Letter from C.W. Leadbeater to Annie Besant
about the Revised Liturgy to be used in the Old Catholic Church.


Sydney, December 12th,1920.

 The night before last we had the honour of submitting to the Lord Maitraya the revised Ritual of the Mass to be used by the Old Catholic Church, at which we [Wedgwood and Leadbeater]  have been working for many months. We wished again and again that we could have the gift of language which is denied to us, and we felt so hopelessly inadequate. The greatest poets and writers of the day were needed for such a work - not two obscure Bishops in a suburb of Sydney! Our only qualifications were familiarity with ecclesiastical forms, and a very deep anxiety to do exactly what He wants. Our instructions were to preserve the old thought-form and the working of the old magic - the effect of the various acts at different stages, the descent and return of the Angel of the Presence, etc.... - but "to take all the brown and grey out of it and to substitute Gothic architecture for classical".

This we have done as well as we could, but apparently not even yet quite sufficiently. It seems that the Great Ones inspired the wandering bands of Freemasons (who built most of the great Cathedrals of Europe) with the idea of the Gothic type precisely as a physical-plane attempt to guide them towards the kind of thought-form which it was wished that their religious services should erect; but they were singularly slow in seeing the analogy. They began in a slavish, well, say obsequious, and shrinking attitude, regarding God as a Being who had to be propitiated, begging Him to hear them for a moment before destroying them, to have mercy upon them, and generally acting as though He were an ill-conditioned tyrant instead of a loving Father. So their devotional thought made on the whole a flat-roofed sort of building - a dead level of nervousness and anxiety, with frequent depressions of slinking terror:

(I speak of course of the majority, not of the great Saints, and I am but repeating what He Himself said to us.). He wished us to substitute for this splendid swift uprush of the Gothic, dotted constantly not with saucers of depression, but with spires and minarets of ecstatic love and devotion:

Well, we have done what we could, but to make these changes and yet keep the essential part of the old form was no easy task. The Lord was so gracious as to tell us that our result is a great improvement on anything that has been done before, and that it will do very well to go on with it; but I think He regards it as an intermediate stage on the way to a Mass of Affirmation rather than of prayer, in which we shall no longer ask God to do for us all sorts of things which we ought to be doing for ourselves - in which we shall not remind Him that He did this or that long ago to the children of Israel, but shall address all such explanations to our congregation, and turn to Him only when we directly invoke His Power in the great magical acts, and when we pour ourselves out before Him in uttermost love and adoration.

But we must bring people along gradually, and this already departs widely from their preconceived ideas. He accepted it most graciously, altering only the expression "Lamb of God, who takest the sins of the world", which we had left in because of its age, though we did not like it.