_The Reformation did away with all that_! Is it possible that worshippers of Jehovah, men who owe all their peace, their privileges and blessings to their membership of Christ’s Church, can for a moment allow and do not rather with horror shout down the fearful assertion, that their community has abolished for itself the ritual of Scripture, and has cut itself off from all the Church that went before it, and all that lies around it? That is what the statement “The Reformation has changed all this,” implies! Which of you my brethren would not repudiate and thrust it away thus nakedly exhibited? Which of you would not feel that if it were true the Reformation was a curse, and not a blessing, and that no effort must be spared to undo it? Which of you would not sink to the earth beneath what would then be the righteous taunt of the Romanist:—that we have no covenanted part or lot with Christ’s Church? Do not start away from such a statement of the case. I am not misrepresenting the argument. I am not exaggerating minor matters. I am not denying, I freely own and stoutly maintain, that each branch of the Church has authority and power to change and change again and again many of her rites and ceremonies—the details, perhaps, of every one of them—so long as all be done in accordance with God’s word: above all I am not foolishly alleging that altar lights, or incense, or chasuble, or any such thing is of such importance as to make or unmake a Church, or is really necessary in the Christian Church at all. I have mentioned these things only as particular illustrations of a system of Ritualistic Service, much of which was taught us by God, and which has been adopted by the universal Church and used everywhere and in all ages. And I say that if the Reformers had deliberately rejected all God’s pattern and all Christendom’s use, and had prescribed for themselves and for us things altogether not only different but _opposite_, then they would have inflicted a curse upon us, and it would be our bounden duty to repudiate them and to undo their work. I have spoken thus plainly and openly in the earnest desire to awaken, to a sense of what they are countenancing, those who carelessly, or it may be deliberately, out of honest and zealous prejudice, represent the Reformation as having made all things new. If once men can be brought to feel that it would have been wrong to make all things new, they will be at pains to inquire with all anxiety whether they have not misconceived the Reformation, and so inquiring, they will come to see what it really did or aimed at, and hence to believe that the Ritual movement of the present day—I am not, of course, speaking of the extravagancies and eccentricities of individuals—so far from ignoring, contravening, and overturning the principles of the Reformation, is the very carrying of them out.