But when you frequent places of public worship, as I would have you go to all the different ones you meet with, remember that, however erroneous, they are none of them objects of laughter and ridicule. Honest error is to be pitied, not ridiculed. The object of all the public worships in the world is the same; it is that great eternal Being who created everything. The different manners of worship are by no means subjects of ridicule. Each sect thinks its own the best; and I know no infallible judge, in this world, to decide which is the best.
Lord Chesterfield (1694-1773) English statesman, wit [Philip Dormer Stanhope]
Letter to his son, #141 (16 Feb 1748)
(Source)
Quotations about:
liturgy
Note not all quotations have been tagged, so Search may find additional quotes on this topic.
A love of order, seemliness, and good taste has led the Anglican Church along a middle path between what a seventeenth-century divine called “the meretricious gaudiness of the Church of Rome and the squalid sluttery of fanatic conventicles.”
William Ralph Inge (1860-1954) English prelate [Dean Inge]
“Bishop Gore and the Church of England” (1908), Outspoken Essays, First Series (1919)
(Source)
The reference is to "S. P. of Cambridge," believed to be the later Bishop Simon Patrick, who published in 1662 the pamphlet "A Brief Account of the new Sect of Latitude-men," lauding "that virtuous mediocrity which our Church observes between" the alternatives quoted by Inge. Reprinted in John Dunton, The Phenix, Vol. 2, ch. 4 (1707).
