whatsoever
courtesies you see to be grimaces, prompted by no spontaneous reality
within, are a thing you wish to get away from. But suppose now it were
some matter of vital concernment, some transcendent matter (as Divine
Worship is), about which your whole soul, struck dumb with its excess
of feeling, knew not how to _form_ itself into utterance at all, and
preferred formless silence to any utterance there possible,--what
should we say of a man coming forward to represent or utter it for you
in the way of upholsterer-mummery? Such a man,--let him depart
swiftly, if he love himself! You have lost your only son; are mute,
struck down, without even tears: an importunate man importunately
offers to celebrate Funeral Games for him in the manner of the Greeks!
Such mummery is not only not to be accepted,--it is hateful,
unendurable. It is what the old Prophets called 'Idolatry,'
worshipping of hollow _shows_; what all earnest men do and will
reject. We can partly understand what those poor Puritans meant. Laud
dedicating that St. Catherine Creed's Church, in the manner we have it
described; with his multiplied ceremonial bowings, gesticulations,
exclamations: surely it is rather the rigorous formal _Pedant_, intent
on his 'College-rules,' than the earnest Prophet, intent on the
essence of the matter!

Puritanism found _such_ forms insupportable; trampled on such
forms;--we have to excuse it for saying, No form at all rather than
such! It stood preaching in its bare pulpit, with nothing but the
Bible in its hand. Nay, a man preaching from his earnest _soul_ into
the earnest _souls_ of men: is not this virtually the essence of all
Churches whatsoever? The nakedest, savagest reality, I say, is
preferable to any semblance, however dignified. Besides, it will
clothe itself with _due_ semblance by and by, if it be real. No fear
of that; actually no fear at all. Given the living _man_, there will
be found _clothes_ for him; he will find himself clothes. But the
suit-of-clothes pretending that _it_ is both clothes and man--!--We
cannot 'fight the French' by three-hundred-thousand red uniforms;
there must be _men_ in the inside of them! Semblance, I assert, must
actually _not_ divorce itself from Reality. If Semblance do,--why then
there must be men found to rebel against Semblance, for it has become
a lie! These two Antagonisms at war here, in the case of Laud and the
Puritans, are as old nearly as the world. They went to fierce b