Now it is a question at least worth asking, whether we have not here indications of a greater disposition than we have commonly given our people credit for, to be moved by such things--by sacred song--by fair vestments--by processional movement--by festal decoration? whether we have not been foregoing hitherto, to our great loss, certain effective ways of influencing our people for good? whether there must not, after all, be less truth than has been commonly supposed in the received maxim, that Englishmen care nothing about these things, nor can be brought to care for them; that they have not in them, in short, the faculty of being affected by externals in religious matters; that the sober Saxon spirit loves, above all things, a simple and unadorned worship, and the like? The writer is not ashamed to confess that he has in time past shared in this estimate of his countrymen; but that experience has greatly shaken his confidence in the correctness of it. And he may, therefore, be accepted, perhaps, as a somewhat unprejudiced witness, when he testifies to so much as has come under his own notice as to the effect of the "ritual developments," so to call them, of which he has above spoken. He can bear witness, then, that with these accompaniments, the Services of the Sanctuary have become to many, manifestly, a pleasure and a delight; that these influences are found to touch and move, even to tears, those harder and more rugged natures which are accessible to scarce anything else; breaking even through the crust of formality or indifference which grows so commonly over the heart of middle age. 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? That which our poor peasants gratefully find provided for them on the Church's days of festival, is no other, in its degree, than what, to the poet's thought, awaited his Lycidas "in the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love:"-- "There entertain him all the saints above, _In solemn troops and sweet societies, That sing, and, singing_, in their glory _move_, And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes." It will be understood that the writer is not now engaged in advocating these particular practices as binding upon us, or even as capable of being introduced everywhere; but only pointing out that, in the acceptance and welcome with which this whole side of ritual action has been received, even in unlikely quarters, we have some indication of the probable effect on the general mind of other well-considered ritual restorations.