But now to return. Let me explain the position which I am throughout maintaining. I have not been speaking as the advocate of high Ritual. I do not understand the aim of the great meeting held last week in St. James’s Hall to be this advocacy; nor do I so understand the Memorial to be laid before the Commissioners. It is not to defend high Ritual in itself, however incidentally Ritual may be affected; but it is to defend the Prayer Book. It is to preserve our present _status_. It is to allow no door to be shut upon the Catholic side, whilst all are left open on the Latitudinarian. It is to preserve an outwork which defends doctrine—dearer than life to many among us. It is to keep all which God’s providence has given us in our Reformation and subsequent Revisions. It is to preserve our character and place in the face of Christendom; it is to shew our loving memory and gratitude for all which our blessed Lord has done for us, and is still doing at the right hand of God, that we will not consent to have this our heritage mutilated or taken from us. And surely in this all Churchmen who believe the ancient Catholic Faith are interested with us, Ritualist or non-Ritualist. I am not myself a Ritualist in the sense of using any of the higher forms of ritual, ceremonial, or vesture. I believe indeed, and who that believes the doctrine so represented, but _must_ believe, that England would be in a higher, holier, and happier state, if, not neglecting one other point of holiness, humility, repentance, or faith, yet, I say, if all among us longed for and delighted in the higher and fuller expression of the faith. But I do not think this fuller expression is to be forced on those who are unprepared for it. I believe in many cases this would hinder rather than help the doctrine. And I have been accustomed to consider that the _abeyance_ of much of the usage (I take the term in its true sense of a practical discontinuance, not of a legal forbidding, which is the repeal or extinction of a thing), that such abeyance may well justify us in not harshly shocking prejudices or wounding feelings; and, therefore, certainly it is not as a mere movement in support of the higher forms of ritual that I am addressing you:—but I ask this;—What is the object of our opponents? Assuredly not merely to put down vestments, or put out candles, or extinguish incense; but to drive out of the Church of England the whole doctrine which those things represent; to expel every one, whether Ritualist or not, who holds and teaches it; to run riot in the destruction of every vestige of faith in the Real Presence, in the Priesthood, the Altar, and the Sacrifice. The papers of the Church Association (_passim_), the writings of the whole anti-Ritualistic world, who are also the anti-Sacerdotal party, from the well-known noisy and ignorant correspondents of the _Times_ to the miserable man who so lately has shocked every feeling of decency in his, at first, most