Project Canterbury

Edward Bouverie Pusey,
Doctor and Confessor of the Catholic Church.

A Sermon preached in St. Mark's Church,
Philadelphia, October 22, 1883,
At the request of the Pusey Memorial Committee,

By William Croswell Doane
Bishop of Albany

Philadelphia: Printed for the Pusey Memorial Committee, 1884. 37 pp.

THE purpose of our gathering here to-night, as I conceive it, is to give glory to God for a great movement in His Church, and not to glorify a man. If it were the latter, no man would so repudiate it, as the man to whom, as God's instrument, we are to do reverent honor, while we give the praise to God. One can almost hear him say: "See thou do it not, for I am thy fellow-servant and of thy brethren the prophets, and of them which keep the sayings of this book."

And yet it is true to say, that when God moves by the instrumentality of men--they being but the lever and His Spirit the power which moves the world--the movement necessarily partakes, in some degree, of the character of the man. We believe this, who hold the Catholic doctrine of the inspiration of the Sacred Scriptures. The men were moved to the extent of being "borne along" by the mighty power of the Holy Ghost, to write, to write all truth and only truth; and yet their personality is left intact; and in distinctive style, and characteristic standpoint, each writer impresses himself upon his portion of the Canon. It is white light, which, through a prism, breaks itself into the seven-fold colors. It is the Holy Spirit of God, the Person, the Holy Ghost, who distributes to every man, severally, as He will, the manifold--poikilai it is in the Greek, many-colored--gifts of Grace. You must get back into one the parted hues, to get the full clear light. You must put together the writers to get all the truth, to which each one contributes what he is and

what he has. So I believe the inspiration of a great movement, being itself of God, colors that movement with the character of the man chosen by God to be its leader.

I think this important, as well as true, to say, not as elevating a man, for it all refers back to God, who finds and furnishes the instrument through which He works; but because it accounts for imperfections and defects in the greatest and most marked manifestations of the working of the Spirit; because it prevents the false judgment which would discredit the divine origin on account of human imperfections in the outcome; and because it forbids us to follow the mistakes of men, under the idea that we are obeying the call of God.

Besides this, the first aim and impulse as shown in the character of the chosen leader is a far safer test of the divine intention, than later and perhaps diver-gent utterances on his part; and certainly than all the vagaries of disciples and followers, who call themselves "of Paul, or of Cephas."

In the deep, calm, meditative saintliness of the soul of Edward Bouverie Pusey, Doctor of the Catholic Church and Confessor, Almighty God set the seal and stamp of the purpose, and sent also the spirit and power of the great movement, which, issuing forth from that spring, has roused Christendom, revived the Church, and revolutionized society. Is it too literal an application of the figure--remembering how the true estimate of Holy Sacraments has been replaced, and the works of mercy restored among men--to say, that the water which issued forth has filled fonts for the washing of regeneration, mingled in the Chalice of a realized communion of the blood of Christ, and overflowed in many a cup of corporal and spiritual refreshing, given to Christ's little ones "in the name of a disciple?"

And yet, my friends and brethren, it is true of purest mountain streams, that in their ever varied and widening career, they set some machinery in motion whose use is absolutely at variance with the peaceful purity of the stream at its source; that they exchange their bed of jewelled pebbles, for a mud bottom and a slimy top; and that they rush with turbid violence into the sea, by wharves that reek with the sewage and the garbage of the city and the ships. And it is also true that this is not the tendency they took on from the dew of their birth; but the inevitable drift and danger of all moving things in this imperfect, sinful, blighted world. The tendency, the purpose are reflected, as in a mirror, in the bowl of their first upspringing; that is, in the soul of the man whom God touched and called and chose; in the kind of mind, in the sort of character, in the qualities of heart and soul, in the personal life of the leader. I would speak with awful reverence of the great mystery of the qeotokia, the bringing forth of God. But as the Incarnation is the keynote to the whole system of Revelation--the one, the word Incarnate, God clothed in Flesh, the other, the Word inspired, God habited in human speech--it is not, I think, irreverent to say, that, as by the operation of the Holy Ghost, God clothed Himself with flesh of the substance of the Blessed Virgin Mary; and, as by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, the Word, the Revealer veils Himself in human language; so, by the power of the Holy Ghost, His great work in the world in which He is, takes outward shape and form from the mould of the

chosen character into which, white-heated with the fire of His Love, He pours the gracious plan.

If I did not believe this, I should not dare to speak in such a place of even such a name. It is the man in the movement, as the sublime realities of his nature indicate the grandeur of its motive, and furnish the clue to its purpose, of whom I am to speak to you; at the close of a period of fifty years, since the stir of it first roused Oxford and England and America and the world.

And this is the conception under which I am to speak of him and of it. I believe that the intensest convictions of his soul were of the supreme authority and sacredness of Scripture; of the divine institution of the Church, in its ministry and sacraments; of the inseparable connection between dogma and duty; and of the equal importance and close association of a sound faith and a holy life.

