“Dear Lady Chatterton,
“Your letter and paper reached me at Liverpool, where I have been preaching in a Benedictine church, on the Festival of All Saints of the Benedictine Order. On my return I was delayed to profess a Benedictine nun. I send for your amusement a pen and ink portrait of the sermon and preacher, which only proves how little a man, who only sees me once in a pulpit, can judge his, I will not say sitter, but stander. As to the timidity of which the portrait-writer speaks, I am afraid it sprang not so much from modest-mindedness as from shivering cold, especially as certain windows of the large church, being under repair, were not glazed. So now to your paper.
“The beginning is very good. When you get to the point of ceremonial, it may be well to take hold of the general principle. Ceremonial is a language, and the most expressive of all languages. Printing is a comparatively modern invention, but in all ages ceremonial, or the language of action, has entered into the religion of man, and that in all races and religious systems, until we come to the Puritanism of the last two centuries, when the Quakers alone succeeded in throwing off this mode of expression so natural to man. Yet have they succeeded? On the contrary; by their dress, their form of keeping on their hats, their shunning titles, in all their formalism, they have stamped themselves a ceremonial people.
“With respect to other forms of Protestantism, it is a question of more or less, proportioned with great accuracy to the greater or less amount of doctrine retained. What is Baptism? What the Communion Service? What the position of the altar or communion-table, on which such a controversy is raging? What is standing, or kneeling, or confirming, or funeral rites, or bowing at the Sacred Name, which St. Paul commands? Or the burying the head in the hand or hat, on first entering a church and taking a seat or kneeling-place? What is all this but ceremonial? Man cannot express himself without it; and it is always in fact a question, not of the principle, but of more or less in practice. God Himself was the inventor of the ceremonial of the Old Law, and Our Lord never does anything of importance without some significant action or gesture, which is ceremonial.
“Outside of Protestantism, there never was a religion, sect, or creed, Jewish, Christian, or Pagan, of which the centre was not sacrifice; and sacrifice is all action, with words as accompaniment. Nay, what are words but symbols, and symbols with mouth articulated and features moving, to express the inward thought or emotion? And what are the printed letters of a Bible but the symbols once removed of those spoken words which the Spirit of God has expressed through the hand and pen of man? Which hands and pens, and the living bodies that moved them, are essentially in their action ceremonials.
“In our present compound state everything must come to us through sense, and both God and man speak to us through human symbols and ceremonials. God has given us two modes of expressing ourselves, by words and by signs; and the signs are the most vivid language of the two. They compel us to speak with body and soul, and leave not the body inertly to resist the expression of the soul, but to go with it, and give us security that with our whole unresisting being we worship God or declare His Will. Whoever would reject ceremonial must not only stand stock still and refuse to speak, but, to be consistent, must even refuse the features expression, and the lips their movement.
“I am simply showing the absurdity of professing to reject a principle without the use of which you cannot even express what you would reject.
“But the great ceremonial of the Church gathers round the Sacrifice and Communion, of which we have the whole ceremonial type in the Last Supper. What we see with faithful eyes, as Horace tells us, affects us more than what is addressed to the ears. Ceremonial speaks to the soul through the eyes, and in large churches all can read with their eyes what only a limited number can hear. Then what a language to those afflicted with deafness! they read the whole progress of the sacred rite with their sight.
“Ceremonial is pre-eminently the language for multitudes assembled, and a universal religion must contemplate all, whether they can hear or read, or not. Of the two languages given by God to man, and ever used in conjunction by all the races of the earth in His worship (until Protestantism arose to reject the principle, but to retain the practice to a great degree) Protestantism have forgotten that ceremonial runs through the whole Scripture, from Genesis to the Book of Revelations. They have lost sight of the fact that the latter sublime Book has for its pictorial frame-work the array of the Church with its grand ceremonial around the Lamb standing on the Altar for ever slain, that is the Christian sacrifice. They forget in religion what Demosthenes says of oratory, that is of expression, that the first, second, and third secret of success is action, action, action. They would bury, if they could, the soul in a dull, stupid, disobedient, lifeless body. This has made the British race of recent ages the half inanimate mortals that other nations pronounce them to be. But if I had never been able to use my eyes to construe your lively features, expressive lips, and kindly hands in their offer of kindnesses, I should never have read your soul; and if anti-ceremonialists would be consistent, all should be covered as to the face with veils, should hold their arms in tranquility by their sides, and utter their sense in the purest vowels - the mere breathings of the soul.
