Ritual purity

“ 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." ”

“ 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! ”

“ Accordingly the ritual enjoins on us, who by nature belong to the heavens but have fallen to earth, to reap the harvest of our constitution here on earth, namely, virtue and piety, and then strive upwards to the goddess of our forefathers, to her who is the principle of all life. ”

“ 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;” ”

“ That which may have been an indeterminate expression of awe and reverence becomes distinctly worship, though not without elements, often retained to the last, that we should call magical. And the changes in the nominal objects of worship are accompanied by progressive changes in the details of the ritual. ”

“ The title of this book may strike the reader as strange and even dissonant. What have art and ritual to do together? The ritualist is, to the modern mind, a man concerned perhaps unduly with fixed forms and ceremonies, with carrying out the rigidly prescribed ordinances of a church or sect. ”

“ Around these nameless beings, a ritual, simple in its origin, but luxuriant in its growth, has developed, overshadowing and obscuring them from our view, so that we, and perhaps the worshippers, cannot see the god for the ritual. ”

“ Ritual is the technique of sanctifying custom; ritual creates and perpetuates myths as well as contributing to the preservation of social and religious customs. Again, ritual itself has been fathered by myths. Rituals are often at first social, later becoming economic and finally acquiring the sanctity and dignity of religious ceremonial. Ritual may be personal or group in practice—or both—as illustrated by prayer, dancing, and drama. ”

“ So too he insisted on the uselessness of fasts and penances and other forms of ritual. “Neither going naked, nor shaving the head, nor wearing matted hair, nor dirt, nor a rough garment, nor reading the Vedas, will cleanse a man. ”

“ 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. ”

“ PRIESTS AND RITUALS The essence of the ritual is the perfection of its performance; among savages it must be practiced with exact precision. It is only when the ritual has been correctly carried out that the ceremony possesses compelling power over the spirits. If the ritual is faulty, it only arouses the anger and resentment of the gods. ”

“ 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.⁠ ⁠... ”

“ Behind the form you feel the person loved. The process is an evocation, pure and simple. An arduous ceremonial, involving worship and devotional preparation, is the means. It is a difficult ritual—the only one acknowledged by the world as still effectual. Ritual is the passage way of the soul into the Infinite. ”

“ A church or a religious ceremony, nay, every additional ounce of gilding or grain of incense, or day or hour, bestowed on sanctuary and ritual, are not useful only to the selfish devotee who employs them for obtaining celestial favours; they are more useful and necessary even to the pure-minded worshipper, because they enable him to express the longing and the awe with which his heart is overflowing. For every oblation faithfully brought means so much added moral strength; and love requires gifts to give as much as hunger needs food and vanity needs ornament and wealth. ”

“ With deliberate intent and elaborate ritual they develop the mediumistic gift, and learn how to attain conditions of frenzy and of trance during which period the body is controlled by a spiritualistic force. ”

“ Of all these sources of evidence, none is more valuable than the testimony of ritual. A moment's reflection will show that ritual, among any people, wild or civilised, is not a thing easily altered. If we take the savage, his ritual consists mainly of the magical rites by which he hopes to constrain his gods to answer his prayers, though he may also "reveal" to the neophyte "Our Father". ”

“ Thus ritual tended to become the predominant element in worship, serving first the interests of unity and order in religion, and later always in danger of becoming a mechanical and religiously degrading influence. ”

“ One may wonder why a magical ritual should be preferred and trusted rather than genuinely devotional worship; since it must, in fact, just as often result in disappointment. But, first, as to the priesthood, an elaborate ritual, difficult to carry out, is favourable to their power, because only professionals can execute it ”

“ It has been felt not only right but necessary, in all ages and places, to accompany the inward feeling of devotion with some outward manifestation of it. In other words, all religious actions are from their nature symbolical and figurative. But if the most obvious corporeal accompaniments to spiritual worship show this clearly, how much more evidently must all ritual systems appear to be symbolical? A system of worship, whether heathen, Christian, or heretical, is only the development and methodising of the simplest figurative acts of devotion ”

“ Let those who would substitute their own crude impulses for the sublime rites of our liturgy, making ill digested forms the supplanter of a ritual carefully and devoutly prepared, listen to one of their own semi-conversational addresses to the Almighty over a grave, and then hearken to these venerable rites, and learn humility. ”

“ The ritual which is comparatively rude and straightforward is the ritual which people call "ritualistic." It consists of plain things like bread and wine and fire, and men falling on their faces. But the ritual which is really complex, and many coloured, and elaborate, and needlessly formal, is the ritual which people enact without knowing it. It consists not of plain things like wine and fire, but of really peculiar, and local, and exceptional, and ingenious things—things like door-mats, and door-knockers, and electric bells, and silk hats, and white ties, and shiny cards, and confetti. ”

“ THE evolution of religious observances progressed from placation, avoidance, exorcism, coercion, conciliation, and propitiation to sacrifice, atonement, and redemption. The technique of religious ritual passed from the forms of the primitive cult through fetishes to magic and miracles; and as ritual became more complex in response to man's increasingly complex concept of the supermaterial realms, it was inevitably dominated by medicine men, shamans, and priests.
In the advancing concepts of primitive man the spirit world was eventually regarded as being unresponsive to the ordinary mortal. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Other things may be added to enrich and beautify human life, but, unless these wants are first satisfied, humanity itself must cease to exist. These two things, therefore, food and children, were what men chiefly sought to procure by the performance of magical rites for the regulation of the seasons. They are the very foundation-stones of that ritual from which art, if we are right, took its rise. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Is it irreverent to think and believe that what these simple souls witness to, as their own experience in presence of a kind of ritual new to them, though familiar of old to their fathers, and to the Church throughout the world, is but an anticipation of what our great poet, Puritan though he was, has described as among the consolations of the blessed? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To the unprogressive ritual element it brought these conceptions, itself—he pterou dunamis, the power of the wing—an element of refinement, of ascension, with the promise of an endless destiny. While the ritual remains fixed, the aesthetic element, only accidentally connected with it, expands with the freedom and mobility of the things of the intellect. Always, the fixed element is the religious observance; the fluid, unfixed element is the myth, the religious conception. This religion is itself pagan, and has in any broad view of it the pagan sadness. ”

“ Howsoever simple the system which we have studied may be, we have found within it all the great ideas and the principal ritual attitudes which are at the basis of even the most advanced religions: the division of things into sacred and profane, the notions of the soul, of spirits, of mythical personalities, and of a national and even international divinity, a negative cult with ascetic practices which are its exaggerated form, rites of oblation and communion, imitative rites, commemorative rites and expiatory rites; nothing essential is lacking. ”

“ The priests have always sought to impress and awe the common people by conducting the religious ritual in an ancient tongue and by sundry magical passes so to mystify the worshipers as to enhance their own piety and authority. The great danger in all this is that the ritual tends to become a substitute for religion. ”

“ A pure faith and a gorgeous ritual are not so incompatible as many people think. God should be worshipped with pomp and splendour; we should bring to His service all that we can invent in the way of art and beauty. ”

“ Yet we are invited to offer formal thanks to God for a meal of flesh whose sanctity is the last survival of that sacrifice of bulls and goats he has renounced. Such a ritual confuses our intellect and fails to stir our emotion. But to others this ritual, magical or anthropomorphic as it is, is charged with emotional impulse, and others, a still larger number, think that they act by reason when really they are hypnotised by suggestion and tradition ”