Dr. Pusey's first appearance as a theological writer and defender of the faith was in 1828, the year of his appointment to the Hebrew professorship at Oxford, which he filled full for more than fifty years. It is curious to note that his opponent in this controversy was Hugh James Rose, with whom he became afterwards closely associated in the publication of the famous Tracts for the Times. The circumstances are too instructive to pass over, as characteristic of the men, and as full of warning to us, of the misapprehensions and misconceptions which occur in the heat of controversy. Dr. Pusey had spent two years in Germany, studying the science of the great language of the oldest inspiration, and watching the struggle between the rationalists and the supernaturalists then raging.

The waves of the German Ocean, troubled and full of mire and dirt, were tossing themselves against the white and shining cliffs of the coast of English theological thought. Mr. Rose attributed the evil in Germany, entirely, to the absence of an internal Church government strong enough to suppress the movement in its beginning. And Mr. Pusey, as he then was, an unknown man, replied that this was no sufficient explanation, and that the true reason must be sought not in external but in internal causes, not in the absence of ecclesiastical repression, but in the entire divorce between dogma and piety which had marked the preceding age. His object was twofold, as Canon Farrar of Durham says, partly his love of absolute truth, and partly his desire to call attention to "the extreme resemblance of the contemporary time in England to that of the age which preceded rationalism in Germany." Mr. Rose, completely misconceiving the temper and purpose of Pusey's book, replied to it in a letter on the State of Protestantism in Germany, in which he speaks of Pusey as "a gentleman whose views of theology are greatly different from mine." In 1833, the two men were seeing eye to eye, and fighting hand to hand that great battle for the restoration of forgotten truths, which has built up the strong barrier against unbelief; "an impregnable fortress, which the desultory assaults of criticism could neither shake nor scale." It ought to be noted here, that divine as Dr. Pusey held and proved the apostolic ministry to be in origin and in authority, his rest against unbelief was in the holy lives of men, nurtured by grace of sacraments, which the priesthood was authorized to administer, and by power of truth, which it was commissioned to teach. It is well known that the great Archbishop of England, recently dead, found still another cause for the skepticism and secularity of the University of Oxford, "in the somewhat eccentric and over-priestly guise in which the Oxford theology of to-day has enveloped not a few of its votaries." To-day in Paradise we cannot doubt that these three holy souls, still praying for the coming of the Kingdom of Christ, own in each other the same high purpose which ruled their lives, and enjoy the peace of the faithful awaiting their great reward.

I want to claim first that Newman was right in calling Dr. Pusey o megas, the great man, the giant; that the common instinct was right when it nicknamed the movement, not Newmania--as a Presbyterian friend called my father's advocacy of the Oxford Tracts--but Puseyism; that, though not among the first devisers, he was the real leader; and that its first and continuous battle was with rationalists, with deniers of the Inspiration of Scripture, with those who having first divorced morality from religion, lost holiness, and then mistaking the Catholic definitions of belief for philosophical speculations about religion, lost faith. And I want to claim this because upon it rests the perpetual claim of the Catholic movement to gratitude and recognition, on the part of all Christian believers. It is the great bulwark against Romeward drifts, but they are not. It is the great barrier against Protestant negations, but they repel. To-day's dangers are from the specious appeals of spurious science, spurious liberality, spurious reason and spurious criticism. And in the perpetual crusade against these enemies, living or dead, Pusey is the Cid Campeador.

This is no curious inquiry about past personalities. The attitude of the saintly scholar in what one called his "bastion in the corner of Christ Church Quadrangle " must be the attitude, to-day, of every defender of the faith. The real assault is the same now. The danger is not Romeward or from Rome; but towards denial, and from the love of folly, falsely called philosophy, which means the love of wisdom; and from falsely called science, which used to mean knowledge, and yet, nowadays, nicknames itself agnosticism, which means know-nothingness. It is twenty years since Pusey wrote: "This has been, for some thirty years, a deep conviction of my soul, that no book can be written on behalf of the Bible like the Bible itself. Man's defences are man's work. They may help to beat off attacks. They may draw out some portion of its meaning. The Bible is God's Word, and through it, God the Holy Ghost, who spake it, speaks to the soul which closes not itself against it." And, again, speaking of the Arnold school--which has drifted into a drearier distance from its founder's faith than the extremest departure of our day from Pusey's starting-place--he calls it "a temple of concord, not of laith, or minds, or wills, but of despair of truth. Nothing in this new school is to be exclusively true, nothing is to be false. ..... To one the Bible is to be, if he wills, the Word of God, so that he allows his neighbor to have an equal chance of being right who holds that it contains somewhere the Word of God, i.e., a revelation of no one knows what, made, no one knows how, and lying no one knows where between Genesis and Revelation, but probably according to the neo-Christianity to the exclusion of both." "The real objection of the critics is, that God should reveal Himself to His creature man, in any other way than by the operation of man's natural reason, or that He should tell man anything beyond the grasp of eye or hand."

