The Hanoverian vulgarity of a Royal christening, with a sham altar loaded ...

The Hanoverian vulgarity of a Royal christening, with a sham altar loaded with the family plate and an opera singer warbling in the next room, shocked a taste which was insensibly forming for simplicity and reverence and the beauty of the sanctuary. Churches were swept; churchyards tidied; church windows cleaned.

High pews behind which generations of the comfortable had dozed the sermon out, red velvet cushions on which the preacher had pounded the divisions of his text, the village band in the gallery, the clerk under the pulpit, gradually disappeared: very cautiously, crosses were introduced, and flowers and lights. Liturgical science became a passion with the younger clergy, and the wave of restoration and church building brought with it a keen, sometimes a ludicrous, preoccupation with symbolism.

Dickens was not far out when he observed that the High Churchman of 1850 was the dandy of 1820 in another form.' The great ritualist controversy belongs to later years: its originating issue was the fashion of the preacher's garment.' The custom at the end of the morning prayers had been for the minister to retire and reissue from the vestry in the black gown of a learned man. As the practice spread of reading the Ante-Communion service after the sermon, the double change from white to black and back into white again was felt to be unseemly.