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It is too dangerous an element; it creates hypocrites and Pharisees. All cast-iron laws and dogmas do. Not that I share the Christian sneer at Jewish legalism. No; much of our so-called ceremonialism is merely the primitive mix-up of everything with religion in a theocracy. The Mosaic code has been largely embodied in civil law, and superseded by it."
When we come to the cult of a goddess like Ishtar, who is the symbol of fertility, observances that illustrated this central notion would naturally form an ingredient part of that 'sympathetic magic, the imitation of an action in order to produce the reality which dominates so large a proportion of early religious ceremonialism.
In India, as in all other countries, the priesthood have given the people that which they asked for, and the result is that many forms of churchly ceremonialism, and forms of worship, maintain which are abhorrent and repulsive to Western ideas.
As the icy chill of ceremonialism seized decadent Babylonia and Egypt, there emerged from the steppes south and east of Palestine a virile, ambitious group of nomads, who not only fell heir to that which was best in the revelation of the past, but also quickly took their place as the real spiritual leaders of the human race.
But ceremonialism more and more encrusted the restored nation; and Jesus was needed to spur and stab the conscience of his contemporaries, and recal them to more spiritual perceptions; to proclaim a coming "kingdom of heaven," in which should be gathered all the children of God that were scattered abroad; where the law of love should reign, and no one should dictate to another.
The close of the sixteenth century saw the contrast between the Anglican churchman on the one hand and the Puritan and Separatist on the other becoming more harsh, their incompatibility more evident. Fifty years earlier episcopacy and ceremonialism seemed to most Anglicans comparatively unimportant in themselves.
Dora smiled sadly and went her way. Against her sweet silent tenacity Daddy measured himself in vain. She would be a good daughter to him, but she would be a good churchwoman first. He began to perceive in her that germ of detachment from things earthly and human which all ceremonialism produces, and in a sudden terror gave way and opposed her no more.
Savonarola vehemently denounced the greed of the clergy and their neglect of spiritual life for the sake of mere external ceremonialism, and he with equal insistence inveighed against the corruption of public manners.
And I believe that this strange recrudescence to use a modern word of ceremonialism and aesthetic worship which we see all round about us, not only in the ranks of the Episcopal Church, but amongst Nonconformists, who are sighing for a less bare service, and here and there are turning their chapels into concert-rooms, and instead of preaching the Gospel are having 'Services of Song' and the like that all this makes it as needful to-day as ever it was to say to men: 'Forms are not worship.
On the other hand, Buddhism has spread to China, Japan and other countries, where it has taken on new forms, and has grown into a religion of ritualism, creeds, and ceremonialism, with an accompanying loss of the original philosophy and a corresponding increase of detail of teaching, doctrine and disciple and general "churchiness," including a belief in several thousand different kind of hells.
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