Ritualism (Christianity)

“ The ritual of the Catholic Church is the ritual of a race shut out from Nature, holding no communion with the powers of earth and air, but turning the spirit inwards and aiming at the concentration of the whole soul upon an unseen God. ”

“ Ritualism.—By ritual is meant the ceremonial part of Religion; the name is also applied to the book in which the Rites and Ceremonies are set forth. By ritualism is meant the system of ritual or prescribed form of religious worship. Therefore, these words meaning what they do are to be lifted up out of all party spirit and are to be regarded as expressive of the Church's real system of worship. Loyalty to the Prayer-book demands obedience to the rubrics on the part of both minister and people. ”

“ The worship in 'spirit and in truth,' for us men who belong to the religion of the Incarnation, must be a worship in body. But it will be spiritual if it is full of spiritual intention. Secular business again is spiritual if it is ruled by the divine Spirit according to the law of righteousness. ”

“ Such have been the ways in which men have tried to express their devotion to God, but all have been either insufficient or vain. Man's thoughts about God have found no fitting expression. A fire has burned in his heart which no words can utter. Now here, as in so many other ways, Christianity comes to our aid, and places within our reach a perfect and all-sufficient mode of expressing our devotion, a perfect worship. Do you ask me to what I allude? I answer, to the Sacrifice of the Mass. ”

“ Hence belief and practice or, in theological language, faith and works are equally essential to religion, which cannot exist without both of them. But it is not necessary that religious practice should always take the form of a ritual; that is, it need not consist in the offering of sacrifice, the recitation of prayers, and other outward ceremonies. ”

“ Looking back upon the days when the untiring voice of prayer was ascending to heaven from the holy sanctuaries of religion, when the festival days were kept and the faith was strong and the people devout, a faith and devotion due in a great measure to the sacredness of liturgical worship and the inspiration of the holy chants, may we not justly mourn the loss of this ancient fervor, and earnestly strive to awaken an interest in what, for so many good reasons, appears to hold more than an accidental relation to it? ”

“ They put no faith in rites or ceremonies, nor do they believe in penances as instrumental in obtaining the grace of God. They declare that moral righteousness, the gaining of wisdom, divine contemplation, charity and the cultivation of devotional feelings are their rites and ceremonies. ”

“ The first commandment, to love God with all our heart, when perverted by superstition, gave a strange direction to the teachings of Christ. For ages, the assumptions of an infallible Church had led men to believe that the interpreter was superior to Scripture. Every expounder of the holy text felt in his inmost heart that he alone, with his fellows, worshipped God as God desired to be worshipped, and that every ritual but his own was an insult to the Divine nature. ”

“ Ritual worship in general appears to the modern transcendentalist, as well as to the ultra-puritanic type of mind, as if addressed to a deity of an almost absurdly childish character, taking delight in toy-shop furniture, tapers and tinsel, costume and mumbling and mummery, and finding his 'glory' incomprehensibly enhanced thereby;—just as on the other hand the formless spaciousness of pantheism appears quite empty to ritualistic natures, and the gaunt theism of evangelical sects seems intolerably bald and chalky and bleak. ”

“ It might, again, be asked whether worship—prayer and communion—is indispensable for a religious life, apart from the argument that prayer is spontaneous or reasonable. Strictly abstaining from wickedness, vigorously practising goodness, faithfully serving humanity, may not man lead a religious life? ”

“ He must be accustomed to regard the inner religion of the heart and that of the external church as perfectly one, as the great universal sacrament, which again divides itself into so many others, and communicates to these parts its holiness, indestructibleness, and eternity. ”

“ We reach the Science of Christianity through demonstration of the divine nature; but in this world goodness will “be evil spoken of,” and patience must work experience.
Audible prayer can never do the works of divine understanding, which regenerates; but silent prayer, Veritable devotion. watchfulness, and devout obedience enable us to follow Jesus' example. Long prayers, ecclesiasticism, and creeds have clipped the divine pinions of Love, and clad religion in human robes. They materialize worship, hinder the Spirit, and keep man from demonstrating his power over error. ”

“ They say, ‘The man may repent,’ and then? Would he go to heaven? What kind of a heaven would be suitable for him? What society is he fitted to enjoy? What delight would he take in anything that is pure and holy? That is another of the false, baneful teachings of the Church, that the vilest of men may in a dying hour, by a few words of the priest, by partaking of the communion, by the anointing of oil, or the sprinkling of a few drops of so-called holy water, in an instant, be fitted to go into the presence of God and associate with angels and the pure and good. ”

“ Here is a supreme priest who believes God to be—what, in the name of God, does he believe God to be?—and discerns that all worship of God is a scenic phantasmagory of wax candles, organ blasts, Gregorian chants, mass-brayings, purple monsignori, wool-and-iron rumps, artistically spread out, to save the ignorant from worse.... ”

“ In a generous eclecticism, within the bounds of her liberty, and as by some providential power within her, she gathers and serviceably adopts, as in other matters so in ritual, one thing here, another there, from various sources—Gnostic, Jewish, Pagan—to adorn and beautify the greatest act of worship the world has seen. It was thus the liturgy of the church came to be—full of consolations for the human soul, and destined, surely! one day, under the sanction of so many ages of human experience, to take exclusive possession of the religious consciousness. ”

“ Oh, how the spirit of true and genuine devotion would radically change all this for the better! We handle sacred things just as if they were the things of the world. Even the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper becomes a mere religious performance, no preparation for it beforehand, and no meditation and prayer afterward. ”

“ Here consequently, if anywhere, we should expect to find the permanent factors in religion recognised even in the forms of worship, and the less permanent allowed to fall away. We should also expect the ritual of the cultus to grow in depth of meaning with time, and that it would more and more recognise the moral and spiritual elements in life. ”

