The revival of pre-Reformation ritual by many of the High Church clergy led to the designation "ritualist" being applied to them in a somewhat contemptuous sense; and "High Churchman" and "Ritualist" have often been wrongly treated as convertible terms. Actually many High Churchmen are not Ritualists, though they tend to become so.
Though a ritualist and a rigorous enforcer of outward conformity, he was uncompromisingly hostile to Roman Catholicism, and most of his writings illustrate this antagonism.
As he was a historian before he became a bishop, so it was his historical sense which determined his general attitude as a bishop. It was this, together with a certain native taste for ecclesiastical pomp, which made him - while condemning the unhistorical extravagances of the ultraritualists - himself a ritualist.
But this revival of ceremonial in its various degrees became the chief external characteristic of the new movement; and "Ritualist" thrust "Puseyite" aside as the designation of those who hold the doctrines for which he mainly contended.
