that the sign, strange and ominous as men deemed it then, had come to stay. The Ritualistic movement followed hard on the Catholic revival. It was the logical and proper sequel to the prevalent Catholic teaching. If the English Church was the Catholic Church in England, on what possi ble ground of reason or common sense was she to be deprived of the use of the full Catholic ritual? Moreover, the Ritual istic propaganda was of immense value as claim of right. It offered a conclusive answer to the objec tion urged by Roman against Anglican theologians : " Your soi-disant catholicity is a mere plausible, literary, paper hy pothesis; how can you for a moment place it side by side with the great work ing system of Rome?" Lastly, Ritualism had in it a strong aesthetic element. It was an endeavor after greater decency and rever THE BISHOP ence in public wor ship. The movement was gradual at first. The Holy Table, as it was called, was transferred from the nave to the chancel, and became an altar, crowned with flowers and surmounted with the sacred sign of the Christian faith. Other changes followed, and then the vigilance of ultraProtestantism began to manifest itself actively. To begin with, weapons of criti cism were alone employed. It was urged, honestly and strenuously, that the Ritual ists, like the original Catholics, were Roman ists in tendency, if not in intention. The charge was in either case absurd a priori,
and has been falsified by the facts. It is of course obvious that to men of a certain intellectual temper the via media occupied by the Anglican and, for that matter, by the Greek, Church, cannot afford an ultimate resting place. But it is equally obvious that two movements which, the one in theory and the other in practice, insist upon the independent catholicity of the English Church, are far less likely to drive men from her bosom than the striking disparity which the " low" view of the Church pro duces between the formularies of the Prayer Book and the actual workingbeliefs of those who use it. Moreover, the Catho lic revival and the Ritualistic movement have not, in fact, fed the ranks of the great Roman Church. These movements were, and are, as dis tinctly anti-Papal in character and in re sults as they were, and are, anti-CalvinOF LINCOLN. istic. Argument soon gave way to pros ecution, and it is at this point that the strictly legal interest of our subject com mences. The Ritualistic movement was, as we have seen, the inevitable outcome of the revival of Catholic teaching in the Church of Eng land; and it took its beginnings from the time when the opponents of Tractarianism objected to the few but able supporters of that cult whom the secession of Newman left firm and standing, that the alleged catholicity of the English Church was a mere paper hypothesis, which could not for
