The last chapter was concerned with the influence exercised by the worshipping life of the Church on the development of doctrine. The Church's doctrines of Christ and of the Holy Spirit had to keep pace with the role ascribed to them in prayer and worship. Prayer and worship take many different forms. At their purest and highest they are concerned simply with the adoration of God in himself. It was for such worship that Basil argued the propriety of using a doxology in which the three persons of the Trinity are coordinated in equal balance. But worship is not always or all the time so disinterested a process.

In prayer man asks. He asks (if he is obedient to the famous saying which, though appearing in no known gospel, is ascribed by Clement of Alexandria and others to Jesus) ‘for the great things’, the things most needful for his spiritual well-being. In worship, especially in sacramental worship, he expects to receive those things for which he asks, the things which go to make up his salvation. Certainly Christian faith was never presented as nothing more than information about the true way of worshipping God. It was that but, because it was that, it was also and emphatically a way of salvation.