the establishment (e.g. Viscount Halifax and the 4th Marquess of Bath). However, the outlook of many of the ritualist clergy themselves, many of whom inevitably operated in some of the most deprived communities in England, resulted in their becoming politically radicalized by the experience – some became ardent Christian socialists. Anti-ritualism and "muscular Christianity" In the spectrum of hostility that it aroused, ritualism also provoked in some of its opponents a reaction that saw its theatricality and its aestheticism as symptoms of "effeminacy". A typical charge was that ritualistic clergy were "man milliners", more concerned with lace and brocade than doctrine. Adverse reaction to this played a significant role in the evolution of the Broad and Low Church enthusiasm for "muscular Christianity". Ritualism and outreach to the unchurched urban poor One of the key ideological justifications used by many of the early ritualists, apart from the fact that it was a symbolic way of affirming their belief in the essentially Catholic nature of Anglicanism, was the argument that it provided a particularly effective medium for bringing Christianity to the poorest, "slum parishes" of the Church of England. It was argued that ritual and aesthetically impressive liturgy did not only provide a powerful contrast to the drabness of the lives of the poor, its emphasis on symbol and action rather than word was a more effective medium for spreading Christian faith in areas with poor literacy rates than the highly cerebral and logocentric worship that was focused on the Book of Common Prayer. This argument may have had some merits, but, very often, the respect that the most successful ritualists often gained in the highly impoverished communities they went to serve was based on the fact that they had expressed a genuine pastoral concern for the poor amongst whom they lived. The argument for ritualism in Anglicanism was also based on the analogy of the success of the Roman Catholic Church amongst the highly impoverished Irish migrant communities in the urban areas of England – it was argued by some that ritual played a key role in the growth of the Roman Catholic Church amongst the poor. However, the use of ritual probably played little more than a subsidiary role in the success of the Catholic Church in this area: its success was probably largely due to a special cultural identity that many Irish migrants felt with the Roman Catholic Church