of which it is made up, conveys an impression of the greatness of the Action it represents, even to the more intelligent of those who do not attach any distinct idea to its various parts.

The ritual of the Catholic Church implies the expression, or rather the consecration, of four great principles. It recognizes in the first place the dedication to the direct service of the Creator of whatever is most precious in His works, or in the products of man's ingenuity. Nothing is created without an end, and the more precious the work the nobler is the end for which it is destined. No one but an infidel could plausibly maintain that the highest use of gold, silver, or precious stones is to minister to the purposes of luxury or vanity; or that artificers have been endowed with the power of investing these products of nature with forms of exquisite beauty, in order merely to adapt them more perfectly to such transitory and sordid uses. The destination which the Church finds for the ingenious labours of man, she finds also for the productive instincts of those inferior animals whose operations are turned to account in the same direction. The bee and the silkworm play a great part in the manufacture of those objects which bring credit on the rational agents who found on them the results of their artistic skill. The labours of mother-bee are accordingly commemorated by the Church on Holy Saturday, and those of the little worm who is the first spinner of the silk which embellishes the sanctuary on festive occasions, would no doubt have received a similar distinction had a like favourable occasion been presented. All these productions and arts find their providential destiny in the Church. Gold and silver are wrought into chalices and monstrances; diamonds and rubies find their appropriate place in the immediate neighbourhood of the Blessed Sacrament, while the bee and the silkworm help towards the honour of their Creator by furnishing the materials of the splendour which faintly symbolizes His glory in this world of shadows. The remaining three principles to which the external worship of the Church bears witness, are indicated by the provisions of her ceremonial. The first of this latter class is the reverence of the Blessed Sacrament. The care with which this primary duty is enforced and expressed is known to those only who have made a careful study of the rubrics. A number of rules which in the eyes of those who do not understand them would wear the appearance of frivolity, will be found on examination to be directed to this object. Among these may be mentioned especially all such as provide against the loss or desecration of the smallest atom of the sacred species. The same is of course the purpose of those repeated genuflections or inclinations which excite the silly

criticisms of the ignorant spectator. In fact, the scrupulously careful and reverent provisions of the rubrics to those who have no correct idea of the doctrine they embody and illustrate, are like the movements of a dance in the eyes of observers who are stone deaf to the music which prompts them. Another principle which is constantly kept in view in the ritual of Catholic worship, is that of the reverence due to those who are engaged in it. The degree of approximation in which the celebrant and ministers respectively stand towards the Blessed Sacrament is the same with that of their several orders in the Church, and regulates the different gradations of ceremonial respect with which they are treated in the great act of public worship, and relatively also in its less solemn acts. It is thus that the Church keeps up her witness to that rule of respect for authority which is fast dying out of the world. The same is true with regard to the representation which Catholic ceremonial makes of the duty of Christian love and fellowship, which shall be the last of the four specified principles to which the Church does public homage before the world. In the frequency with which the celebrant in Holy Mass turns away from the work in which he is engaged to address the people in the words of pastoral affection, one is reminded of our Blessed Redeemer's threefold withdrawal from close intercourse with His Eternal Father in the Garden of Agony in order that He might cheer the hearts of His disciples. In the interchange of the kiss of peace between the celebrant and his chief minister, the ministers with one another, and afterwards with the clergy, we have a witness to the love which should subsist between the servants of that Lord who first loved them and laid down His life for them. It is worthy of remark that the Church, with her usual consideration, makes none of these ritual illustrations absolutely indispensable except those which are universally practicable. The reverence of the Blessed Sacrament demands that the chalice and patten should always be of precious metal, or at least of that into the composition of which some precious metal enters. An altar-stone is likewise essential, though it may be inserted in a wooden table. Had the latter provision of the Church been generally known and borne in mind, the controversy on stone altars by which the minds of Anglicans were at one time so seriously disturbed, would never have been raised. The Holy Sacrifice has frequently been offered in the humblest dwellings of the poor, and on tables which, at other times, might be lawfully converted to domestic uses; and with such sacrifices our Lord, as we may believe, has been as well pleased as with those which have been offered on altars of marble and in vessels of gold. There are houses of Religious

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novices in which High Mass is not celebrated from one year's end to that of another. But in the essential provisions of ceremonial the Church allows no latitude and tolerates no exception. S. Ignatius of Loyola, than whom none could lay a less urgent stress on what may be called the luxuries of public worship, is imperative in requiring of his ordained subjects the most scrupulous attention to the duty of rubrical exactitude.

