"The joining of the whole congregation in prayer has something exceedingly solemn and affecting in it"
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There is an almost theatrical precision to Moritz's phrasing: not the beauty of prayer, not the truth of doctrine, but the joining. The emotional charge comes from synchronization. A congregation, speaking or listening in unison, turns private inwardness into a public instrument. The point isn’t that prayer is powerful; it’s that bodies and voices aligned toward the same invisible address produce a pressure you can feel in the room. “Solemn and affecting” names the mood without romanticizing it, as if Moritz is reporting on an aesthetic phenomenon as much as a religious one.
That choice fits his late-18th-century moment, when writers were newly attentive to psychology, sensation, and the machinery of experience. In a Europe where churches functioned as both spiritual and civic infrastructure, collective prayer was also collective rehearsal: of obedience, belonging, and shared narrative. The subtext is that liturgy is a technology of community. It makes a crowd legible to itself.
Moritz, an author associated with acute observation and inner life, sounds less like a preacher than an ethnographer of feeling. He’s interested in how the individual self gets briefly overwritten by a larger “we,” and why that can be moving even to someone who isn’t intoxicated by faith. The sentence quietly admits an unsettling double edge: what can be “exceedingly” affecting can also be exceedingly persuasive. The solemnity isn’t just reverence; it’s the palpable power of mass unity.
That choice fits his late-18th-century moment, when writers were newly attentive to psychology, sensation, and the machinery of experience. In a Europe where churches functioned as both spiritual and civic infrastructure, collective prayer was also collective rehearsal: of obedience, belonging, and shared narrative. The subtext is that liturgy is a technology of community. It makes a crowd legible to itself.
Moritz, an author associated with acute observation and inner life, sounds less like a preacher than an ethnographer of feeling. He’s interested in how the individual self gets briefly overwritten by a larger “we,” and why that can be moving even to someone who isn’t intoxicated by faith. The sentence quietly admits an unsettling double edge: what can be “exceedingly” affecting can also be exceedingly persuasive. The solemnity isn’t just reverence; it’s the palpable power of mass unity.
Quote Details
| Topic | Prayer |
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