never been reckoned among artistic predilections. The aim of ritual is,
I believe, a high poetry of which the essence is symbolism and mystery.
The movement of forms solemnly vested, and with a background of
architecture and music, produces an emotion quite distinct from other
artistic emotions. It is a method, like all other arts, through which a
human being arrives at a sense of mysterious beauty, and it evokes in
mystical minds a passion to express themselves in just that way and no
other, and to celebrate thus their sense of the unknown.

But there has always been a natural terror in the religious mind of
laying too much stress on this, or of seeming to encourage too much an
Êsthetic emotion. If the first business of religion is to purify life,
there will always be a suspicion of idolatry about ritual, a fear of
substituting a vague desire for beauty for a practical devotion to right
conduct.

Hugh wrote to me some years later what he felt about it all:

"... Liturgy, to my mind, is nothing more than a very fine and
splendid art, conveying things, to people who possess the
liturgical faculty, in an extraordinarily dramatic and vivid way.
I further believe that this is an art which has been gradually
brought nearer and nearer perfection by being tested and developed
through nineteen centuries, by every kind of mind and nationality.
The way in which it does, indisputably, appeal to such very
different kinds of people, and unite them, does, quite apart from
other things, give it a place with music and painting.

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