In thus defining the use of ritual religion, the Church has entered her silent protest against its abuse. If there be one thing more hateful to her than another, it is that very spirit of formalism and excessive care for externals which is one of the most hackneyed of the popular charges against her. This prejudice is not to be wondered at, considering that she is chiefly known to the critical world by those great public celebrations which form the exception to her more habitual modes of worship. The temporary cessation of the Holy Week services at Rome, however lamentable as involving a partial eclipse of the Church's outward splendour, is not without its providential compensation in proving to the world that the king's daughter is none the less glorious within because stripped for the moment of her vesture of varieties. The leading form which the abuse of ritual is apt to assume is the practice of attributing an exaggerated importance to anything in religion which is purely external. But it will have appeared also from what has been said, that all the ceremonies of the Catholic Church are eminently characterized by the note of reality. Not one of them is superfluous or introduced simply for effect. There is accordingly as little reason for calling them theatrical as for saying that they are needlessly multiplied. The essence of the theatrical is show without reality. If the ceremonies of the Church be effective, it is simply because they are real; they resemble the vesture of nature, which is so beautiful in its impression on the eye that we are tempted to think its only purpose is to delight our senses and recreate our spirits. Such, no doubt, is eminently its effect; but there is not a combination of scenery which satisfies the idea of the picturesque, not a colour in the petal of a flower or the plumage of a tropical bird which does not answer some purpose more immediate than that of illustrating the glory of the Creator, and the beauty of His heavenly palace in the sight of a thankless world. In the same way the Council of Trent assigns the edification of those who assist at the offices of the Church as a reason, secondary to that of their diviner use, for rendering them beautiful and attractive. We desire to speak with all possible consideration of the recent revival of ceremonial religion in the Church of

England, and are far from joining in that indiscriminate condemnation of its promoters which some of their extravagances are certainly calculated to provoke. But it is hardly possible from the nature of the case that they should not be in danger of one or both of those serious abuses to which we have just adverted. The natural force of reaction from the state of neglect which during a long period of religious indifference had crept into the worship of the Established Church would issue, in spite of attempts to prevent it, in an exaggerated estimate of the importance of ritual. We must bend a stick strongly in the opposite direction to that into which it had swerved before we can expect it to settle in its normal position. Again, it is not surprising that ritual should have outrun the limits of doctrine, which is far more difficult to establish than itself. Hence the ritualists, to use a familiar illustration, have put the cart before the horse, and sought to ground doctrine on ritual, instead of leaving ritual to grow out of doctrine.

What is to be the end of this wonderful movement in the Church of England? Wonderful indeed it is when we consider the rapidity and extent of its growth, and the untowardness of the soil and climate in which it has flourished. As to the argument which represents it as independent of Roman influences, and supposes that it will stop short of Roman results, we cannot but regard such a mode of reasoning as too evidently interested to be either plausible or creditable. The rubrics of the Prayer-book are strained if not violated in order to justify the new practices; the voice of living authority is unheeded, and its mandates defied in order to find a place for them. It is to our churches that ritualists must have recourse for their ceremonial arrangements; our magazines to which they resort for their altar breads, thuribles, vestments, and other appurtenances of divine worship; our treatises which they consult for the details of a ritual which finds no recognition in their own. It is equally unreasonable to contend that the movement has no tendency to favour the progress of Roman Catholicity in this country. It was once said by an acute observer of human nature, "If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation." We might say also, Give us the externals of a nation's worship, and we will tell you its rcligion. This truth was fully appreciated by the Reformers of the sixteenth century, and will sooner or later become apparent to the Reformers of the nineteenth. They are doing for us a work which we could never have done for ourselves; the work of accustoming the English mind to the true Catholic type of worship. They are doing, with all the advantages of a

favourable prestige, what we can but slowly effect against the tide of an adverse prejudice. The future of English religion is a great question, and for many reasons a painful and alarming one, and we fall back with comfort on the thought that its response does not rest with us. But as to that limited portion of the ground which is covered by the subject under consideration, the ultimate issue is at once easier to foresee and pleasanter to contemplate. The ritual movement, though it may stay, will never satisfy the spiritual cravings of the more earnest among its promoters. It is manifestly paving the way not for the consolidation but for the dissolution of that Establishment in which it exists as a thoroughly uncongenial element. When its work shall have been accomplished, one of two events may be expected to follow. Some of the party will adopt the wiser course of submission to the Catholic Church; while others will seek to form an independent communion, which, however true its doctrine and venerable its practices, will exhibit the essential characteristics of a sect. There was at one time another hypothesis-of all the most repulsive to Catholic reason-that of a corporate union with the Catholic Church. But this dream has now at all events been dispelled by Mr. Gladstone, and others who have made common cause with him against the Vatican Council. We will end with the expression of an anxious hope that, whenever the inevitable crisis may arise, we Catholics of England may be found to have so far improved our opportunities as to be adequate to the duties which so serious an addition to our responsibilities must of necessity bring with it.