True worship is an involuntary act of the inmost affections. Will and understanding can determine and regulate the act, but they cannot originate and inspire the feeling, which rises unbidden from the bosom toward the supreme attraction. False worship is not, however, necessarily hypocritical. It is false in the sense of being a result of religious teachings, instead of coming from the affections, and the sentiments of the worshipper have no real part therein. Worship of the Supreme Spirit of the Universe is possible only to those who feel and are therefore attracted powerfully toward the sacred essence of Infinite Love. Any sentiment less profound, any attraction less vital, leads to the worship of a lesser god in an inferior manner. Inasmuch as the masses, including the most enlightened among them, are inspired with no deep spirituality of feeling, they do not rise superior to religious materialism. They do not exemplify in practice that religion—pure and undefiled before God and the Father—which is "to visit the widows and the fatherless in their affliction and to keep oneself unspotted from the world."
False worship in religion is often an attractively artistic, an exquisitely artful, exercise in fashionable churches. The foundation of religion is believed by many to be the "sacred volume." By such minds the real works of God—the universe and its starry skies—are overlooked
as of little moment. Empirical rules, for worshipping the Almighty acceptably, are obeyed as scrupulously among us as not more formal or falser rules are followed in India, China, or Japan. In pagan countries—or, more properly, in countries more pagan than ours—religious ceremonials are outwardly more crude, but no one can affirm that worship is less sincere there than in the popular institutions of our country. Sincere and true worship may be outward and objective or inward and subjective, but the act is invariably in accordance with the real moral and intellectual growth of the worshipper. False worship, on the other hand—as affirmed already—is in accordance with the individual's religious instructions, as also with social temptations and governing circumstances.