What Newman called his "stationariness" was in nothing more clearly shown, than in Dr. Pusey's constant and consistent contention for the sacredness of God's Word. In commentary and controversy, in tract and sermon, whether the denier wrote in German, or translated German neology into the poor English of Essays and Reviews, he fought the denial, however and by whomsoever it was made. For he was saint and soldier, like the red-cross knights of old, fighting to recover the Holy Land of Revelation from desecration by the infidel. And what a mine of wealth, what a magazine of weapons his writings are. The Lectures on the Book of Darnel cover directly or indirectly the whole line of argument. He took the point which the unbelieving critics considered the most assailable. Indeed, they counted their attacks upon its claim to be prophetic at all, to have destroyed its date, its authorship, its inspiration. "It is one of the highest triumphs and most secure facts of the more recent criticism," one of the critics wrote, "to have proved that the Book of Daniel belongs to the time of Antiochus Epiphanes." And Dr. Pusey says in his Preface: "Disbelief of Daniel has become an axiom in the unbelieving critical school." And he brought to bear upon it, the result of years of study, of most minute acquaintance with everything that could bear upon it, of language and its variations, of history, of Eastern antiquities. His Preface to the book is the best tract that could, to-day, be published in reply to the shallow and unlearned, or to the disingenuous and dishonest, attempts to undermine men's confidence in the inspiration of Holy Scripture. And this was only one of varied contributions to the defence of the Word of God, which, one way and another, make up a library in themselves.

And yet this is the man- of whom men still will persist in thinking; that he overlaid the Word of God with human traditions; that he was unevangelical; that he elevated the Church and its forms and ceremonies above the Scriptures.

Dr. Pusey's contributions to the Tracts of the Times were not very many. Three tracts on Baptism, a catena of the Fathers on the Sacrificial character of the Holy Eucharist, and two tracts on the benefits of Fasting, are the sum. His work was in the study, in the pulpit, and in the preparation of the innumerable volumes which he issued from the press. And no one who ever saw his study can forget it or him. I saw him there in 1873. An uncommanding figure, with a head that dominated his short stature, with a face of power, of love, of gentleness, he was in a perfect clutter of books and papers, which ran over tables and chairs and the floor. He was just finishing his Commentary on the Minor Prophets, and seemed as one who had lived in communion with them, and with the "Holy Ghost who spake" by them. His welcome to me for my Father's sake was most affectionate, and both then, and when I saw him later, the impression he produced on me was of mingled humility and confidence, the humility of self-distrust and the confidence of an impregnable faith. "Intrenched," as one has said, "behind solid works of libraries of the Fathers, and of Anglican Divines," he realized what one of his disciples once said, "a Catholic Christian has no difficulties;" and fulfilled his own description of one who could "appeal to that which had been taught everywhere, always, and by all," as "lifted up to the eternal sunshine above the reach of that which, by contradicting it, condemns itself." I remember very well his gracious gift to me of his blessing, having first asked mine: I remember his saying to me that he was not much of a reader of the current theological literature of the day: and I remember the calmness with which he said, speaking of Dean Stanley's university sermon which he preached that year, that he had no fear of that sort of teaching; that it could have only passing influence, because it had no positive truth to assert or to witness. One who writes from larger knowledge of his manner of life, says: "It was not the least characteristic feature of the great theologian and controversialist, that with the incessant laboriousness of a man of affairs, a profuse correspondence, infinite distractions, the daily irritations of frivolous and morbid, as well as healthy demands on his direction, the countless accumulation of heavy books and fugitive papers which besets an editor and author, the fresh growth of sympathy which made the sap rise at the touch of each new spring-time in more than sixty years of manhood, nevertheless the scholar secured a reserve of leisure for thought, the ascetic made time every working-day for discipline, and the recluse lived as if he cared only for prayer."

I have dwelt, with this long emphasis, upon the labors of this saintly scholar "in the word and doctrine," because I believe that in very large degree, they comprised alike the leading objects and the lasting results of his life; and because much else that he did was subordinate and auxiliary to this. There is added reason, too, to dwell upon it, because the memorial to Dr. Pusey with great fitness takes this tendency and shape; a great library, of which his own books are the nucleus, housed in Oxford, and with learned men appointed to the care of them, who shall be able, by their familiarity with the books, to guide young men to the treasures they contain.

Drinking, as he did, deeply of the well of Scripture undefiled, the very "well of Bethlehem," of the birthplace of the Incarnate Word, he had resort, and he opened to others the resort, to the old fountains of patristic lore. And the Church of this century owes largely to him, under God, the revival of the study of the Fathers, and the ability to study them; the publication of the library of the Fathers being due to his efforts, and done in many most important instances by him. And what has not been gained here! The witness which the Church of God bears to the Word of God is twofold. Pillar and ground and keeper, she furnishes the only sufficient evidence of the authenticity of the Sacred Canon to the searcher after truth. Faith is confirmed in the soul, when the Spirit in the Sacred Scriptures speaks to the spirit of the reverent reader of the Bible. To you and me, who have known them from a child, the voice of God speaks out of them, mingling with the tones of some Lois or Eunice, through whose dear lips they poured their first sweetness into our childish ears. But the unbeliever demands outside, historic proof to his mere reason. And external historical testimony to the Canon, proving what books are,

