The Universal Catholic Church uses a revised Liturgy in the vernacular, wherein the essential features of the various sacramental forms are preserved with scrupulous care, but the prevailing tone is one of devotional and joyous aspiration. The endeavour has been throughout to place no sentiment on the lips of priest or congregation which they cannot honestly and sincerely mean, or reasonably be expected to carry out in practice. The fear of God and His wrath, imprecations of the heathen, the attitude of servile cringing and abject self-abasement, the oftrepeated appeals for mercy and naive attempts to bargain with God, and other crude survivals mainly of the Judaistic era, together with the haunting fear of everlasting hell-all these have been eliminated from the ritual as derogatory alike to the idea of a Loving Father and to the men whom He has created in His own image. For while the essential truths of religion are changeless, the presentation and setting of those truths must vary as the races advance into fuller enlightenment. Aspirational utterances and forms of petition which suited agricultural communities in Asia Minor in the earliest centuries of the Christian era can in no way give adequate expression to present-day sentiments of worship. The same may be said of medieval forms.
