Rites

“ The author of the universe seems at first sight to require a worship absolutely pure, simple, unadorned, without rites, institutions, ceremonies; even without temples, priests, or verbal prayer and supplication. ”

“ You will at once discover that they have inaugurated the rites of all kinds of religions, either that the divine indulgence might be rewarded, or that the threatening anger might be averted, or that the wrath already swelling and raging might be appeased. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Religious rites are, first, rites of approach, whereby the community draws nigh to its god; and, afterwards, rites of sacramental meals whereby the community celebrates its reconciliation and enjoys communion with its god. ”

“ Whether the Apostles designed these rites to be perpetual, seems a question which belongs to scholars and antiquarians; not to us, as Christian men and women. So long as they satisfy or help the pious heart, so long they are good. ”

“ If I am right in contending that magic and religion flow from a common source, rites may remain for generations in an indecisive condition which is neither, but may crystallize in either shape according to the specific occasion, the environment, or the dominant mental and institutional tendency of the social group. ”

“ The too common mistake has been of thinking of this view of celestial nature as the origin of man’s religious rites, instead of as an outgrowth of the primal religious rite, which antedated man’s study of, or wonder over, the workings of the elements and the course of the heavenly bodies. ”

“ Yet through it ran the old familiar sense of ritual, due to the practice of so many years, that cleansing of mind and body for a big Ascent⁠—like initiatory rites that once had been as important to him as those of some priest who approached the worship of his deity in the temples of ancient time. He performed the ceremony with the same care as though no ghost of vanished faith still watched him, beckoning from the air as formerly.⁠ ⁠... ”

“ The same thing can be applied in different degrees to the various rites throughout the year, when succeeding festivals bring before us the other great mysteries of religion, or when we are called on to express the ordinary feelings of Christian devotion. He who has studied the simple devotions of the rosary, or the way of the cross, will be astonished at the mine of devotion, of enlightened piety contained in them, and at the treasures that are drawn from them by faithful souls, simple and unpretending as they are, and puerile as they appear to the self-sufficient. ”

“ The rites may be performed anywhere as occasion demands.
‘3. Spirits, not gods, are recognised.
‘4. The rites are magical rather than propitiatory. In other words, the desired objects are attained, not by propitiating divine beings by sacrifice, but by ceremonies which are believed to influence the course of nature directly through a physical sympathy or resemblance between the rite and the effect which it is the intention of the rite to produce.’ [2]
We will pass now to another point, the selection of the victim to be sacrificed ”

“ Genuine piety was supplanted by a long train of superstitious observances, which originated partly from opinions inconsiderately embraced, partly from a preposterous disposition to adopt profane rites and combine them with Christian worship, and partly from the natural predilection of mankind in general for a splendid and ostentatious religion. ”

“ We find amongst you no worship but only a self-begotten set of rites which are pleasing to the flesh, such as, bells, organs, singing, celebration, ornamented churches, beautiful images, differences in victuals and in days, false purification and promises, reading many psalms and pater nosters with the mouth and not spiritually, adulteration of the sacraments, and a destruction and garbling of all that which Christ Jesus has taught and commanded in his holy gospel. ”

“ They do not perform any rites and ceremonies, or 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. They further say, Govern and regulate your feelings, discharge your duties to God and to man, and you will gain everlasting blessedness; purify your hearts, cultivate devotional feelings, and you will see Him who is Unseen. ”

“ That other religious ceremonies, repeated from age to age, have the same tendency as prayers to become dead forms from which the spirit of communion or devotion has departed—though under favourable conditions it may return from time to time—is too well known; and if in their emptiness they are still believed somehow to serve their purpose, it can only be as magical rites. ”

“ At the same time, every such employment is surrounded by a sort of aura of rites, which seem to be carried out with equal, or greater, scrupulosity and conviction; yet, age by age, these rites slowly atrophy and lose their importance and their ancient meaning, which is explained by new myths; or other rites may be learnt from neighbours or from invaders; for some rites may be necessary to their life, though not any particular ones. ”

“ In the countless songs of the rites may be found the poetic side of the divine characters, and in the long prayers we may learn their potency, and discover how man hopes to commune with them and gain their favor. ”

“ That the Gentile rites in question, however grossly corrupted, were derived from divine originals, must be manifest to any one who will compare the significance and beauty of the Scriptural rites as connected with the spiritual truths of revelation, which they symbolized, with the bareness and absurdity by which they are characterized, in their distorted Gentile forms, detached from the spiritual connection to which they natively belonged. ”

“ The histories of all nations, barbarous or civilized, ancient or modern, teem with sacrificial rites of every description, whether they be of a nature gross or mystical, of a performance mild or bloody; rites invented and celebrated either to expiate the sins of man, or to appease the anger of God and regain His favour. ”

“ We have, after earnest and frequent calling upon the Name of God, and after much Consultation, not with Flesh and Blood, but with His holy Word, resolved to lay aside former Liturgy, with the many Rites and Ceremonies formerly used in the Worship of God; and have agreed upon this following Directory for all the Parts of publick Worship at ordinary and extraordinary Times. ”

“ The religious belief in which we have been educated, whose rites, and forms, and ceremonies are associated with our earliest recollections, at whose hallowed altars we have formed the most sacred of all human [252] alliances, and in whose consecrated earth the remains of our ancestors are deposited, may be supposed to enkindle, even in the breast of age, the fire of a youthful attachment ”