and what are not, inspired; proof of the authorship and authenticity, must come from witnesses apart from the sacred writings themselves. The independent and contemporaneous witness of the continuous Church of God from the beginning, and it only, answers the question, what books are "the Scriptures," which Christ still bids us search, which St. Paul tells us are "given by inspiration of God and are profitable." Hence, to the Church of Christ, as to the ancient Church of Israel, were committed, to keep, to catalogue, to communicate to the world, "the oracles of God." And her witness in this matter is largely gathered from the writings of the early Fathers, who, as they specify, or quote from, or make lists of, the several books, show what the Canon was and is. Infinitely more valuable and conclusive such testimony is, than the mere manuscripts of the Holy Scriptures, whatever letter of the Hebrew alphabet they bear, or from whatever mediaeval depository they may have been dug out. For they are farther away from first-hand copies, than the patristic writers are. But this is not all. The theory of modern days is only partly true, that the critical apparatus is so complete to the scholar and the student of the nineteenth century, as to make him the best judge of authorship, or of the meaning of the authors, of the books of the Sacred Canon. Two things were theirs, who wrote upon these questions in the early times, which are not ours; the nearness to our Lord's own time, the memory of the words of the Lord Jesus, which were never written down, the recollection of that unwritten tradition which contains and conveys the meaning of the Scriptures as they expounded them who lived nearest to the writers of the Holy Scriptures; these first, and moreover the spirit of that intense reverence which they had, to whose ears the very tones of the voice of the Master and His apostles sounded in every word. It is true that all attainment, when it really has attained anything, in philology, in science, in antiquities, in everything, will, rightly applied, cast new light upon the sacred page. But after all, the telescope, the long-sight looking through the tube of the Christian centuries of patristic teaching, brings nearer and more clearly to the soul's eye, the stars, the separate points of heavenly truth in this great firmament of revelation, than they can be brought by the near sight, the microscope of a close criticism, as of mere human words. If I may change the figure, the one is love listening for the voice from dear lips living; the other is science, dissecting the organs of speech.

It was like a revival of learning, when Dr. Pusey brought to bear upon the subjects which he treated, the accumulated lore of the past. Nor only are we richer for the results of his own studies, in the Catenae Patrum, the commentaries, the sermons which he published. But, under God, we owe to this Tractarian movement, our knowledge of, and access to, those witnesses to the meaning of Scripture, and Creed, and Council, which are most certain to be true, because they tell, not what this Father or that Doctor taught, but what was the intention and interpretation of the early or the contemporaneous Church.

Certainty of the Holy Scriptures; primitive and continuous witness to their authority, their authorship and their authenticity; deep and reverend insight into their meanings and their mysteries; the clearly defined outline of the visible Catholic Church in every age seen through all mists and clouds; the witness of the Universal Church in all the centuries to the power of Sacramental grace,--that we have these to-day, in all their fulness, we owe, under God, to this despised and maligned body, once "everywhere spoken against;" but now, consciously or unconsciously, influencing the Christian thought of the world. Equally, too, let us recognize the revival of learning, in the republication by the Oxford men in the library of Anglo-Catholic Theology of the works of those Fathers of the English Church of the 16th and 17th Centuries, of whom one said well: "There were giants in the earth in those days." It followed inevitably that this revival of doctrine led to a revival of practices in the Church. Because, faith is not merely, in itself, a work--as the Master said, "the work of God is to believe on Him whom God hath sent"--but it works, speaks, acts, worships, expresses itself in sacraments, in services, in sacrifices, in offerings, in self-denials, in deeds of mercy. I am not here to say that Dr. Pusey was without fault. It is most easy for a little man to-day, with the wisdom of the sight that looks back, to see mistakes in him or in any man. And he was, often I think (putting myself by thinking so among the little men), as "children of light" are, not so wise, at least with worldly wisdom, as "the children of this generation." And I am not claiming that the movement did not run into errors and excesses and mistakes. Old rivers run riot in spring freshets, no matter what their soberness of habit and of years. And trees, when the sap starts, are spendthrifts of their power, which wastes itself in too many buds, many of which fall off, and in the wrong set of some new branches, which take strange twists

and forms. But the life, the aim, the general outcome of freshet and sap-rising are for good. We are too timid about the eccentricities of earnestness and the excesses of enthusiasm. God has in hand the issue. Till the harvest, the evil and the good will grow together, and the harvest is not the final ingathering only. But here and now, from time to time, our "works go before us to judgment;" and God sifts wheat from chaff, in the quiet autumn days that follow the teeming vitality of a new spiritual stirring of His Church, and winnows, as with a rushing, mighty wind of Pentecost, the threshing-floor, and only the wheat remains. It has been so, it will be so, about the outcome of the Oxford movement. And we may let the men [1] who deserted, and the mistakes that were made, and the mischiefs that began then and still last on, we may let them alone here. For, the great good, prevailing and abiding, must be in our thanksgivings as we commemorate the life-work of Dr. Pusey, and the chief issues of the movement which God made him lead. We may differ in the language of our summary of these chief issues, or in our estimate of the amount of counterbalance in the way of excesses and extremes. But men do not differ much as to the facts of what God has wrought in the fifty years from 1833 to 1883, during which time the waters have been stirred by the Oxford movement. I may be allowed to quote this striking summary from a secular American newspaper of the day:

