67. "Spiritual worship" & "mockery of religion"?

John and Alice were deeply attached to the ways of their own chapel.  This wasn't without music, as is sometimes said, as we have seen in the story of Henry Burnett & Fanny Dickens (in Chapter 27 )

We can see that Alice enjoyed music in chapel from her letter to John on 30 October 1865 from Bristol, where she was staying with her sister-in-law Mrs Alice Wills

I was at Chapel twice yesterday.  I enjoyed the singing and the evening service.  The morning minister I could not hear.  The chapel is really beautiful.  I only hope that the idea of spiritual worship will be retained amongst us along with so much that charms the senses  [1]

As Bijan Omrani wrote in God is an Englishman (2025), Puritanism was

the move made from devotion through the senses to devotion through word and intellect 

and Alice is clearly rather unsettled by Congregational chapels adopting a rather more welcoming approach to the appeal to the senses.  Her grandson Arthur wrote of his grandparents

What saved them from the unattractiveness of Puritanism was their intense love for poetry … They loved the beauty of Nature as revealing the glory of God.  It is strange that only in religious matters would they banish sacramentalism from life.  My grandmother was an enthusiastic admirer of Wordsworth, the most sacramentally-minded poet of her time.  She used to enjoy telling the story of how one day she was walking near Grasmere and saw a venerable figure coming towards her: she asked a roadmender seated on his heap of stones, "Is that Wordsworth?" and met the rebuke, "That's Mister Wordsworth, mam."  My grandfather's chief enthusiasm was for John Milton, as combining poet and Puritan. [2]

As John's willingness to attend the Anglican service in the cathedral shows, he was all in favour of union between Protestant denominations.  Catholicism was another matter.  Arthur wrote that

the austerity bred by their type of religion was lightened by a true kindliness towards all honest folk, whatever their religious convictions – except, of course, Roman Catholics, whom they would not have regarded as honest folks.  This deep-rooted prejudice of "No Popery" was an ugly flaw. [3]

"No Popery" was the centuries' old cry of Protestant England.  Hostility to Catholicism became a live topic again with the mass migration of Irish Catholics into Manchester from the late 18th century, and the ancient fears were stirred up once more when Pope Pius IX reinstated Catholic church organisation and hierarchy in 1850.  But the edited letters show that Alice and John could take a more nuanced view than simply "No Popery".  They evidently weren't so ferociously a Protestant as to refuse to set foot in a Catholic church, though Alice found her first visit as a young woman an upsetting experience.  When she and John visited Paris in the summer of 1855 they attended the Baroque church of Saint-Roch in the rue Saint-Honoré.  She told Alice Wills on their return to England in a letter of 25 August 1855

Paris seems wholly given up to the worship of pleasure.  We attended a Roman Catholic service in St Roch: it really was painful to me – it seemed to me nothing more than a spectacle.  I could have wept all the time; it seemed such a mockery of religion [4]

By the time Alice was in her fifties her view was rather different.  In October 1881 she went to stay with young John and Evelyn and their five small children in their home in Kensington.  One Sunday, after going to chapel and leaving unhappily because she couldn't hear a word of the service, she and Evelyn had a good walk in the sunshine.  Then

We looked into the Roman Catholic Church and saw Cardinal Manning in his scarlet robes escorted in all form to the pulpit … The super-abundance of ceremony and symbol appears like the return to the infancy of religion instead of going on to perfection … My desire was to worship; but the bowings curtsyings and movements of the officiating minister (I suppose I ought to say Priest) completely distracted my attention.  A Quaker's silent meeting would have suited me better and proved a better help to devotion.  Minds are differently constituted, and in this way we explain to ourselves that there are those who find help in these outward forms. [5]

Cardinal Manning (1808-92)

So now she was considering the idea that there were people who found help in the "outward forms" that she once felt were "such a mockery of religion".  She and Evelyn had probably seen the 73 year old Cardinal at the Pro-Cathedral on Kensington High Street.  (The building of Westminster Cathedral had not yet begun; the Pro-Cathedral was destroyed in the Second World War and the Church of Our Lady of Victories stands on the site).  Cardinal Manning was one of the century's famous converts to Catholicism, having been an eminent High Church clergyman before his conversion.  The ceremonial and the "outward forms" of the Catholicism nearly a century before Vatican II would certainly be quite unlike anything Alice was used to.  

John's views are not made clear in the edited letters, though we can see he wasn't exactly friendly when he wrote on 29 November 1885 after Alfred was unsuccessful in the election

The brewing interest, the public house keepers and the Roman Catholics – these carried the day against Alfred [6]

but, having attended the service of the Established Church in the Anglican cathedral as mayor, he also went to a Roman Catholic bazaar and fancy fair in aid of the charitable works of the sisters who lived at St Gertrude's House, Alexandra Park.  

The items for sale at the bazaar, reported the Manchester Evening News on 5 December 1882, included articles sent to the nuns from churches in Borneo, India, Mozambique and Fiji.  The 8th Earl of Denbigh, a Catholic convert, opened the bazaar and Lady Herbert of Lea, known for her philanthropic work, was running a stall.  She was Elizabeth Herbert, society hostess, writer, translator, a devoted friend, supporter and assistant of Florence Nightingale, and she had become a Catholic under Cardinal Manning's influence when she was widowed.  In this unlikely setting there was stout Protestant Alderman Hopkinson in his capacity as mayor, and giving a brief address after Lord Denbigh had called for support

whether we called ourselves Catholics or Protestants, we ought to do all we could, according to our consciences, to help the progress of Christianity among the heathen.  (Applause)

Into John and Alice's settled world of faith during their married life there came three challenges.  The first was from raising their beloved eldest son; the second from the challenges to faith from the new science; and the third came from unexpected in-laws.

Notes

[1] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910 (1948) ed. Mary Hopkinson and her niece Lady Ewing, with a Preface by Sir Gerald Hurst, K.C., p. 47

[2] Arthur W Hopkinson, Pastor's Progress (1942) pub. Michael Joseph Ltd., p. 216 of Religious Book Club edition, 

[3] ibid.

[4] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, p. 25

[5] ibid., p. 78

[6] ibid., p. 90