A HOME THRUST
"Ah, Bishop, what a heavenly sermon that was of yours last Sunday, about worldliness and the vanities of the flesh!—it nearly made me cry! And I say, Bishop, how hard it hit you and me!!!"
When the question of revising and shortening Church Services was discussed in the same year, Punch suggested as an alternative the discontinuance of all sermons except on special occasions. But the most pointed of his criticisms throughout this period are directed against Ritualism and in particular the use of the Confessional. High Anglican Ritualism was to him the Chambermaid of the Vatican. As for the Confessional, it was "a dangerous and disgusting practice."
Father Ignatius
In the autumn of 1858 Punch printed a cartoon on "Soapy Sam's" dangerous flirtation with the Scarlet Lady, accompanied by a letter advocating more drastic treatment of those who practised the Confessional, and later on in the year Tait, then Bishop of London, is applauded for his intention to deal faithfully with Ritualists and credited with saying: "You must not bring your toys to Church." Punch's attacks on the Ritualists exhibit a steady crescendo in freedom and even brutality through the 'sixties, and, admitting the sincerity of his dislike, little excuse can be found for the publication of such tasteless pictures as that, for example, of the sentimental young lady who observes to her sister, à propos of a sandalled curate, that "it is no use working slippers for him, and mother says he doesn't wear braces." Throughout the years 1864 and 1865 the vagaries of Brother, or Father Ignatius (the Rev. Joseph Leycester Lyne) are held up to unqualified contempt. But this "Histrio Anglicanus," as Punch called him, invited ridicule by his extravagances and those of his troop of mimic monks. The point of Punch's attack was that they were not real members of a monastic order, but mountebanks who played at being Romanists and occasionally imposed on Roman Catholics by their "profane tomfoolery." Father Ignatius, moreover, was doubly obnoxious to Punch, for he was not only a mock monk, but an extreme obscurantist who fulminated against the Higher Criticism and all liberal theologians. No quarter was therefore given to him in verse or prose. He is treated in "Spoiling the Game" as a dangerous lunatic:—
Brother Ignatius wears a monk's gown
(A strait waistcoat were suitable wear),
Brother Ignatius shaveth his crown—
'Twould be well were his whole head shaved bare.
