No one can be blind to the way in which every detail of our life is being modified by the many new inventions which accelerate the rate of living. We crowd into a single day more than our forefathers could put into a week. The express train, the telegraph and the telephone, the typewriter, the multiplied devices for saving time—all these things are speeding up life to the point at which the time for meditation and quiet is crowded out. This is surely a great and growing danger of which none of us is wholly unconscious.  
I have been surprised to find in how many different circles there is at the present time a feeling of dissatisfaction with the 77forms of worship which have for long been regarded as sufficiently satisfactory. I know a number of cases where, in high church circles, prominent people are feeling after something more akin to a Quaker Meeting than anything else. I am also intimately associated with some of the most living movements in my own country, in which meetings have been held on the same lines. This does not mean that great value does not still attach to regular arranged services. No doubt the vast majority of those who attend the services of the Anglican Church are still finding out that their spiritual needs are met thereby; but, there are others, and some of them are choice spirits, who feel the need of more liberty and who crave for more stillness in their worship. They are coming to recognize the great danger of the regular pre-arranged service such as is usual in most other denominations. They fear, perhaps, the invasion of the sanctuary by the spirit of rush and hurry.
 
Turning to the mission field, I could quote many examples which show the way 78in which the Quaker form of worship appeals to some of those who are being brought out of heathenism. I think of one young man, a close personal friend of my own in China, who, having attended one or two Friends’ Meetings, came to us and urged us, at a very early stage in our mission work in Chengtu, to establish a regular Friends’ Meeting in addition to the ordinary mission services; and I recall with keen satisfaction the experiment which we made and the true worship into which Chinese and English together entered and the helpful and inspired ministry which arose out of it. A leading Indian Christian, describing the establishment of the National Missionary Society of India, explained to a Friend the way in which the Christians had met together for united worship, sitting as he said often as much as half an hour in silence and then breaking out, as prompted by the Spirit, into prayer and praise. “We,” he said, “find this most helpful; it means a great deal to us, and we have meetings of this kind before every one of our business sessions; but,” he 79continued, “you won’t be able to understand it; it is so different from your English ways.” You can imagine his surprise on being told that he had almost exactly described the way in which the Friend to whom he was speaking habitually worshiped. Not long ago I took a friend of mine to Meeting. He was a man who had spent some years in India and had become intimately associated with a number of Indian students. After Meeting he asked me if our Meetings were open to the public; because, if so, he would like to bring some of his Indian friends to Meeting, as he felt it was exactly the thing which would help them.
 
It seems to me that, in the forms of worship in other Churches, we have either on the one hand a united act of worship which is to some extent formal, as when the congregation joins in the singing of a hymn or in a set prayer; or else on the other hand we have an individual act which is not formal but inspired, as when a man filled with a message from God delivers it to the congregation. 80I know no other form of worship which fulfils my idea of a united act inspired of God. A............