James Galloway Cowan

“ What present comfort in the troubles of this lower life, what cheering in despondency, what stimulus in toilsome effort do we not miss, my brethren, by not realizing that in the Church we are come unto Mount Zion, unto the heavenly Jerusalem—unto the very throne, into the very presence, within the enfolding arms of the God who has saved us, Who loves to fill us full of peace, and joy, and benediction now. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I am not denying, I freely own and stoutly maintain, that each branch of the Church has authority and power to change and change again and again many of her rites and ceremonies—the details, perhaps, of every one of them—so long as all be done in accordance with God’s word: above all I am not foolishly alleging that altar lights, or incense, or chasuble, or any such thing is of such importance as to make or unmake a Church, or is really necessary in the Christian Church at all. ”

“ The Reformation did away with all that! Is it possible that worshippers of Jehovah, men who owe all their peace, their privileges and blessings to their membership of Christ’s Church, can for a moment allow and do not rather with horror shout down the fearful assertion, that their community has abolished for itself the ritual of Scripture, and has cut itself off from all the Church that went before it, and all that lies around it? ”

“ I further urged, that man’s natural feeling, rightly enlightened as to its relationship with God, would spontaneously have prompted him—has, in fact, prompted him—to make such a manifestation of inward devotion, such an external homage and worship, such an use in God’s honour of the things which the senses approve as costly, excellent, beautiful, edifying, joy-inspiring, joy-proclaiming, glorifying. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ It remains to say a few words to those whom at the outset I called “hurriers along;” to those who have gone with the movement without considering whither it was carrying them, or what would be the effect on others who are being left behind; to those who in their conformity to “high-ritual” are rather indulging their taste, than exercising their judgment, or are regarding as the soul of worship, that which is but the accessory, the expression, the body and clothing of worship. As I have warned you before, there are great and peculiar dangers inherent in “high-ritual;” ”

“ Heaven must be a substantial and tangible place; because those who are to inhabit it will have bodies to rest in it, and eyes, and ears and other senses to find gratification in it. And if it is such a place, and is full of objects which affect the body, and which the body may employ, then I see not why much of what the Apostle saw in vision may not be a literal representation of what shall actually be. But concede that it is only an image, a pictorial representation, nevertheless it is God who has chosen these things to symbolize His perpetual worship ”

“ Exaggerated in importance, regarded as an end instead of a means, followed out into very minute detail,—its forms and expressions unduly repeated and multiplied—it obscures the very truths which it was meant to exhibit; it distracts the attention which it should fix; it begets formalism, it mocks God with a worship which is not spiritual and true, and therefore is no worship at all ”

“ As in the Mount He had given Moses a pattern and a law of all things that men should make and do for His worship in the Church on earth; so in Patmos to the beloved disciple, to him who had drunk in most deeply the spirit of Christ, to him who was to teach men more than any other prophet of the real, the abiding, the spiritual, the heavenly—to him, I say, God opened a door in heaven, and showed the things that must be hereafter, the worship that is to be celebrated and perpetuated in His fullest Presence ”

“ 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.
That the Christian Church accepted at once this rule of worship is evident from the fact, that the apostles and first disciples continued to take part in the temple and synagogue services as long as the Jews would let them; yea, and that they even still observed those ordinances which, in their necessary observance, God had abrogated; instead of which He had appointed other things. ”

“ 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 soul may worship God sufficiently (for the whole being) p. 8when 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! ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now of course there are prejudices and perversities still existing and many of them. There are men who for the love of opposition resist and cry down ritualists. There are others, who in their inmost soul are smitten with a great fear, lest they should be beguiled of their reward in Christ, and turned into formalists and idolaters! It was to be expected that each of these classes would strenuously oppose itself to the ritual movement and even that, though they really have little in common, they would readily make common cause against ritualists. ”

