For Glory and for Beauty
Exodus 28 describes the fabrication of the priestly garments and multiple times echoes the phrase "for glory and for beauty." This is in stark contrast to modern worship tendencies to downplay vestments, ritual and ceremony. The modern church - including swaths of confessional Lutheranism - downplay the ritual and ceremony of worship. C.S. Lewis in the Preface to Paradise Lost, Oxford, 1942, pg. 17 "A celebrant approaching the altar, a princess led out by a king to dance a minuet, a general officer on a ceremonial parade, a major domo preceding the boar's head at the Christmas feast - all these wear unusual clothes and move with calculated dignity. This does not mean that they are vain, but that they are obedient; they are obeying the hoc age which presides over every solemnity. The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil ...