On 25 May 1837 Pusey wrote his wife on the topic of this sermon as follows:

My sermon was, I am told, one and a half hour; people were very attentive and the dear little children very quiet and good. I know not what the collection was, but some people seem to have been impressed with it... The dear little children with their white pinafores and straw bonnets looked such emblems of purity, and I thought of our own dear Catherine and how pure and bright she is.

God bless you, dearest; a large opening seems made in the first week of parting, and the rest will, if it please Him, pass rapidly by; and when we meet again we must try to live yet more like pilgrims heavenwards. I am much perplexed by my own sermon, for I know not how I can act up to it, with our Heads-of-Houses dinners; and it has come across me had one not better give them up altogether? But this is very crude.

(Maria French, The Story of Dr. Pusey's Life, p. 114).

Project Canterbury