance, there has been no form of worship more universal than the sacrifice of the productions of the field upon an altar. There is no service to which history records a wider assent than this, among all tribes of men and in all periods of the world. If our business were simply to worship God, as ancient men worshipped him, it is certain that we should be bringing up the choicest fruits of our harvests; we should be driving into our sanctuaries our Texan steers, our Alderney kine, and our Narragansett sheep, and slaughtering them in token of our gratitude to God. This is the most ancient way of worship known to us, and it was at one time nearly, if not quite, universal in the world. Jesus Christ himself never sai...« less