"Puseyism, quite as much as Wesleyism, put new life into the English Church, and the religion of the English people. It affected its enemies quite as much as its friends. The earnestness and self-denying evangelism of the Puseyites put the low churchmen and even the dissenters 'on their metal.' It has transformed the external appearance even of dissenting chapels by its revival of ecclesiastical architecture. It has diffused reverence in worship by its doctrine of sacramental grace. It has revived historical Christianity and presented an ever-living Christ. It has invested with awful significance sacramental acts that had lapsed into mere forms. It has knit together the severed veins of the Christian Church. It has taught the greatest statesmen, like Sir Robert Peel, Gladstone, Sidney Herbert, the late Earl of Derby, and even the aesthetic Lord Beaconsfield, a solemn deference to sacred things, a baring of the head and taking oft of the shoes when standing upon holy ground. It has reformed the manners of the English clergy. Where the sacrament had been administered at rare intervals, there is now weekly communion. Where churches had fallen into decay they were renovated; where indecency and profanity had prevailed it inspired the masses with serious and reverential thoughts. It has virtually destroyed the pew system, which made the poor man feel that the house of prayer was not for him. It has purified the grossness of the English hymn books and the slovenliness of English religion. It has made the bishops something more than ecclesiastical machines and mere figureheads of the ship of faith. It has revived Christianity as a life instead of a dead letter. It has made the communion of saints and the presence of angels vivid to the religious imagination. It has created a heroic ideal of Christian virtue, and given martyrs and saints to a material and unbelieving age. It has reburnished the old Christian armor and equipped the flower of England's youth with a new chivalry. It has called a drowsy peasantry to prayer by brief services at matins and evensong. It has made pastors as well as preachers of the national clergy. It has made the wealthy build churches and rear altars as in the olden time. It has weaned many of the aristocracy from frivolity and self-indulgence, and persuaded them to make life worth living by the imitation of Christ. It has founded sisterhoods, and given woman her old place beside the Cross and Sepulchre. In a word, it has purified the very sources of the national life.

"The visible effects of this much-abused Puseyism--ridiculed by such Gallios as Macaulay--are too palpable to be denied or ignored by the keenest skeptic or the most cynical man of the world. Whately exhausted his sarcasm upon the movement at Oxford, and Blanco White predicted that it could only end in the wholesale conversion of Anglicans to Rome. But it has been Newman's changeful followers, not Pusey's steadfast fellow-workers, who have abandoned its principles and forsaken its banners." [The Brooklyn Eagle].

Looking in our own land, let us remember how here we have pushed on our aggressive work as a great missionary Church, till the two missionaries have grown to fourteen home missionary bishops, fifteen home missionary jurisdictions, and more than four hundred missionary clergy, beside the noble men at work in Africa and China and Japan. Let us recall with thankfulness how religious education in Church-schools has grown from the six Church institutions of training, till almost every diocese has its own seminarium, in which the "seed which is the Word" is sown. Let us not forget the splendid tokens of spiritual life--all in this last twenty years--in the organized workers and established works of mercy; the sisterhoods and deaconesses, and the hospitals and orphanages and houses of shelter, which are the inns to which Christ, the good Samaritan, brings the wounded in body and soul, from the desert roads of life, to be cared for by those who seek no repayment till He comes again. And if I may quote again, this time, myself, I add:

"The salient points that tell what fifty years have wrought in doctrine and worship are such as these: far greater reverence and care in the conduct of divine service and in the administration of the Holy Sacraments, and greater importance attached to them; frequency and fervency of Holy Communions; multiplied services of every sort, from the quiet composure of the Church's daily order to the intense services of missions and Lenten preachings and Advent Meditations; Feasts and Fasts observed; the far more careful training of candidates for confirmation, and the deeper solemnity of that grace-giving, sacramental ordinance; the bolder and simpler teaching of doctrine, alike in sermons which are lessening in mere rhetoric and finish, and strengthening in the wealth of Scripture exposition and direct appeal; and in the few Sunday-school manuals which will survive the mass of trash that strews the land; the chanting and the choral service, the hymns and the hymn-singing, as they not only enrich the common worship of the Church, but make it the worship of God, and not the pietistic self-contemplation in public of individual holiness. These and their outward and visible signs of the cross uplifted on our churches, and borne in solemn processions, of altars duly built and vested, of Churches planned after the general architectural laws which the Church has set her seal on, as most suggestive in their symbolism, and best suited in their character, for the kind of worship which centres about the offering of the Eucharistic sacrifice; these are the tide-marks--ridging not merely the sand of shifting feelings, but the great rocks of established principles--tide-marks of that advancing wave, whose waters were just setting towards the flood half a century ago."

