Laudator Temporis Acti

Maurice Baring (1874-1945), The Puppet Show of Memory (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1923), p. 199:

He [Reggie Balfour] took me one morning to Low Mass at Notre Dame des Victoires. I had never attended a Low Mass before in my life. It impressed me greatly. I had imagined Catholic services were always long, complicated, and overlaid with ritual. A Low Mass, I found, was short, extremely simple, and somehow or other made me think of the catacombs and the meetings of the Early Christians. One felt one was looking on at something extremely ancient. The behaviour of the congregation, and the expression on their faces impressed me too. To them it was evidently real.

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), "The Portraits of John Knox," Essays on Politics and Society (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022), pp. 309-352 (at 344):

The Mass is a daring and unspeakably frightful pretence to worship God by methods not of God’s appointing; open idolatry it is, in Knox’s judgment; a mere invitation and invocation to the wrath of God to fall upon and crush you. To a common, or even to the most gifted and tolerant reader, in these modern careless days, it is almost altogether impossible to sympathize with Knox’s horror, terror and detestation of the poor old Hocuspocus (Hoc est Corpus) of a Mass; but to every candid reader it is evident that Knox was under no mistake about it, on his own ground, and that this is verily his authentic and continual feeling on the matter.