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Updated: June 26, 2025
In the sixteenth century the tea-room afforded a welcome respite from labour to the fierce warriors and statesmen engaged in the unification and reconstruction of Japan. In the seventeenth century, after the strict formalism of the Tokugawa rule had been developed, it offered the only opportunity possible for the free communion of artistic spirits.
Yet Christ had said: “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another, “ and Muḥammad had said: “This your religion is the one religion.... To you hath God prescribed the faith which He commanded unto Noah, and which We have revealed unto thee, and which We commanded unto Abraham and Moses and Jesus saying: ‘Observe this faith, and be not divided into sects therein!’” The Founder of every one of the great religions had called His followers to love and unity, but in every case the aim of the Founder was to a large extent lost sight of in a welter of intolerance and bigotry, formalism and hypocrisy, corruption and misrepresentation, schism and contention.
I beseech you if you will not misunderstand the expression make your communion such that it will repel as well as attract; and that people will find nothing here to draw them to an easy religion of words and formalism, beneath which all vermin of worldliness and selfishness may lurk, but will recognise in us a church of men and women who are bent upon holiness, and longing for more and more conformity to the divine Master.
"Yes," said Arthur, apparently in answer to my thoughts, "those 'high' services are fast becoming pure Formalism. More and more the people are beginning to regard them as 'performances, in which they only 'assist' in the French sense. And it is specially bad for the little boys. They'd be much less self-conscious as pantomime-fairies.
The current complaints of bureaucracy, however, are not directed mainly against the ineffectiveness of the machinery of control, but against the way in which public work is conducted by government officials the formalism and red-tape by which it is hampered, the absence of elasticity and enterprise; and the methods of government departments are often compared, to their disadvantage, with those of business firms.
"Chapels" are as compulsory as football, and all boys, with a very few marked and conscious exceptions, are confirmed and expected to become communicants. But in actual fact, many of them come from homes where connection with the Church is purely nominal, even if it exists at all. Thus a dangerous element of formalism and make-believe is introduced from the start.
Locke argued that all government exists, or should exist, by consent of the governed by a "social" contract, as it were; that education should be more widespread; that superstition and religious formalism should not be allowed to obscure "natural laws" and "natural religion"; and that religious toleration should be granted to all but atheists.
But his rebuke of the ruling class, the Pharisees, for their formalism, pretended sanctity, self-seeking, and enslavement to tradition, excited in them rancorous enmity. His disappointment of the popular desire for a political Messiah chilled the enthusiasm of the multitude, many of whom had heard him gladly.
While dazzled by the glitter and splendor of "Le Bocage," she shivered in its silent dreariness, its cold, aristocratic formalism, and she yearned for the soft, musical babble of the spring-branch, where, standing ankle-deep in water under the friendly shadow of Lookout, she had spent long, blissful July days in striving to build a wall of rounded pebbles down which the crystal ripples would fall, a miniature Talulah or Tuccoa.
So little is there really spiritual and suggestive of the higher life in what is exclusively ecclesiastical, that in their best moments men instinctively turn away from it, and find inspiration and peace in quiet thoughts about the Master, who said, "The Kingdom of God," that is the kingdom of righteousness, or the ethical church, "cometh not with observation," and "The Kingdom of God is within you". The more inward religion is, the less formalism it employs, the more ethical it becomes, the nearer it approaches the ideal of the great Master.
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