Were I not convinced that it is so, God forbid that I should stand here as a vindicator of the movement. For I am persuaded that the Reformation was most righteous and necessary, and that God Himself specially wrought it for us. However gently we should always speak in controversy, however charitably we should think of and construe the acts and motives of others, we must not hide from ourselves that the unreformed Church of this country, in the sixteenth century, was in a very corrupt and ungodly state. The form, indeed, of all the essentials of Christianity was maintained, but it was overlaid by man’s idle, or even false traditions and man’s corrupt practices. The power of the priesthood was abused; the word of God was withheld from the people; the Holy Eucharist was mutilated and perverted from the purposes of its institution; in worship, the creature was set side by side with the Creator, if not exalted above Him; the substitution of form for spirit and substance, and in many cases of a wrong form, too, was generally sanctioned and encouraged. From all this the Reformers were stirred to rescue us, and by the grace of God they did it. But theirs was no hot-headed indiscriminate work. They laboured, with all the calmness that men in their trying circumstances could command, to distinguish between right and wrong. They wished to retain all that seemed edifying, or even merely harmless, though it were of recent growth. They sought to restore all things to the primitive rule and pattern. They would have counted it sin to have rejected anything that God had suggested to His Church or that the Church in former ages had adopted. Let any one acquaint himself with the doctrine, ritual, and practice of the unreformed Church, and then compare with them the first Prayer Book of Edward VI., and he will find that there is no unnecessary deviation from them; that there is a strict maintenance of everything that it was possible to retain without fostering error or obstructing Christian edification; that the Reformers even went beyond, and revived and enforced what had been disused and forgotten—if it had early sanction—leaving nothing unrestored that had primitive authority, save only the godly discipline of Penance; and how they thought of that, how they wished to restore it, how they hoped that the time would come when it would be restored, let the Commination Office testify!
This was the principle of the Reformation. And how was it carried out in the matter of ritual? Why! everything that was Scriptural or primitive, or, though recent, edifying, was retained. There were the same Churches, the same altars, the same symbols and furniture, the same vestments. Even the same services and the same ways of offering them were preserved; only they were cleansed from corruptions, divested of things doubtful or unedifying, simplified by making prayers and lections more continuous, and by discountenancing those minutiæ of bodily worship—numerous bowings, genuflections, and the like—which, however natural they may have been to the foreign Priests who had ministered at our altars, however useful to the people when, by reason of all being performed in an unknown and muttered tongue, much dumb show and bell ringing were necessary, were distracting to true worship by their multiplicity, and were unnecessary in an audible and intelligible service.
I do not say that everything which this ritual movement seeks to restore is distinctly by name approved and retained by our Reformers; but in its general features, in almost all its items, in the kind of worship and confession of faith at which it aims, I am sure that it has their sanction and is the taking up of their work.
How is it that this ritual has never been the generally used ritual of the Reformed Church? Why should it now be revived?—these are questions which, if God will, I will answer in detail in my next sermon.
Meantime, my brethren, strive to make profitable and personal use of what has been said, by carefully informing yourselves as to the real state of the case; by trying to root out of you prejudices, and to keep yourselves from uncharitable suspicions of ritualists and rash and profane speech about ritual; by cultivating respect for the motives of those who, in their labour to be loyal to the Church of the Reformers and useful to you, have come under so much obloquy; by praying earnestly that those in authority may have wisdom given them rightly to deliberate and determine in this matter, and that those under authority may have grace to render all due submission: that each and all of us may be animated by the pure desire to enforce and observe the Apostolic rule, “Let all things be done decently and in order.”
SERMON III.
I Corinthians xiv. 40.
“Let all things be done decently and in order.”
By the good Providence of God, the Reformation was effected in this country with the sanction, under the immediate direction of the highest authorities in Church and State; by men of sound faith, sober judgment, and calm temperament; on the righteous principle of maintaining as good and necessary whatever of doctrine or practice had universally prevailed among Christians, and of not differing unnecessarily, even in non-essentials, from the mediæval Church.
The conservative and Catholic feeling which animated the Anglican Reformers very soon, however, came into conflict with a radical and mere Protestant spirit. I desire not to repudiate “Protestantism” as an attribute of the Anglican Church. Our Reformers did most stoutly protest—by speech, by deed, by enactment, by suffering—against prevailing corruptions and superstitions; specially they protested against the tyrannical assumption of universal dominion by the Bishop of Rome, and the capricious and lawless issuing by him of ecclesiastical prohibitions and indulgences.
But their Protestantism only asserted what they were not; and certainly they never prided themselves in or contented themselves with the mere assertion of the negative and the diverse. In that they put away what was wrong, or corrupt, or unedifying or distracting or burthensome, they were Protestant; but in their maintenance of the one faith in its integrity and the due proportion of its several parts, in their strict adherence to the principle which had ever guided the service and ritual of Christ’s Church, they were true Catholics—much more worthy of the name than those who henceforth claimed the exclusive right to it.