ter phase of ritualism
into which it has tapered down appears to the profane to be largely a
matter of upholstery, given over to people who concern themselves with
the carving of lecterns and the embroidery of chasubles and altar cloths;
with Lent lilies, antiphonal choirs, and what Carlyle calls the "singular
old rubrics" of the English Church and the "three surplices at
All-Hallowmas."

Newman was, above all things, a theologian; a subtle reasoner whose
relentless logic led him at last to Rome. "From the age of fifteen," he
wrote, "dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion; I know
no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of
religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery."
Discussions concerning church ceremonies, liturgy, ritual, he put aside
with some impatience. His own tastes were simple to asceticism. Mozley
says that Newman and Hurrell Froude induced several of the Oriel fellows
to discontinue the use of wine in the common room. "When I came up at
Easter, 1825, one of the first standing jokes against the college all
over the university was the Oriel tea-pot." [6] Dean Church testifies to
the plainness of the services at St. Mary's.[7] Aubrey de Vere reports
his urging Newman to make an expedition with him among the Wicklow
Mountains, and the latter's "answering with a smile that life was full of
work more important than the enjoyment of mountains and lakes. . . . The
ecclesiastical imagination and the mountain-worshipping imagination are
two very different things. Wordsworth's famous 'Tintern Abbey' describes
the river Wye, etc. . . . The one thing which it did not see was the
great monastic ruin; . . . and now here is this great theologian, who,
when within a few miles of Glendalough Lake, will not visit it." [8]

There is much gentle satire in "Loss and Gain" at the expense of the
Ritualistic set in the university who were attracted principally by the
external beauty of the Roman Catholic worship. One of these is Bateman,
a solemn bore, who takes great interest in "candlesticks, ciboriums,
faldstools, lecterns, ante-pend turns, piscinas, roodlofts, and sedilia":
wears a long cassock which shows absurdly under the tails of his coat;
and would tolerate no architecture but Gothic in English churches, and no
music but the Gregorian. Bateman is having a chapel restored in pure
fourteenth-century style and dedicated to the Royal Martyr. He is