ABSTRACT
The heterodox churches by and large adopted and adapted the rich ceremonial of Eastern Orthodox liturgy, providing one alternative for those who desired the experience of ritual and were prepared to abandon orthodox Christianity. Similarly, one of the main concerns of the Catholic wing of the Church of England, whether among the sixteenth-century and Caroline Divines, NonJurors, Tractarians of the Oxford Movement or Anglo-Catholics, was the issue of ceremonial in worship. Indeed, it is one of the themes that links all of the above. The rise of what was to become known as the Ritualist Movement within Anglo-Catholicism after 1850 was to push the issue of ritual into the public arena, to the extent that the Evangelical wing argued for legislation against the activities of the Ritualists, which they eventually obtained in the Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874, of which more later.
