The call for “spiritual renewal” by the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans provokes more concern than hope among those struggling to preserve the fragile unity of the Church of England, whose General Synod is meeting in York this weekend. Supported by five bishops, the new grouping of conservative clergy will oppose liberals on issues including the ordination of women bishops and the blessing of gay partnerships.

To some, this represents a “Church within a Church” and a likely schism in the worldwide Anglican Communion. Heated words can be expected, but it is still hard to imagine Anglicans loathing one another as much as they did between the 1860s and 1880s.

Then rival groups of clergy repeatedly tried to take each other to court. The point of contention concerned style rather than substance, with “Low Church” and Evangelical Anglicans trying to prevent their “High Church” brethren from reintroducing ritual practices. Whether lit candles should be permitted on an altar became, all too literally, a burning issue.

The “ritualists” believed that the outward symbols of dress and ceremony better engaged worshippers’ full range of spiritual senses. They upheld the importance of facing east during Holy Communion, mixing water with wine in the chalice, offering wafers rather than bread, lit candles on the altar, the use of incense and elaborate vestments. This was “smells and bells” Anglicanism or, as David Lloyd George put it in 1904 to a gathering of Baptists, “salvation by haberdashery”.

The ritualists’ campaign group, the English Church Union, tried to repel “Erastianism, Rationalism and Puritanism”. It also tried to prosecute the Evangelical Bishop of Carlisle for heresy, and pursued actions against clergy who held services in theatres. To their opponents, it was the ritualists who were the aspiring thespians whose dramatic performances paved the way if not to hell then at least to Rome — the real underlying fear. In 1867 the Church Association launched a £50,000 fighting fund to back legal action by “aggrieved parishioners” against them.

Drafted by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the 1874 Public Worship Regulation Act aimed to root out ritualist practices in the Established Church. It ended up jailing five clergymen for contempt of the court set up to try them. In 1888 there was even an attempt to arraign Edward King, the Bishop of Lincoln, the first bishop since the Reformation to wear a mitre.

Far from smashing ritualism, the attacks boosted its popularity and in 1906 the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline sought a truce.

Nobody thought it appropriate to use the phrase “horses for courses”, but that was about the sum of its findings. It is a sentiment that those trying to keep Anglicans together — if not united — may wish to invoke.

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