“ Nevertheless it is easy to see that there has never been a time since the Reformation when men have been so able as they are now to discriminate between what is Catholic and what is Roman, when they could venture to confess that they had made the discrimination, yes and to act upon it without inevitably leading themselves or others back into the bondage from which we have been delivered. ”

“ To both these parties—the standers still and the hurriers along—how wisely speaks the precept, “Let all things be done decently and in order”!
And first to the first—the standers still—the “old-fashioned,” the contented with things as they were. Consider, my brethren, what mean ye by the service of God in the sanctuary, the assembling of yourselves in Church from time to time. Why do you come? Who bade you come? what to do? You come to worship God in a building set apart for His worship; a place in which He may meet you by appointment. And who is God? ”

“ Seek each one what may edify others, and all what may honour God. Endeavour to take, each and all of you, your due part in common worship. Ask God’s Spirit to show you out of His own Word, illustrated by the testimony of His Church, what is common worship ”

“ Wherever the experiment has been fairly tried it has thoroughly succeeded: it is only those who have not tried it who doubt of, or deny the hope of its success.
And as there never has been a time when the ritual movement could be so easily effected, so has there never been a time when it was so loudly called for as it is now; first, by so many of the worshippers, who have come to appreciate beautiful churches, musical services, frequent celebrations, devout ceremonies and symbolizing acts and ornaments,—and so to crave the perfect development of the system to which these things belong ”

“ You know what provision you would make, what anxious care would possess you to fit your house, to array and order your household, for the due entertaining of an expected guest only just a little above yourselves in dignity and in claim to be respected. ”

“ Let us speak with all charity and fair allowance of those earnest and holy men. Almost all the doctrines of the faith had been perverted or leavened with corruption; almost all the ordinances and ceremonies were associated with gross abuses. In the intensity of their awakened feeling against these things, it was natural that many among our own people, unable to distinguish between the truth and the corruption, the use and the abuse, should think that their rulers had not gone far enough in the way of change ”

“ If you know anything of the Marian persecution, and the bitter animosity against suspected Romanism which it naturally begat; of Puritanical infatuation and its superstitious horror at the sight of a surplice, its general disuse of the Holy Ordinance to which “high-ritual” and glorious vestments peculiarly belong, its perversity in wearing black, simply because others wore white, in fasting (as on Christmas day) when others were feasting ”

“ 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. ”

“ If once men can be brought to feel that it would have been wrong to make all things new, they will be at pains to inquire with all anxiety whether they have not misconceived the Reformation, and so inquiring, they will come to see what it really p. 19did or aimed at, and hence to believe that the Ritual movement of the present day—I am not, of course, speaking of the extravagancies and eccentricities of individuals—so far from ignoring, contravening, and overturning the principles of the Reformation, is the very carrying of them out. ”

“ But were it otherwise; were they one and all, from first to last, in their own private judgments and by consent among themselves, against its actual use, or at any rate deliberately acquiescent in its disuse, are we to be bound by their personal tastes and their private judgments, so as to yield up what at least they have preserved and solemnly handed on to us, what we have seen to have such full Scriptural sanction, so to harmonize with p. 29the dictates of true Catholic devotion, so to express in act, as, thank God! ”

“ There is just now a great agitation throughout the land about what is called “The Ritual Movement.” After many years of sluggish indifference to the Apostle’s precept—it would hardly exceed the truth to say of perverse opposition to it, in doing all things indecently and against order—men on all sides are waking up to a sense of their neglect, and to a desire to repair it ”

“ That p. 6the 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. ”

“ They doubtless justified themselves by considering that their second Prayer Book still contained the doctrines which the offending rites and vestments were meant to adorn; they hoped that men might come to understand and hold those doctrines when their prejudices were disarmed; at any rate they feared, lest, by a stubborn maintenance or violent enforcement at that critical time of anything not really essential, they should p. 26endanger the best interests of the Church; or even provoke and perpetuate among us a mere Protestant reformation. ”