Faith & Spirit Quote by Ralph W. Sockman

Sockman’s line turns what sounds like a private religious posture into a public ethic, with a quiet bit of rhetorical jiu-jitsu. By insisting worship is "primarily" directed upward, he preempts the common critique that church is either performative morality or community therapy with hymns. The first sentence narrows the target: God is not a metaphor for "our values" or "the group". Worship, in this framing, is an act of accountability to an authority that can’t be flattered, audited, or voted out.

Then he flips it. "When we realize this and act upon it" functions like a test: if you truly believe you are serving God, your behavior can’t stop at reverent feelings or correct liturgy. It has to cash out in the world. The subtext is a warning against piety as self-care, status signaling, or tribal identity. Serve God and you lose the right to use religion as a badge; you inherit obligations that inconvenience you.

The final clause - "we make it a service to men" - reads like a rebuttal to the false choice between vertical devotion and horizontal compassion. Sockman, a prominent Protestant voice in mid-century America, is speaking into an era when churches were pressured to prove social usefulness (war, depression, civil rights, growing secular confidence) without surrendering theological center. His solution is elegant: don’t dilute worship into activism; deepen worship until activism becomes the inevitable spillover. The line works because it refuses sentimentality while still offering a practical yardstick: if your worship doesn’t bend toward your neighbor, it’s probably not aimed at God in the first place.