Of the excesses of the movement--the swash and swirl of the strong current, breaking down banks and barriers which had to be restored, and bearing along in open view the drift-wood of useless trifles and the dead-wood of lifeless forms,--one can only say, that they are due to the fallibleness and frailty of our nature, and to the fact that some men among Pusey's followers clung to the outskirts of the movement, which are, of course, extremes; hugged the skeleton of mere externals with neither clothing flesh, nor circling blood of earnestness and reality; and learned the shibboleth of a mere parrot repetition of phrases, whose intense meaning conveyed to them no consciousness of their solemnity.

It is of course impossible to enter at length, and in detail, into any of the great ranges of teaching which Dr. Pusey advocated and practiced. Two matters which have been brought somewhat conspicuously before us in later years, by the published life of the great Bishop Wilberforce, we hardly can pass by. Dr. Pusey's teaching in regard to private confession, and his editing of Roman Catholic books of devotion, like "Avrillon's Guides," have been held by some, to have unsettled the belief of many persons in the Church of England, and driven them towards Rome. I greatly doubt the fact. I am inclined to think that, where one has crossed the border-line, failing to see it for faintness, not in the line itself, but in the individual eye, where one has crossed it, being led towards it, by the setting forth of Catholic doctrine, up to the point where Catholic truth and Roman error diverge, a hundred have been driven to Rome by the mistiness of modern rationalizers, and the dreariness of ultra-Protestant denials, of truths and means which the soul craves, when it is bowed down underneath a sense of sin, or under the shadow of sorrow. But the difficulty of great minds and souls in leading others, who are less great than they, lies often here. Maurice and Arnold and Stanley holding that "the Christian soul is naturally and inherently human" (because Christ's soul was human), were followed by scores of men who left out Christianity, and preach and hold to-day a Gospel, or a man-spel, of a humanity sufficient for its own sanctification and salvation. It was so in this other case. Dr. Pusey's intense sense of the awfulness of sin, his rare acquaintance with the secret workings of the human heart, his wonderful ability to counsel and guide in difficult cases of conscience, his gift of spiritual diagnosis, led him to advocate and advise private confession in a way which was safe in his hands, but unsafe in the hands of men who adopted, without ability to assimilate, the system of either teaching and practice. Safe and helpful in his hands, it is unsafe in theirs, as an amputating knife would be in the hands of a butcher, or as apothecaries' drugs, weighed by the scales of avoirdupois. But that there are empirics does not discredit the beneficence of the practice of medicine.

In like manner, the kindled and chastened powers of his soul used and meant language in devotional books, exotic in England and America, but the natural utterance of men of warmer temperaments. I would give very much if I could find the whole of a correspondence which I had with Dr. Pusey, during the Lambeth Conference, upon the question of private confession, in which the personal fitness for such distinctive duty was discussed; because it threw new light to me upon the fact of the great difference in the judgment of honest men upon this subject. But of this I am sure, that no man, more earnestly than he, could have discouraged either the undertaking of the delicate duty of hearing confessions by unskilled, unsympathetic, professional priests; or the cultivation of morbid introspection, by compulsory or sentimental confessions. The truth is, that Keble's opening words in the Preface to the Christian Year, are in accord with the whole train of the Oxford movement, and they pervert it who forget them. "Next to a sound rule of faith there is nothing of so much consequence as a sober standard of feeling in matters of personal religion." Dr. Pusey wrote to me, because he was distressed at what he thought the somewhat vague language of the bishops, as to encouraging private confession. And while he claimed that no priest was bound to discourage it, he entirely disclaimed the right of its being urged as a necessary preparation for Holy Communion, as a requisite of a higher or holier life, or as the only remedy for post-baptismal sin. And he felt most strongly the need of the training of clergy for this most delicate task. It is not too much to say, in the face of the great danger that inheres in this much-abused privilege of burdened souls, that its entire disuse has certainly helped to deaden the life of God in the soul; that its right use has been, and is, helpful to many a heavy heart; and that the indiscriminate decriers of private confession, are either the men who know, by hearsay, or by frightful knowledge, of its abuse, or the men who never have used it, as priest or penitent, at all.

