aster,
a tradesman shout from the gallery, "We will now sing to the praise
and glory of God a _h_anthem!" when a motet would be sacrificed to
incompetency with every circumstance of barbarity attending the
execution. Mr. Newman in language of appalling force, written a year
after his conversion, has described the Anglican service as "a ritual
dashed upon the ground, trodden on, and broken piecemeal; prayers
clipped, pieced, torn, shuffled about at pleasure, until the meaning
of the composition perished, and offices which had been poetry were no
longer even good prose; antiphons, hymns, benedictions, invocations,
shovelled away; Scripture lessons turned into chapters; heaviness,
feebleness, unwieldiness, where the Catholic rites had had the
lightness and airiness of a spirit; vestments chucked off, lights
quenched, jewels stolen, the pomp and circumstances of worship
annihilated; a dreariness which could be felt, and which seemed the
token of an incipient Socinianism, forcing itself upon the eye, the
ear, the nostrils of the worshipper; a smell of dust and damp, not of
incense; a sound of ministers preaching Catholic prayers, and parish
clerks droning out Catholic canticles; the royal arms for the
crucifix; huge ugly boxes of wood, sacred to preachers, frowning on
the congregation in the place of the mysterious altar; and long
cathedral aisles unused, railed off, like the tombs (as they were) of
what had been and was not; and for orthodoxy, a frigid, unelastic,
inconsistent, dull, helpless dogmatic, which could give no just
account of itself, yet was intolerant of all teaching which contained
a doctrine more or a doctrine less, and resented every attempt to give
it a meaning."[46] The Catholic Church's ritual he found very
different.

[Footnote 46: _Essays_, ii. pp. 443, 444.]

"What are her ordinances and practices," he asks, "but the regulated
expression of keen, or deep, or turbid feeling, and thus a 'cleansing'
as Aristotle would word it, of the sick soul? She is the poet of her
children; full of music to soothe the sad, and control the
wayward--wonderful in story for the imagination of the romantic; rich
in symbol and imagery, so that gentle and delicate feelings, which
will not bear words, may in silence intimate their presence, or
commune with themselves. Her very being is poetry; every psalm, every
petition, every collect, every versicle, the cross, the mitre, the
thurible, is a fulfillment of some dream of ch