have myself a very great repugnance to reviving obsolete usages on private authority without very strong reason for doing so. And, great indeed as is the good which the [Cambridge] Campden [Society] has done and is doing … I confess they seem to me to carry too much sail. There are, after all, things of greater consequence than ceremonies; and though the very business of the Society is with externals,
and therefore it is not to be blamed for being silent upon theology and ethics, yet I cannot but fear that some of its promoters have given too little time to the foundation, before they began to build… They are not always so serious and reverent as the sacredness of their subject requires them to be.
Letter to R. Belaney 7 September 1842