“I have often regretted that we have not a little dictionary of the sense of ceremonial acts, and have often threatened to write one, but have not the time. This of course is an excursus for your own reading, but you may find out of it a few sentences for your libretto.
“By the way, I met a Welsh lady last week just entering the convent at Stone, who became a Catholic solely through testing the Protestant version of the New Testament by the Greek.
“In your final remarks on the corruption of priests, I think that, unintentionally, you leave the impression that this may be frequent, from seeming to assume that the Protestant notion of it is correct, but needs vindication. A glance at it again, with its abrupt termination, will show what I mean. Falls are not only few, but rare, as they are in the New Testament. Protestants can have but little notion of the way in which a priest is guarded in his state of life. The long and pious training; the daily recital of the Divine Office, mostly taken from Holy Scripture, and the greater part consisting of the Psalms; the fixed hour of meditation; the use of the confessional; the strict canonical discipline that surrounds the priest’s life; all these are perpetual helps, supports, and guards against human weakness. Then will these good Protestant souls who are ever talking of grace be pleased to remark that a vocation to the priesthood implies an extraordinary gift of grace from the Holy Spirit, and that grace, unless much abused, is stronger than nature. Nay, I may add that those reserved manners, so offensive to the Protestant mind, are the outcome of that internal self-control and caution become natural, through long training from youth and habit, which, however artificial it may look to those who have no key to it, is the necessary accompaniment of the sacerdotal character. Our Lord said to them de mundo non estis, and no one ought, if he be a Christian, to be shocked that their life, and therefore their manners, are not those of the world.
“My concluding remark is that a profession of faith cannot be fairly grounded without some reference to the Church as the Divine institution of Christ, the holder of His authority, and His witness to mankind. The question recently put to Lord Redesdale, but left without a reply, is the true touchstone of faith. ‘Is the Church of Christ divine in its authority?’ Did the Incarnate Truth establish the authority to last for ever, or like Moses did He point to its fall and reformation? And if so, did He point, as Moses pointed, to some one who should come, some other Divine One, who should reform His work as Christ reformed the Law of Moses? If so, who is that Divine One? Whence came He? By what signs should we know Him? And has His work become divine in its authority, whereas the work established by Christ must have failed? There is one Church of Christ, with one truth, taught by one authority, received by all, believed by all within its pale; or there is no security for faith. If we examine our Lord’s words and acts, such a Church there is. If we follow the inclinations of our fallen nature, ever averse to the control of authority, we there find the reason why so many who love this world receive not the authority that He planted to endure, like His primal creation, to the end.
“It is pleasant to human pride, and independence to be a little god, having but oneself for an authority, and a light and a law from oneself to oneself.
“But does this, or does it not, contradict the fact that we are dependent beings, and that the Lord He is God? This spirit of independence, with self-sufficiency for its basis, and rebellion for its act, is just what Sacred Scripture ascribed to Satan. And as we expect the character of God, that is a superior and unquestionable Authority in the work that emanates from Him (God) and leads to God; so must we expect the character of Satan, that is to say, self-sufficiency and independence, in whatever has been inspired by him, and leads in his direction.
“But all this is not for your paper, only something about the Church as Christ’s Witness and authority to man for His Truth and His requirements.
“Praying our Lord to keep you.
“I remain, dear Lady Chatterton,
“Ever most sincerely yours,
“W. B. Ullathorne.”
Bishop of Birmingham's letter to Lady Chatterton on ceremonial