The Ritual Movement Three plain sermons preached at St. John the Evangelist's, Hammersmith — Themes and Context

The Corinthian Parallel as Rhetorical Frame

Cowan opens by drawing a direct analogy between the Corinthian church and the Anglican Church of his day. The Corinthians, he says, were “divinely distinguished by the number and excellence of the spiritual gifts” yet “distinguished themselves by anarchy, lawlessness, pride, self-will, self-sufficiency, uncharitableness, ecclesiastical and moral laxity.” The parallelism is exact: Anglicans have been “distinguished by God” with “conspicuous and super-excellent gifts and privileges,” yet they too are “constantly distinguishing ourselves by strifes, irregularities, and miserable assertions of self’s importance.” This rhetorical move allows Cowan to treat the Ritual Movement not as a novel dispute but as a recurrence of a perennial ecclesiastical failing. He does not name specific ritualist practices in this opening; instead, he frames the entire controversy as a failure to observe the apostolic rule. The effect is to elevate the debate from practical disagreements over vestments or gestures to a matter of fundamental Christian order.

Two Audiences, One Precept

Cowan explicitly divides his congregation—and by extension his readership—into two groups. To the “standers still,” the “old-fashioned” who are “contented with things as they were,” he poses the question: “what mean ye by the service of God in the sanctuary?” The incomplete sentence in the excerpt suggests he goes on to challenge their complacency. To the “hurriers along,” he implies a warning against being “hurried along without due care to consider, perhaps without time to consider, whither they were tending.” This balanced address is characteristic of the sermons’ structure: Cowan avoids taking a partisan stance, instead using the apostolic precept as a corrective for both inertia and haste. His language remains concrete—he speaks of “obloquy” faced by clergy loyal to the Church of the Reformers—and he prays that “those in authority may have wisdom” and “those under authority may have grace to render all due submission.” The sermons thus function as a homiletic appeal to a middle way, grounded in the authority of the biblical text.

Reformation History as a Cautionary Tale

In the third sermon, Cowan turns to the English Reformation to argue that the Anglican Church was founded on a principle of conservative reform. The Reformers, he claims, acted “with the sanction, under the immediate direction of the highest authorities in Church and State; by men of sound faith, sober judgment, and calm temperament.” They maintained “whatever of doctrine or practice had universally prevailed among Christians” and avoided “differing unnecessarily, even in non-essentials, from the mediæval Church.” This historical narrative serves to distinguish Anglicanism from what Cowan calls “a radical and mere Protestant spirit.” He acknowledges that the Reformers did “protest” against “prevailing corruptions and superstitions,” but insists that their Protestantism “only asserted what they were not.” The true Anglican identity, in his telling, is Catholic—a term he claims for his own tradition against those who “henceforth claimed the exclusive right to it.” The foreign Reformation, by contrast, is portrayed as “revolutionary and indiscriminate,” seeking “to destroy, root and branch, whatever was old.” Cowan’s language here is notably concessive: he allows that “earnest and holy men” were driven by “awakened feeling,” but he ultimately presents their course as unguided by “Catholic influence” or “intelligent principle.”

Diction of Decorum and Its Opposites

Throughout the sermons, Cowan’s lexical choices reinforce his central argument. The key terms are “decently” and “in order,” which he glosses as “decorously” and “according to system and appointment.” Their opposites form a litany of disorder: “anarchy, lawlessness, pride, self-will, self-sufficiency, uncharitableness, ecclesiastical and moral laxity.” This binary is not merely descriptive but evaluative: to be “old-fashioned” is to be “contented with things as they were,” a phrase that carries a hint of reproach; to be a “hurrier along” is to lack “due care.” Cowan also employs the language of sight and appearance: the Ritual Movement “wears the appearance of strange and even dangerous innovation.” The verb “wears” is telling—it suggests that the movement’s novelty may be superficial, a matter of outward show rather than substance. This aligns with his broader concern for the visible order of worship, but it also reflects a preacher’s instinct to probe beneath surfaces. The sermons are thus as much about the proper disposition of the heart as about the arrangement of the sanctuary.

Cowan’s sermons are best read as a period piece that illuminates the rhetorical strategies of a moderate Anglican clergyman navigating a divisive controversy. Readers interested in Victorian religious history will find here a concrete example of how biblical exegesis was mobilized to address contemporary church politics. The sermons’ brevity—three plain discourses totaling under 13,000 words—makes them accessible, but their argumentative density rewards careful attention to Cowan’s use of analogy, historical narrative, and lexical contrast.

This sermon’s insistence on order, on the how rather than the what, brought back those warm afternoons reading about rituals in translation—the care in a chant, the weight of a gesture. Another book stirred that same patience once: Buddhism, in Its Connexion with Brahmanism and Hinduism, and in Its Contrast with Christianity — Reading Companion. It felt less like doctrine, more like a quiet room where belief simply breathed.