I must say one other word. Dr. Pusey's effort to reconcile the Roman authoritative statements of doctrine with Catholic symbols of truth may have seemed to some, more ingenious than ingenuous, a piece of specious and of special pleading. But against these, must be set off that "olive branch shot from a catapult," as poor Newman called the Eirenicon, when he was hit and hurt by it; whose title is, "the Church of England a portion of Christ's one Holy Catholic Church and a means of restoring visible unity;" and which is a most searching and uncompromising denial, with irresistible proofs, of the modernness and human-ness and falseness of Rome's corrupt additions to the faith. And whatever may have been the longing and outreaching efforts of this holy man to reconcile the irreconcilable, they grew out of his intense desire for the fulfilment of the Saviour's passionate prayer for "the actual, mystical oneness, inwrought by Christ our Head, uniting the whole Church together in one with Himself in His body; an actual oneness produced by grace, corresponding to the oneness of the Father and the Son by nature;" "even as Thou, Father, art in me and I in Thee, that they all may be one in us." Let us beware, in a day when agreement to disagree passes for unity, when we discriminate with dangerous facility and fertility of self-will, between essentials and non-essentials; when men set up an idol of what is called liberality, which is liberal to the extent of giving away parts of the deposit of the truth, and illiberal only to the faith itself; when unity means common cause on uncommon occasions, upon common and worthless points, with varying sects, but never a hope or prayer that the old schisms of Christendom may be healed; let us beware how we judge this man, if in the very glare of the fire that burned within his soul for the true, organic unity of the Church Catholic, he seemed not to see clearly the dangers of attempted reconciliations: namely, of explaining away the errors whose evil was not in the language, which might be made to conform to Scriptural standards, but in the false teaching they were intended and inevitably tended to convey.

One other phase of Pusey's influence and power may not be passed by. This student was no recluse, winking with owl-eyes when forced to face the garish light of the outer world. It may well be doubted whether any man ever surpassed his mighty power as a preacher, not merely, I think I may say, not mainly, of theoretical, but of practical Christianity. I do not allow that false and foolish antagonism, which this age is fond of making, between dogmatic and practical. Having first made dogma a matter of opinion, and then made practice the indulgence of natural instincts, and so removed all thought from either of any standard to which each must be conformed, this age divorces that which God has joined together; throws the faith overboard; is impatient of any teaching of the truth; and means, by practical teaching, some passing, superficial, ear-tickling topic of the day. It is a false and fatal distinction. Every attribute that describes man's relation to God is an attribute of intense activity, and not of subjective passiveness. Is it love? That is "the fulfilling of the law." Is it faith? That is "working the works of God." Is it penitence? That is forsaking sin. Theories and thoughts about religion are not doctrine or dogma. Articles of religion are not creeds. Uninfluential and inoperative, they are unpractical and disconnected from holy living. But doctrine, dogma, is life, is practical. Baptized into the name of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the believer is baptized into obedient sonship, into cleansing by the sacrifice, and following the example, of the Lord Jesus, into sanctification by the Holy Spirit of God. And so doctrine is life. This I have already spoken of as a note of the character and work of Dr. Pusey. It will sufficiently illustrate this, if any one will read his tract on Baptism, and his sermon on "The entire absolution of the penitent." They are in a sense dogmatic, as stating the power of the new birth in the sacrament, and of pardon in the power to remit sins. But their weight and force lie in their intense statement of the awful nature of sin, "the remedy provided for it by our Lord's meritorious sufferings and death, and the application of that remedy in Holy Baptism." And then came the question of post-baptismal sins, the daily danger of every Christian soul; treated, you may say doctrinally, and yet with what awful practical power, as he forced home the fact that it was not what it would have been without the baptismal gift, "not a falling away from a state, but the falling away from a new life, undoing a new nature, defiling the temple of the Holy Ghost." And this was the line of his teaching in his life and with his lips. Mozley's description of the preacher, with special reference to the University sermon, preached after his suspension ended, is well worth quoting here: "Oxford has had, and has within her (in 1846), a voice which speaks with the love and power of intensity and earnestness to her sons; a voice which, without art, or manner, or any of the advantages of oratorical discipline or nature, is powerful by intensity, and impressive by the single-minded force of love, and a penetrating purity of will; a voice which always speaks amid the perfect silence of arrested and subdued thoughts, which is allowed always to still and to fix for the time that it is speaking, the waywardness, dissonance, and wanderings of inward nature; which imparts to its hearers for the time, somewhat of that serenity, awe, and singleness, out of which itself issues, and which creates amid the confusions and bustle of the mind's commonplace, intellectual life, a temporary calm, during which ideas, hopes, and longings, which were never entertained before, find an entrance into many a mind to produce their living and permanent fruits afterwards."

Dr. Pusey's sermons are a marvellous and most unusual instance of varied powers consecrating themselves to do battle for the truth and for holiness, with whatever weapons the peculiar exigencies of the time required. One turns with amazement from the abstruse and difficult study of his last sermon on "Un-faith," to the simplicity of the sermon on the text, "Do all in the name of the Lord Jesus;" and to the fiery energy, like Elijah's, or the Baptist's, of his sermon "On our Pharisaism," or to that scorching and scathing rebuke of the sins of the clubs and drawing-rooms of a great city like London, in his sermon "Why did Dives lose his soul?"