“ Repentance, faith and obedience will not, of themselves, be effectual to our salvation. We may sincerely repent of our sins, heartily believe the gospel; we may walk in the paths of holy obedience, but until we enter into covenant with God by baptism and ratify our vows of allegiance and duty at the holy sacrament of the supper; commemorate the mysterious sacrifice of Christ, we cannot assert any claim to salvation.’
“Every man of common sense will reject such a statement as false, no matter who made it. It is the teaching of priests to clothe their performance with power and mystery. ”

“ The ritualistic conception now spoken of offers us a Christianity which secures "salvation," by the intervention of a priest,—a man who, though, to all outward appearance, but a human being among human beings, yet alleges, and finds people to believe, that he can exercise supernatural functions, and has the power of opening or closing the gates of heaven to his fellow-men. ”

“ It is disaster to side-track on the journey of life. Keep to the words of Christ and you keep on the main line. The gospel as revealed in the teachings of Jesus is entirely free from the sacerdotal imperative which nowadays imposes priest and ritual in the path of spiritual worship and blocks the fair-way to God. Priests and rituals and creeds are non-essentials; they are only wrappings: they are not religion, nor the best part of it. ”

“ Such a ritual as this, so framed in the pile which is consecrated to its use, is a worthy offering of man's devotion to his Lord. Such a ritual shows forth completely, though not elaborately, that Incarnation, of which the Sacraments, in their full significance, fully recognised, are the appointed complement. More than that may be beautiful, may be symbolical, may be touching, may be popular with the few, but it is not essential, nor is it practical towards the conversion or the growth in grace of the millions whom, first of all, we have to look to in our own generation. ”

“ The result of a faithful reception of the Holy Communion should be holiness in the common, everyday life, from which an incident, the family meal, is borrowed and transformed as the symbol and means by which all other incidents may be transformed. So great a mystery demands all the majesty of a liturgy and the accompaniment of [Pg 106] stately worship; and a dignified ritual attached to this representative, this common act of our human life, is most valuable as indicating the majesty of all that is commonplace when it is touched by God. ”

“ With the Pagan worshipper religion ended when the service closed, and he turned from the temple to the world. With the Christian, the highest service only then commences when he leaves the church. Religion, with him, is virtuous action, more than it is meditation or prayer. ”

“ The worship experience consists in the sublime attempt of the betrothed Adjuster to communicate to the divine Father the inexpressible longings and the unutterable aspirations of the human soul—the conjoint creation of the God-seeking mortal mind and the God-revealing immortal Adjuster. Worship is, therefore, the act of the material mind's assenting to the attempt of its spiritualizing self, under the guidance of the associated spirit, to communicate with God as a faith son of the Universal Father. ”

“ Being thus freed from the condemning power of original sin, and regenerated by baptism, men were expected to work their way to heaven by observing the laws of God and the rites of the church. These rites were fasting, masses, saying of prayers, pilgrimages, and the like, and in practice crowded the moral law out of mind. ”

“ The man who attends a ritual of prayer which he does not honestly believe in, merely for the sake of social custom and observance, is openly deriding his Maker and the priests who gain their living out of such ritual are trading on the Divine. ”

“ We cannot deny, then, that pure religion [38] may consist with rituals and sacraments; we cannot deny that it may exist without these. But I insist upon this point: that the sacrament, the ritual, is not, itself, religion. It may be a beautiful sign—it may be a quick suggestion—it may be a medium of spiritual influence; but, alone, it cannot take the place of inward, personal piety, of right affections and an obedient will. No punctilious form can stand substitute for a vigilant conscience; no posture of devotion can supply the place of living deeds ”

“ The majesty of God and the sanctity of religion require the first, in order to excite in the minds of men proper sentiments of reverence and devotion; and experience itself shows how much the sacred ceremonies of religion conduce to this end. ”

“ But indeed a Sacrament so great and so rich in all manner of blessings can never be extolled as it deserves by human eloquence, nor adequately venerated by the worship of man. This Sacrament, whether as the theme of devout meditation, or as the object of public adoration, or best of all as a food to be received in the utmost purity of conscience, is to be regarded as the centre towards which the spiritual life of a Christian in all its ambit gravitates; for all other forms of devotion, whatsoever they may be, lead up to it, and in it find their point of rest. ”

“ But what is this but a confession, in each case, that in proportion as men give up ceremonies and become spiritual in their worship, their religion is the best, or that spirituality is the grand characteristic of the religion of Jesus Christ? ”

“ The time must come when the world will worship only one God and do away with the idolatry of the bible, of Jesus, of Mary, of the innumerable saints, the adulation of rites, rituals, ceremonies, and make righteousness and holiness consist in obeying the laws of God, as written in the hearts of men, and in maintaining clean, upright lives. ”

“ It is attractive to most of those who approach it with any sympathy, to whom a religion for men, the ideal of proud yet ready submission to Almighty God, set forth by a ritual hardly surpassed in dignity by any, must appeal strongly. ”

“ To thousands of earnest and sincere Christians connected with churches using an elaborate ritual, this ritual is no mere form; it is a means of blessing and grace through which God reveals himself to their souls. Moreover, God selects certain persons, especially well qualified to hear his voice; these he commissions as ambassadors to declare him and his will to the people. The belief in this method of revelation is the philosophical basis for the offices of the Christian preacher and the Christian religious teacher. ”

“ Yet it is from mythology, or from the still more reflective and deliberative expression of ritual, of rites and ceremonies, that the science of religion has sought to infer the nature of the gods man worships. The whole apparatus of religion, rites and ceremonies, sacrifice and altars, nature-worship and polytheism, has been investigated; the one thing overlooked has been the one thing for the sake of which all the others exist, the prayer in which man's soul rises, or seeks to rise, to God. ”