Long years ago, when religious people excited themselves almost to frenzy about Ritualism, Mr. Gladstone surveyed the tumult with philosophic calm. He recommended his countrymen to look below the surface of controversy, and to regard the underlying principle. "In all the more solemn and stated public acts of man," he wrote, "we find employed that investiture of the acts themselves with an appropriate exterior, which is the essential idea of Ritual. The subject-matter is different, but the principle is the same: it is the use and adaptation of the outward for the expression of the inward." The word "ritual" is by common usage restricted to the ecclesiastical sphere, but in reality it has a far wider significance. It gives us the august rite of the Convocation, the ceremonial of Courts, the splendour of regiments, the formal usages of battleships, the silent but expressive language of heraldry and symbol; and, in its humbler developments, the paraphernalia of Masonry and Benefit Societies, and the pretty pageantry of Flag-days and Rose-days. Why should these things be? "Human nature itself, with a thousand tongues, utters the reply. The marriage of the outward and the inward pervades the universe." The power of the outward reaches the inward chiefly through the eye and the ear. Colour, as Ruskin taught us, is not only delightful, but sacred. "Of all God's gifts to the sight of man, colour is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn.... Consider what sort of a world it would be if all flowers were grey, all leaves black, and the sky _brown_." The perfection of form--the grace of outline, the harmony of flowing curves--appeals, perhaps, less generally than colour, because to appreciate it the eye requires some training, whereas to love colour one only needs feeling. Yet form has its own use and message, and so, again, has the solemnity of ordered movement; and when all these three elements of charm--colour and form and motion--are combined in a public ceremony, the effect is irresistible. But the appeal of the inward reaches us not solely through the eye. The ear has an even higher function. Perhaps the composer of great music speaks, in the course of the ages, to a larger number of human hearts than are touched by any other form of genius. Thousands, listening enraptured to his strain, hear "the outpourings of eternal harmony in the medium of created sound." And yet again there are those, and they are not a few, to whom even music never speaks so convincingly as when it is wedded to suitable words; for then two emotions are combined in one appeal, and human speech helps to interpret the unspoken.