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Ritualiem THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG 80
asserted had, first, to make good its doctrinal status: it had to begin by working its way into the mind and the imagination. The Tractarian writers recognized this necessary order; they anxiously held aloof from precipitating those effects, which they, nevertheless, distinctly anticipated from this teaching. " We the old Tractarians," wrote Dr. Pusey in the Daily Express, May 21, 1877, " deliberately abstained from innovating in externals." " We understood the `Ornaments Rubric' in its most obvious meaning,-that certain ornaments were to be used which were used in the second year of King Edward VI.; we were fully conscious that we were disobeying it; but we were employed in teaching the faith to a forgetful generation, and we thought it injurious to distract men's minds by questions about externals. We left it for the church to revive " (Letter of Dr. Pusey to English Church Union). Also, Letter to the Times, Mar. 28, 1874: " There was a contemporary movement for a very moderate ritual in a London congregation. We (the Tractarians) were united with it in friendship, but the movements were unconnected."
As soon as their teaching had secured believers, it set itself to apply its principles in action; and this active application of recovered belief in a sacerdotal church inevitably took the form of recovering and reasserting that litur-
z. Logical gical structure which still underlay the Character of Book of Common Prayer. The move-
Transition. ment, in making this fresh effort, passed from the study to the street; it became practical, missionary, evangelistic. It insisted that its work upon the masses, in their dreary poverty, demanded the bright attraction and relief of outward ornament and the effective teaching of the eye. This change from the univer sity to the town was signalized by the establish ment of, e.g., St. Saviour's, Leeds (to which the Tractarian leaders lent all their authority), and of the Margaret Street Chapel, under F. Oakeley, a de voted companion of J. H. Newman.The transition to ritual was not only a practical expediency, it was also the logical outcome of the new position; for the doctrinal revival lay in its emphatic assertion of the conception of mediation, of mediatorial offering. This mediation was, it taught, effected by the taking of flesh; i.e., of the outward to become the offering,- the instrument of worship. The body of the Lord was the one acceptable offering, sanctified by the Spirit; and in and through that mediatorial body all human nature won its right to sanctification, to holy use. The spirit needs, according to this teaching, an outward expression to symbolize its inward devotion. Its natural mode of approach to God is through sacramental signs; and the use of special sacraments justifies, of necessity, the general use of visible symbols. If grace comes through outward pledges, then devotion will obviously be right in using for its realization forms and signs and gestures; love will be right in showing itself through beauty; and prayer and praise will instinctively resort to ceremonial.
Nor was the pressure toward ritual merely doctrinal. The double movement in the church had
its parallel in the secular world. The spiritual revival of Wordsworth had its reflex in the emotional revival of Walter Scott. The set of
3. Parallel things was running counter to Puritan Movements. bareness. The force and reality of imagination in the shaping of life's in terests were recognized with the glad welcome of a recovered joy. A touch of kindliness repeopled the earth with fancies and suggestions, and visions and dreams. This world was no longer a naked factory, housing the machinery of a precise and unyielding dogma; nor was it the bare and square hall in which reason lectured on the perils of a morbid enthusiasm; it was a garden once more, rich with juicy life, and warm with color. This literary warmth mixed itself in with the doctrinal movement toward the enrich ment of the churches. The emotions were making new demands upon outward things; they required more satisfaction. They had been taught by the novelists to turn to the past, whether of cavaliers with plumes and chivalry, or of the Middle Ages with wild castles and belted knights, and praying monks and cloistered nuns. All this world of strange mystery and artistic charm had become alive again to them, and the revival made them discontented with the prosy flatness of common life. The churches were responding to a real and wide need when they offered a refuge and a relief to the distressed imag ination. Everywhere began the Gothic revival. The restoration of the disgraced and destitute par ish churches, which had become practically neces sary, was taken up by men full of admiration for the architecture which had first built them. They were passionately set on bringing them back as far as possible into their original condition. The archi tects thus were, indirectly, ardent workers on the side of the ecclesiastical revival. They eagerly studied liturgical correctness in restoring the beauty of the chancels, in placing the altar at its proper height and distance, in arranging the screen and the stalls, the altar-rails and credence-table. This combination of ecclesiastical and architectural sen timent was greatly furthered by the Cambridge Ecclesiological Society, which did much to foster antiquarian exactness, and to promote active efforts at restoration (A. J. B. Hope, Worship in the Church of England, London, 1874). This architectural movement, which dated its earliest impulses from J. H. Newman's church, built at Littlemore amid much ferment and anxiety, culminated in the vast achievements of Gilbert Scott and George Street, whose handiwork has been left in restored churches throughout the length and breadth of England. [Worthy of mention here is the new Roman Catho lic cathedral of London, consecrated 1910. Even though it does not belong to the Anglicans, it ema nates from the same source as that named in the text and the aim was to make it primitive Byzan tine in style.] This general restoration of order and fairness into the public services, which ran level with the renewal of church fabrics, roused much popular hostility, which made itself known in riot ous disturbances, chiefly directed against the use of the surplice in the pulpit, following a direction for its use given in a charge by Bishop Blomfield in 1842.