LETTER- TO THE EDITOR.
RITUALISM, OR PRINCIPLE P fTo THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR.")
Sra,—As one who has devoted the best years of his life and all the power he possessed to a system in which he once too credul- ously believed, I ask permission to say a few words on the topic. of Ritualism in the Anglican Church ; and the remarks I desire to make will have the tendency to carry back the argument to a position which approximates to first principles. There has been a decided effort made on the part of the advocates of Ritualism to cling to details of secondary moment. The broad outlines of the case have become obscured ; and generalisation, deduction, and theory have taken the place of fact. Persons weary of being told the number of Judges who concurred and dissented from a given judgment, or the names of the Courts which pronounced for and against some given use or custom. Even on this head, Ritualists have little or nothing of which to boast. No Court has decided in favour of all the points in their programme. No Judge has ventured to affirm that, as a whole, the law is even patient of it. As a system, and apart from details, Ritualists have been defeated on their own ground along their whole line. If they be not, the avowed imprisonment of several clergymen, and the unavowed suppression of Ritualism in many parishes by the opposition of the parishioners and the private action of the Bishops, are difficult to explain. Neither are these facts more easy of explanation—the numberless churches in which Ritualism has been snuffed out by the death of an incumbent, by his translation, or by his secession to Rome ; and the very slow increase in the number of churches in the country which adopt consistently the Ritualistic theory, and their insignificant proportion to the whole number of 20,000 or 30,000 (and the exact total is immaterial) of churches in the Establishment.
Leaving the minntim of Ritualism, permit me to draw attention to the broad facts of the case. These will commend themselves to Englishmen, in a way in which the trivialities of special pleaders in favour of an alien system of ceremonial have not been commended, either to conscience or imitation. At the date of the Reformation, rightly or wrongly, together with the doctrines of the Catholic Church which had obtained in England for centuries, were deliberately swept away all and everything which distinctively taught the same doctrines in Catholic cere- monial. The dress of the clergyman and his position at the holy table, the coverings of the altar and the arrangement of the sanctuary, the entire structure of the Office-book and its order of sequence, the omission of endless matters of ceremony, whether in act or word, and the consequent inutility of a large number of ornaments which were used in the sacrifice of the Mass—all these Were summarily and positively changed. There is no need to tell of the excesses which accompanied these changes, of altar-slabs being desecrated, altars used as tables, altar-coverings used as counterpanes, chalices employed in dis- sipation, chasubles and copes being turned into ladies' dresses and men's cloaks. It is sufficient to compare the Communion Sunday service of our boyhood in a decently-conducted church, according to the letter and spirit of the Prayer-book, with even a low mass in a Catholic Church of the present day. Instead of priestly vestments, there was a surplice; instead of lights, there were not even candlesticks ; instead of sacrificial posture, there was ministerial position ; instead of unleavened wafer and a mingled chalice, baker's bread and the rector's best port wine, straight from his cellar ; in a word, instead of the holy sacrifice. of the Catholic Church, with endless mysticisms, a commemora- tive service of a Protestant body, freed from the very shadow of the unseen. Every one of the differenti% which sever Catholic worship from Protestant communion has a reason, a history, an au- thority of its own. There is a completeness and a consistency in both systems. When the English nation ceased to be Catholic, it consistently abandoned the ceremonial symbolising anything but the Protestantism which it deliberately adopted. It is true that on various grounds and for different causes, from a secret love of what had been suppressed, or from a con- cealed wish to return to what had been lost, individual items of the old ritual may be found in the lives or works of individual clergymen, in the records of their times, or in books of law, or Acts of Parliament. These were exceptions which proved the rule. And this fact has been either overlooked or ignored, namely, that in no single church, from the Reformation to this day, has one single disputed detail of Ritualism been uninter- mittingly used ; and that no one clergyman has ever used all the disputed details of Ritualism at any single date, from that age to this. Of course, the times of Revolution are outside the question. But amongst an infinity of ways in which Ritualists imitate Catholics, I take the six points of the Charter of Ritual- ism ; and I affirm that there is no consensus of tradition for any one of them, and that as a systematic whole they have never been employed in the Anglican Establishment.
Such has been the unbroken custom of the English Church for three centuries. The six points have been used by no Anglican clergyman; not one of them has had a con- tinuous usage in any Anglican Church. To recall men's minds to this fact, is to remind them of the first principles of the Ritualistic controversy. To bind them to it is to afford a sufficient reply to the isolated acts of men of the Stuart or Georgian era, or to the confused and inconsistent rules, the result of compromise and change, in Act or rubric. But in this case, first principles will teach more. There is no harmony, consistency, or reality in thus forcing Catholic ceremonial upon Protestant services. There is no sense of the fitness of things, and there is an absence of something which is fatal to success. As well essay to graft a garden-rose upon a hedge-briar when its roots are not imbedded in mother-earth, as to import the mystical ceremonial of the Mass into the dry, hard realism of the Anglican service, which is planted in the modern strata three centuries old. The Ritualist system is simply eclectic ; it has no foundation in eternal principles, it has no antiquity. We have seen its rise, we may see its fall ; but its principles no man has formulated, nor can formulate. Catholicism may be good, Protestantism may be good ; but a hybrid between them can leave neither mark nor issue behind it. The facts and truths and realities which make all who seek for authority and cleave to consistency sceptical of Ritualism, inspires me to ask you, Sir, to print these lines. Whether my opinions may be Rationalistic or Catholic—the two results of Anglican Ritual- ism—is of no importance to any one. The facts to which I call attention are of much importance, specially in view of the Ritual discussion at the Church Congress, in which the above view will probably not be taken.—I am, Sir, &c.,
A SOMETIME-ANGLICAN.
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