“ In a community where explanations of this type hold sway, we are not surprised to find that the origin of rites, too, is almost uniformly traced to a vision and that even the most trivial alteration in ceremonial garb is not claimed as an original invention but ascribed to supernatural promptings. ”

“ Either the physical analogies to which the Word of God constantly appeals, in figures of speech and similitudes, and upon which the whole ritual system is built, do so correspond with the spiritual realities as to assist us to true conceptions of them, however inadequate,—either the Scriptural figures, forms, and rites were selected because best adapted to convey and illustrate the spiritual ideas designed, or we are mocked by a semblance of revelation which reveals nothing. ”

“ In fact the central figure of these rites, by whatever name he may be called, is the somewhat elusive and impersonal entity, who represents in anthropomorphic form the principle of animate Nature, upon whose preservation, and unimpaired energies, the life of man, directly, and indirectly, depends. ”

“ 71 Experience had shown him the efficacy of these solemn and pompous rites, to soothe the distress, to confirm the faith, to mitigate the fierceness, and to dispel the dark enthusiasm of the vulgar, and he readily forgave their tendency to promote the reign of priesthood and superstition. ”

“ For we must not build tem­ples according to the same rules to all gods alike, since the per­formance of the sacred rites varies with the various gods. ”

“ Religious phenomena are naturally arranged in two fundamental categories: beliefs and rites. The first are states of opinion, and consist in representations; the second are determined modes of action. ”

“ Piety has not failed and gone out; each age has its own forms thereof; the old and passing can never understand the new, nor can they consent to decrease with the increase of the new. Once, men put their piety into a church, Catholic or Protestant; they made creeds and believed them; they devised rites and symbols, which helped their faith. ”

“ The quarrels, and divisions about religion, were evils unknown to the heathen. The reason was, because the religion of the heathen, consisted rather in rites and ceremonies, than in any constant belief. ”

“ The most barbarous and the most fantastic rites and the strangest myths translate some human need, some aspect of life, either individual or social. ”

“ And what therefore I would earnestly desire that the Church of God in this land might draw forth from the present excitement and anxiety about ritual is, a faithful comparison of herself, in point of doctrine and practice, with the Apostolic and Primitive model. There are greater things than these; "The life is more than meat, and the body than raiment." ”

“ The form familiar hovered o'er his head,
And, "Sleeps Achilles," thus the phantom said,
"Sleeps my Achilles, his Patroclus dead?
Living, I seemed his dearest, tenderest care,
But now forgot, I wander in the air:
Let my pale corse the rites of burial know,
And give me entrance in the realms below;
Till then, the spirit finds no resting-place,
But here and there the unbodied spectres chase
The vagrant dead around the dark abode,
Forbid to cross the irremeable flood.
Now give thy hand; for to the farther shore
When once we pass, the soul returns no more. ”

“ On the whole, then, to conclude this part of my subject, there ought to be no real difficulty among [86] us as to what is fairly permissible, and answers to the mind of the English Church—taking a wide and liberal view of that mind—in the matter of ritual. Two leading conceptions, NOBLENESS with SIMPLICITY, sum up her general desires on this subject. In the due observance of these, it is her deliberate judgment, (as represented by her wisest sons,—as Ridley, Andrewes, Overall, Cosin) , will be found the best security for worthy worship on the one hand, and for devout worship on the other. ”

“ Let the rituals be rightly performed with joy and beauty!" Remember that all acts of love and pleasure are rituals, must be rituals. "There are rituals of the elements and feasts of the times. A feast for the first night of the Prophet and his Bride! A feast for the three days of the writing of the Book of the Law. A feast for Tahuti and the child of the Prophet—secret, O Prophet! A feast for the Supreme Ritual, and a feast for the Equinox of the Gods. A feast for fire and a feast for water; a feast for life and a greater feast for death! ”

“ Now in the morning Mass you do all that the race needs to do and has done for all these ages where religion was concerned; there you have the sacred and separate Enclosure, the Altar, the Priest in his Vestments, the set ritual, the ancient and hierarchic tongue, and all that your nature cries out for in the matter of worship. ”

“ Thou, divine Son, Who didst suffer for us on the cross; thou, Holy Spirit, Who didst sanctify us in Baptism. May God, in His three divine Persons, preserve our body, purify our soul, direct our heart, and lead us to life everlasting. ”

“ Elaborate rituals and traditions serve to lengthen the divide between what believers wish to state and supposed obligations that come with prayers.More often than not, such rituals are man-made rules meant to lend mystical, mysterious air to worship. In fact how we worship is as bare knuckles as simple sincerity. ”

“ What would become of us without the ceremonies of religion? How they strengthen the piety out of which they spring! How, by concentrating all that is holy and divine around their outward forms, do they purify and sanctify the affections! ”

“ The ritual alone which accompanied divination practices and incantation formulae and was a chief factor in the celebration of festival days and of days set aside for one reason or the other to the worship of some god or goddess or group of deities, is free from traces of the astral theology. The more or less elaborate ceremonies prescribed for the occasions when the gods were approached are directly connected with the popular elements of the religion. ”

“ This was intended to show that when we are occupied in any spiritual exercise, we ought not be diverted to other things, even under pretext of civility.
11. The Mass is certainly a function the most excellent, the most holy, the most acceptable to God and useful to us, that can be imagined. And so, while it is going on, the Angels assist in crowds, with bare feet, with earnest eyes, with downcast brows, with great silence, with incredible amazement and veneration. With what purity, attention, devotion, and reverence, then, ought the priest to celebrate it? ”