The Catholic World, Vol. 19, April 1874‐September 1874

by Various

Of course the first generation of the Reformed recollected the old Catholic worship, and kept up some resemblance to it; but as the memory died away, one point after another was cast aside, till every original trace was lost, and everything was made as bald and plain as possible.

Then a new great discovery was made. Satisfied with their own position, they looked at the Catholic worship, now become strange and [pg 329] wonderful in their eyes, and they discovered a striking analogy between it and pagan worship. Middleton, in the last century, expatiated wonderfully on the point; and our readers know how offensively our fluent, superficial Prescott, in his Conquest of Mexico, draws the comparison. But these men never seem to have thought that God might have his own views of his own worship, and that he could not have left the world without a guide on this point; they forgot that one fully explained type of worship of the ante-Christian era was before us to guide us in our search.

Take one of our average countrymen, from Prescott's own State, and set him down in the temple of Jerusalem while the high-priest was still offering the sacrifices of the law. What would his impressions be? He would certainly deem it a very pagan affair; the architecture would, in his eyes, be unsuited to a meeting-house; the vestments heathenish or—what to him would perhaps be synonymous—popish; the incense clearly so; and a radical defect in the whole would be, in his eyes, that the congregation took no part, and that the building was not adapted to preaching.

If, at the morning hour of prayer, or when the shadow of Mount Sion fell lengthening towards the Mediterranean, he entered the sacred enclosure, and beheld the priest, in rich robe, enter, incense in hand, to offer it on the golden altar, while the people were kept rigorously without, he would have found it sadly at variance with his ideas.

If, as the sun began to gild the golden face of the tower, he saw a devout Jew coming with his wife and little ones, bearing in his arms a lamb, to have it offered in sacrifice for him or some sick child at home, and taking back part to eat as part of the religious rite, he would think all this needed reforming, and that it was very nearly as bad as the popish way of having Masses said.

The only question would be whether the Almighty was wrong, or whether his own stand-point was utterly wrong.

Certainly, neither in the Jewish temple service nor in the worship of any pagan nation could he find the type of his own. The pagan had strong and striking resemblances with the Jewish; the worship of Christendom grew out of the Jewish temple service.

To this day chants echo through Catholic aisles that were first heard on Mount Sion. To the Catholic the old temple service would be intelligible; the edifice, the vestments, the incense, the priestly performing of a great act, would all be in harmony with ideas with which he had been imbued from youth; to him there would be the most natural of natural things in having sacrifice offered for him or his; he would kneel without in the crowd, offering, through the priest within, the smoking incense—offering it, as each one around him did, for his own wants of soul or body. In all the ideas of worship of the Jew he would be at home, and could join in the same spirit in every religious act that marked life from circumcision till the Kadisch, or prayer for the dead, poured forth beside the grave in the valley of Josaphat.

Those who find the Catholic worship too like the pagan would have condemned the divinely-instituted worship of the Mosaic law as still more like it. That paganism bears its testimony to the Catholic worship is an argument [pg 330] in its favor, not against it; for the pagan worship was a divine institution, perverted more in its object than in its form. Had it been purely the coinage of man's brain, of man's private judgment—one of those ways that seem right unto a man, though the ends thereof lead to death—there would be no such resemblance.

Is it not a striking fact that the Catholic, trained to the worship of his church, would be at home in the temple of Jerusalem during that divinely-instituted worship, while to the Protestant it would be utterly repugnant?