And it was not ritualism, nor beauty, nor symbolism, that was abolished, but certain ceremonies, some of which, indeed, at the first were of godly intent and purpose devised, ‘but had at length turned to vanity and superstition.’ It is precisely, by the way, for these reasons that practices have been over and over again abolished in the Roman Church itself, where yet indiscreet devotion’ still works such havoc. Some, by ‘the great excess and multitude of them,’ had become an intolerable burden; but the ‘most weighty cause of the abolishment of certain ceremonies was that they had been so far abused’ by the ‘superstitious blindness’ of the ignorant and the ‘unsatiable avarice’ of those who traded on it, ‘that the abuses could not well be taken away, the thing remaining still.’ So, then, even those ceremonies which have been abolished were of godly intent originally, or at the worst due to undiscreet devotion and a zeal without knowledge, and were not removed for their own sake, but because of certain abuses which had fastened inseparably upon them.
This does not look much like a destruction of ritualism. Yet even this is further safeguarded in the next paragraph, by a cutting reply to those who wanted ‘innovations and newfangledness’—’surely when the old may be well used, then they cannot reasonably reprove the old only for their age, without bewraying of their own folly.’ Indeed so conservative is this preface that it does not hesitate to declare that innovations (‘ as much as may be with true setting forth of Christ’s religion’) are ‘always to be eschewed.’
After a happy apology for the retained ceremonies that they are ‘neither dark nor dumb,’ the preface concludes with the significant declaration that, while we claim our right to an English use, ‘we condemn no other nations,’ a remark which shows how far the spirit of the Prayer Book is removed from
