Many would be surprised to learn that the stained glass windows we see in churches today only started to appear about 150 years ago. They were in the original Catholic Churches, but just like the Jews in Old Testament revivals smashed up the High Places of Pagan worship and ritual; the stain glass windows, statues and other idolatress practices were smashed up and torn down in the Reformation. They started to re-appear in the middle of the 19th Century when much of the Church of England was defecting back towards the Apostasy of the Church of Rome. (see Roman Catholicism for the errors on the Catholic Church. Also John MacArthur's excellent sermon on the apostasy of the Church of Rome, inside the Way of the Master Radio program Hour 1 & Hour 2)Here is an extract from Bruce Shelly's Church History in Plain Language, on the Anglican Church's drift towards the fatal errors of Roman Catholicism:
"To spread their views the Oxford men launched, in 1833, a series of "Tracts for Times," a move that gave rise to the label "Tractarians." In these writings the Oxford leaders published their convictions on a single article of the creed: belief in "One, holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church." They emphasized the apostolic succession of Bishops through history and the church's God-given authority to teach the truth and rule men's lives. They magnified the place of the sacraments, ascribing them to an actual saving power. As an ideal for the Church of England, they held up the church of the first five centuries. Then, they said, the Christian church was undivided and truly catholic.
While some of these historical ideas were fanciful, the Tractarians believed them enthusiastically, They called themselves Catholics, on the ground that they were in agreement with this early catholic Christianity, and they shunned the name Protestant, because it referred to a division in the church.
Public worship was vital to the Oxford men. They believed strongly in the religious values of symbolic actions in worship, such as turning toward the altar, bending the knee and elevating the cross. The worship of God, they said demands the total response of man, so ritual should appeal to the senses: rich clerical garments, incense on the altar, music by trained voices. In short, Tractarian Christianity was a zealous version of "High Church" Christianity.
Step by step the Oxford men moved toward the Church of Rome. Then came the thunderclap. In 1841 John Henry Newman wrote Tract 90 and asserted that the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England were not necessarily Protestant. They could be interpreted in the spirit of the Catholic Church. Did Newman really believe that a person could be a Roman Catholic and remain in the Church of England?
A storm of protest fell upon the Oxford movement. The Bishop of Oxford forbade Newman to publish other tracts. Newman concluded that the only way to be truly Catholic was to enter the Roman Catholic Church. He converted to Rome in 1845 and during the next six years hundreds of Anglican clergy men followed him. In time Newman became Rector of the New Catholic University in Dublin, and in 1877 he was made a Cardinal in the Church of Rome.
The great majority of the Tractarians, however, stayed in the Church of England and saw an increasing number of clergy men adopt their "High Church" views. Religion for many focused on ritual, priests, and sacraments. The concern for beauty brought in improvement in architecture, music, and art in the churches. Gradually the names "Oxford movement" and "Tractarian" gave way to "Anglo-Catholic," which meant Anglicans who valued their unity with the catholic tradition in Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, but refused to accept the supremacy of the patriarch or pope".
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