also assuming that Christian Ministers were, like the High Priest, Hieratic or Sacerdotal Priests, for the continual offering of Expiatory Sacrifices for sin (which they certainly were not): it followed, that the Christian Vestments were intended to resemble, or ought to resemble, those of the High Priest! It was not until the revival of classical learning many centuries later, that men perceived the utterly erroneous character of this theory. Meanwhile, from the ninth century downwards through the Dark Ages, this Levitical Vestment Theory was generally accepted. True, there were obvious difficulties in the way of its acceptance: but no difficulties deterred the critics of that period. The long white vestments of the Bishops and Clergy were in number, form, colour, texture, and adornments, unlike those of the High Priest: but they were like them in being long and flowing, and this was supposed to establish their identity. The obvious deficiencies in number, colouring, and other respects, were in part supplied by superadding to the ancient white vestments the gorgeous secular robes in which the Bishops and clergy then delighted, and which (as their origin was quite forgotten) were assumed to be holy garments; and where these failed to make up the necessary number and variety, entirely new additions were made. to the vestments then known. In this way, the number of Episcopal vestments was raised to 8 in the ninth century; and the number of Archiepiscopal vestments to 9. At the close of the eleventh century, Bishops had 9 sacred vestments, and Archbishops 10. Fifty years later, Honorius of Autun reckoned 7 sacred vestments as proper for Priests; 14 as belonging to Bishops; and 16 to Archbishops. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, Pope Innocent III., by assigning two additional vestments to the Pope, raised the number for Popes to

18! Thus the Medieval development of ecclesiastical dress, which began in an effort to assimilate the official dress of Christian ministers to that of Jewish High Priests, eventually went far beyond anything known in the Levitical Dispensation. The simple white robes of the ancient Church were, however, still retained, and used as under garments: but they were literally buried out of sight beneath the purple and gold, scarlet and blue, violet and other gorgeous colours of the new sacred vestments; the colours of which, as also those of the altar decorations, were now made to vary continually with the seasons of the Church's year.

In the prolonged and complex movement known as the Reformation, our principal English Reformers kept one main object steadily in view from first to last. That object (as expressed in the Preface to the Prayer Book of 1549) was, to establish "an Order for Prayer, and for the reading of the Holy Scriptures, much agreeable to the mind and purpose of the Old Fathers, and a great deal more profitable and commodious than that which of late was used." Many of the questions necessarily raised under this principle were new and difficult, and the internal state of the nation as well as its foreign relations were unusually full of danger. In carrying out their noble principle of effecting a return to the worship and theology of the early Church, our Reformers had at once to contend with, and to consider, two powerful and extreme parties, either of which might at any moment become supreme in the state: viz., (1) those, on the one hand, who believed in the Sacerdotal theories, and loved the florid ritual and vestments of the Middle Ages; and (2) those, on the other hand, who, ignorant of history and in violent.

1 Marriott, pp. lxxviii.-lxxxiii., 83-87.

reaction against Rome, were unable to understand that the simple white vestments of the Primitive Church were not, equally with the gorgeous sacred vestments of the Middle Ages, invented or introduced by corrupt Popes. It is not my intention here to give any detailed account of the action of the Reformers from the beginning of the Reformation movement until the final settlement of our Prayer Book in 1662; still less is it my intention to discuss legal and technical questions arising out of that action. But one important result of the movement, considered as a whole, was the retention of the Church's testimony to the Primitive doctrine of the authority and sufficiency of Holy Scripture, the Divine origin and commission of the Christian Ministry, and the grace of the Sacraments of Christ. Another result was the removal from our Church's official teaching of everything in Medieval theology which represented the clergy as a Hieratic or Sacerdotal Order, like the Levitical Priesthood, for the offering of Expiatory Sacrifices. And a third result, important in connection with the subject of this Section, has been, that (with a few recent exceptions of doubtful authority) the customary Sacred Dress of the English Clergy, for more than two centuries, has been the Surplice and Stole,1 which closely resemble the Sacred Dress of the Primitive Church.

1 The University or College Hood, although allowed to be worn by the clergy during their ministrations, is not an ecclesiastical vestment.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

PRIMITIVE, MEDIEVAL, AND MODERN CHRISTIAN
WORSHIP.

1. Primitive Christian Worship was Pure and Beautiful: Medieval Worship, Florid, Idolatrous, Irreverent, and Unedifying.-2. (1) Paintings, Mosaics, and Coloured Glass: (2) Flowers: (3) Lights.-3. Veils, Altar Cloths, Altars, Curtains, Incense.-4. Primitive Evangelical use of the Sign of the Cross; and Medieval and Modern Roman Worship of Crosses.-5. Worship of Relics.—6. Worship of Images.—7. “Vain Repetitions: " Purgatory: Masses: Indulgences.-8. Worship in Unknown Tongues.-9. Readers and Choirs removed into deep Medieval Chancels.

1.-Primitive Christian Worship was Pure and Beautiful: Medieval Worship, Florid, Idolatrous, Irreverent, and Unedifying.

BEAUTY in worship, as in all things, is alike delightful to a child and to a mature man: but it is not always the same beauty which appeals to both. The child, or the savage whose mind and spiritual faculties have not been fully developed, delights in a barbaric and sensuous kind of beauty, in florid pageantries and pomp, in masses of varied and gorgeous colours, in vistas of gold, and in golden shrines spangled with myriads of jewels: but he has often little perception of the higher and more spiritual glories of true art, in which cultured men delight. All worship ought to be beautiful, and its beauty ought to be as perfect as possible, after its kind. But the beauty appropriate to worship during the

spiritual and moral infancy of our race-such beauty as I have described above in connection with Heathen and Jewish worship-is an altogether lower kind of beauty than that which is alone suitable for Christian worship. The spirituality of Christian devotion is beyond comparison higher and purer than that of any other religion. There was, indeed, some spirituality in the better forms of Heathenism, and much more in Judaism: but even Judaism, at its best, was a religion and worship adapted to the childhood rather than to the maturity of our race; it was a "tutor to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith," and live in the glorious sunlight of the Gospel, the free and noble life of "a full-grown man,"2 as distinguished from a life subject to the irksome constraints, lower motives, and limited perceptions of childhood. The adornments of Christian worship ought to be more simple, grave, chaste, and noble than those of less spiritual forms of devotion. They ought to be suggestive of moderation, sincerity, refinement, selfdenial, purity, unworldliness, holy reverence, holy joy, and heavenly aspiration. They ought not to be suggestive of the tainted levities of the gilded theatre, or of the childish glories of the Baby-House; and least of all should they suggest the soft and gorgeous splendours of the homes of mammon-worship and of unrestrained luxury. Christian art should never affect a lavish and ostentatious display of gold, and jewels, and brilliant colours; but it should exhibit the infinitely higher and chaster beauty which arises from the expression of the noblest conceptions and aspirations of the spiritual mind. The beauty of Christian worship should always be such as will educate the worshippers' minds and hearts, in seriousness, in purity, in unworldliness, in spirituality, in tenderness, in reverence.