Protestant Churches Adopt Vested Choirs and Ritual Innovations
The New York Sun, which in religious matters speaks from the Roman Catholic standpoint, points to certain “suggestive religious changes,” or innovations, in worship that are being made in leading Protestant churches, for the apparent purpose of attracting people to the church service. We quote from what the Sun says with reference to the nature and significance of these changes:— The most remarkable, not to say curious, of these innovations are the vested choirs, borrowed from Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism, which have been introduced even into a Baptist church of New York, but more extensively into Methodist churches in several places. On Easter Sunday the Washington Heights Baptist church started the innovation of a vested choir of sixty voices, with cassock and cotta, and the women wearing also mortar-board hats. That is, the investments are the same as in Episcopal churches. The introduction of such a choir into the Metropolitan Methodist Temple, a year ago, proved so successful, apparently, that the example has been followed by other Methodist churches, one at Chicago having come into line recently and conspicuously. This is very suggestive because the two Protestant churches which in the past were always most distinguished by the extreme simplicity of their worship and their church architecture, and were most violently opposed to anything like mere æstheticism in religious services, were the Baptist and the Methodist. They were plain people, and all worldly display, in raiment and in social life, was eschewed by them. Methodists were enjoined by Wesley, in his “General Rules,” to “evidence their desire of salvation” by refraining from the “putting on of gold and costly apparel.” Like austerity of life was the Baptist rule, and the meeting houses of both denominations were usually without steeples or any other marks of a distinctively ecclesiastical architecture. The change from all this to the pomp of vested choirs and the imitation of purely ritualistic features is revolutionary. A generation ago it would have stirred up violent protest throughout those denominations. Now it seems to cause no disturbance whatever, but rather to provoke an amiable desire to repeat and extend the innovation. Will these ritualistic Baptist and Methodist churches stop with vested choirs merely? Will they not go on, naturally and logically, to the adoption of other features of the liturgical churches they are imitating? We are likely to see the cross introduced, and perhaps the time will come when the plain communion table will give place to a veritable altar, with all its religious significance. This is, therefore, a serious innovation, suggestive of a radical doctrinal transformation in the future. We have seen how ritualism in the Episcopal Church has advanced to a bold teaching of the real presence. The same paper notes that while there is this rapid move Romeward in the bodies that have constituted the stronghold of Protestantism, the inroads of Mormonism, Christian Science, and the “New Thought” into the domain of orthodox religion constitute a phenomenon no less striking; and it rightly observes that “the religious waters seem to be more disturbed at this time than ever before in the history of Christianity, and signs of unprecedented revolutionary changes appear in many directions.” Though men know it not, the world is fast ripening for the final harvest.