The Ritual Movement / Three plain sermons preached at St. John the Evangelist's, Hammersmith

by James Galloway Cowan

But you are not left to spontaneity. When God chose for Himself a people to honour and serve Him, to be witnesses for His honour, to bring in due time all nations to serve and worship Him, He taught that people what kind of House they should build Him, and with what kind of ritual they should serve Him; treating the matter of such importance as actually to inspire the architects, to prescribe each article of furniture and every detail of ornament, to appoint precisely the ceremonies and observances. And what did He require? That the material of house and ornament should be of the best and costliest and most splendid; that every act, every feeling of worship should have its corresponding sign in some ritualistic observance; that among the accessories of worship should be attractions for means of enlisting men’s various senses; colour, and pattern and ornament for the eye, music for the ear, fragrant perfume for the scent.

This is God’s pattern of what is decorous: His prescription of order.

But you object: “No, this was God’s pattern and order: but it was all appointed under a different dispensation from Christianity, for a rude and childish people, as pictures and types and carnal ordinances, to be exchanged when men were fit, when the Messiah should come, for inward and invisible realities, for purely spiritual things, which heart and mind alone could apprehend, which outward sense would rather obscure than discover.”

Now, of course, Judaism was in some respects a different dispensation from Christianity, and some even of its divinely appointed observances were merely temporary, and had a significance and use for Jews which they would not have for us. But it is quite an error to suppose that these Jews were a rude and childish people; they were rather the civilised and cultivated and most spiritual of the earth. Albeit, if we might dare to say so, for them more than for us, or for any other people whom God has since drawn near to Himself, an elaborate outward and sensuous worship (if it were not the right, the necessary, the permanent accompaniment of inward realities) was unsuitable and fraught with danger. They had just come out from the home of idolatry; they were going to dwell among the observers of carnal and idolatrous rites; they were themselves hankering after visible objects of worship; they would again and again make stumbling blocks for themselves out of the very things which God appointed for their edification in His worship. Now ascribing to God, as we must always do, perfect wisdom and clearest foresight, is it presumptuous to say that He would have kept these snares from the Jews, that he would have drawn off their minds from the external and the naturally magnificent, and rather would have forbidden than enforced minute ritual and much worship of the body, as things through which they were sure to err, unless there were in the things themselves intrinsic good, unless, in fact, they were not merely useful accessories of worship, but a very integral and essential part of the worship itself?

And then, again, my brethren, where are we told that Christianity is a purely spiritual religion; that its functions are all such as can be performed by mind and heart, without body; that, in fact, the body has no real part in them? The worship of the body is indeed no worship by itself, for: “God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.” But is it not Christianity that has redeemed and consecrated the body? Has not the second Adam taken away from it all but its form of mortality? Has not the Lord purchased it for Himself, imposing upon it much work in His service; commanding by His inspired Apostle that it should glorify Him; promising it great excellencies and rewards in its future state; appointing for it a glorious worship in heaven? Assuredly, my brethren, as man is three-fold and has been redeemed in his three-fold nature, mind, heart, and body, so has each part of him its appointed, its bounden part, to take on its own account in the positive worship of God. And were it not so, were the body merely the case of the soul—its link with the material; its tabernacle in the temporal; its agent among the natural and outward—still, is it not in these respects part of its office to exhibit what is in the soul? Does not the soul naturally move it when it is moved itself? Is not the body, as it were spontaneously, affected by all that passes within, and, unless unnaturally restrained or physically disabled, does it not always betray and manifest the inward affection?

The soul may worship God sufficiently (for the whole being) when the body is taking no part by reason of paralysis or prostration, or because the man, deeming it inexpedient at that time that sound or sign should escape him, is curbing and binding it down; but in health and left unrestrained, the body is such a spontaneous sympathizer and persistent co-operator with all within, that we are justified in saying of him who does not speak to God with his lips, and bow his head before Him, and clasp his hands, and kneel upon his knees, that he does not worship God in spirit and in truth!

We have reached thus far, brethren—if you have gone with me—that God has prescribed much ritual, and that man from his very nature must use much ritual in divine worship.

Of course God’s prescription is liable to much modification when it comes to be applied, not to one people, but to all the nations of the earth; not to a tabernacle in the wilderness or a temple at Jerusalem, but to every place in which men ask him to record His name and come unto them and bless them; not to dim and imperfect types, but to the glorious and perfect anti-types; not to Judaism, which was local and temporary, but to Christianity, which is universal and eternal. Of course, too, the details of men’s spontaneous worship will, necessarily, be different according to the truth which they have to express by outward signs, according to their natural characteristics in a warm or cold climate, according even to individual temperament.

But this principle assuredly holds good for all time and for all men: that God having once pronounced Himself in favour of a certain kind of ritual, and His Church having consented to express its doctrines and its feelings by certain outward signs and rites of its own, the general rule and form of decent and orderly worship has been set and established, which should only be departed from by Divine sanction and appointment, unless, indeed, the doctrines and feelings which we have to express are so diverse from those of the elder Church that they cannot find an intelligent and real expression in the same ritual.

You will hardly need, brethren, that I should prove to you that our religion is substantially that which God gave to the Jews; that under the old dispensation as under the new, salvation is offered to mankind only through Jesus Christ, and that the general ways of seeking and keeping hold of that salvation—humbling ourselves before God, initiation into His covenant, constant prayer, supplication and praise, constant pleadings of His sacrifice, constant feeding on His grace, are the same for us as for them, unless God Himself has changed them. Now this we know that He has done in some respects, taking away circumcision, the daily sacrifice of animals, and the Passover, and various rites and ceremonies which, from the nature of the case, could be only temporary; or, at least, had real use and significance only for the nation of the Jews, or for an expectant Church. But then He has given us other ordinances in the place of those withdrawn, and these we naturally observe in the same spirit, and, as far as suits them, with the same form as He appointed for the older ordinances. God is still the same: man is still the same. The expression of worship which He once required, is that which He must surely still require in all its essentials, all its characteristics.