London (England) -- Religion; Religious thought -- England -- London
gently blooms as Puseyism. A cold in one man may, by means of gruel, be
removed in a week. In another man, it may deepen into deadly decline.
Puseyism may retain as many in the English Church as it may send to Rome.
Your Low Churchman may say the Puseyite has no business in the Church at
all. Well, the other may say the same of him, and there is no one to
decide as to who is right. King James II. said, Hooker’s Apology made
him a Papist, but Hooker was not responsible for this, and is still
rightly looked on as one of the brightest ornaments of the Church of
England as by law established. Men make strange leaps. Many a convert
to Rome has been won from the ranks of Methodism. Many an infidel has
been born and bred in the very bosom of the Roman Church. A Puseyite may
become a Papist, but he also may not, and so may other men. Some people
say there is Popery everywhere. I listen to a Wesleyan Reformer, for
instance, and he tells me that the Conference is Popish, and that the
President is the Pope. If so, it is hard to blame the Puseyites for
exhibiting the priestly tendency, more or less apparent, as some affirm,
in all priests.
I imagine the crime of Puseyism, in the eyes of most churchmen, is the
crime of a pretty woman in an assembly of haggard crones. The Puseyite
place of worship is always neat and clean, and worth looking at, and it
attracts when others fail to do so. The causes of it must be various.
Why does one graceful woman robe herself in simple muslin, and another
dazzle you with her gorgeous attire? You may be a philosopher. If that
woman can be your companion, can feel as you feel, and love as you love,
you care not for her attire. But she knows that the world has a
different opinion. The Puseyite becomes an object of interest. On a
small, very small scale, he is a hero. True, to fight about little
ceremonials argues the possession of a brain of but limited power, but
his opponents are in a similar position. If you deny worship to be the
simple genuine feeling of the heart—if you make no provision for that—if
you turn it into a form, why then, possibly, the more of a form it is the
better. I confess the way in which they intone the service at St. Paul’s
is pleasant to listen to. It is not worship, I grant. Neither is
mumbling the thousandth time over a printed form of words worship. What
a dull thing an opera would be, read, and not sung. It is true people do
not make love, or do business, or address each other in music, in real
life, but in an opera they do, and the effect is great. So it is with
the Church of England service. Intoned it may be unintelligible or
theatrical, but it is attractive nevertheless. It is not natural, but
what of that? The soul bowed down with a sense of sin, yearning for
peace and pardon, in its agony and despair will vent itself in broken
sentences, and will turn away from all ceremony—from even the sublime
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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