"Dives had this excuse, that it was not an extreme necessity which he neglected. Lazarus was fed by others, yet Dives is in hell. But we know of Lazarus starving, and not fed; kept out of our sight, often shrinking from it; his cries unheard by us, but heard by God. We know of chronic distress among our artisans, men of the same blood as ourselves, against whom famine tries habitually its strength, so that it is said that 'nothing can starve them.' The weavers of your gay clothing starve, while you make a show of their toil. The women who fit your dresses perish untimely (some hard by) by their wasting toil. It is a known class of women which ekes out its scanty wages by occasional deadly, degrading sin. .... And you, which robe are you weaving for yourselves? Are you arraying Christ in the robes wherewith you clothe His poor, that at the awful day your Judge may say, 'With this have ye clad me: I see you, not in the defilement of your sins, but clothed in the robe of my righteousness; receive the robe of glory, which I have dyed for you with my own most precious blood.' If not, what remains for you but the robe of everlasting fire to wreathe round you, your inseparable dress forever?"

One said of his sermon on "Pharisaism," preached in St. Paul's, Knightsbridge, on Ash Wednesday, 1868, that "as flash after flash came fast from that paleface, and the quiet cadence of that loving voice fell in mighty thunderings, the hearers had not a breath to waste upon the man. It was all they could do to breathe through the storm of words he spoke."

The characteristic of his preaching was always its intensity, and I believe it will be found on any unprejudiced study of his writings that his chief aim, whether he pressed home truth, or magnified the means of grace; whether he preached on the entire absolution of the penitent, or the awful judgment of the sinner; whether he urged the tenderness of the Divine Love, or the awfulness of the Divine judgment; his chief aim was to raise men from what he called a "zealless, loveless, lifeless worship of God, who is Love, to a holy life."

Canon Carter speaks of Pusey's mind as "many-sided to an unusual degree;" and Liddon said, that "to attempt to describe his life was like sailing round the ocean." Thank God, Canon Liddon, furnished as no other man can be for the task, with the compass of perfect sympathy and the chart of an intimate knowledge of the great man of whom he writes, is to give the biography of Dr. Pusey to the Church. And this century will get no more precious book. I have not ventured upon such an undertaking, but only sought with sincere and reverent love to touch upon a salient point or two of his rare mind and remarkable life, as they gave power and purpose to the great Oxford revival of letters and of life. I have not desired to shirk or shrink from whatever obloquy belongs, or ever did belong to an assent to the several and separate distinctive principles which Puseyism, so called, brought into revived and realized existence fifty years ago. But the fact is that, in an outlook over half a century, one sees, as it were, the white harvest-fields, of one season at least, the world over. Things have had time to be sown, to take root downward and bear fruit upward, to spring and grow, one knoweth not how. And that outlook is too broad, to speak of just what every single field may hold, to count the beards of wheat or the beads of barley, to distinguish the variety or to detail the number of the weeds. Seeding and sower are judged by the great, glowing glory of the harvest, if it makes the valleys "laugh and sing," if it ''makes glad the heart of man" and "his countenance cheerful," if it feeds "the wild beasts upon the mountains and the cattle upon a thousand hills," if it "satisfies men with bread here in the wilderness." And whatever else this ingathering may tell, it chants, for a harvest-home song, with the rhythmical movement of Millais' picture, this legend: "A sower went forth to sow:" "the Seed is the Word."

Before and behind and beside all other things, Pusey's life-work and Pusey's leadership tended to deepen in men's minds the sacredness, and to draw out before men's minds the sense, of the Holy Scriptures. Learning and holy life were set to this. He dared to prove and wear Saul's armor,--the very results of German philosophy and German thought. But he accounted himself strongest with staff, and scrip and sandal, going forth as David went; and in his shepherd's bag, that is, in the furnishing of his pastorate of souls, storing the stones he gathered from "Siloa's brook that flowed fast by the oracle of God," the very words of God Himself.

Dear friends, dear brothers, let a man speak to you who has crossed the equator, the imaginary line that parts youth from age, and has put away the extravagances of childish things; let a man speak to you, whose birth was synchronous with the Oxford movement; let a man speak to you, whose office has its only comfort and its only power in its fatherliness; and let him say to men and women, to priests and laymen, to teacher by the consecration of motherhood or by the ordination of the Holy Ghost, let him say to all-- for we are learners, every one--that the power of any life, of any school of teaching, of any study, of any pulpit, lies just here. The searcher of the Scriptures, the man that is "mighty in the Scriptures," the wielder of "the Sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God," having drunk in from the breasts of our spiritual mother "the sincere milk of the Word," is the teacher of men, who "will have power and prevail." And they only err, wander and grope blindly in the dark, and lose their way, and lose their souls, and lose the souls of others, they err, in sorrow uncomforted, sin unforgiven, weakness unstrengthened, darkness unilluminated, ignorance untaught, who know not "the Scriptures, nor the power of God."

"Nocturna versate manu, versate diurna." By night and day, in the constant familiarity of frequent study, of turning over and turning back, of looking into the Sacred Books in their original or in their great English counterparts, so, my brother priests, on whom God has laid the duty "rightly to divide the Word," fit yourselves to be "stewards of the mysteries of God."

What was beyond this in Pusey's life, and Pusey's work, was his own personal holiness; which showed the end and aim of all, to deepen the sense of the sacredness of Scripture and to draw out its sense, that so the faith of men might be strengthened into deeper holiness of life. As he said himself, speaking of his reasons for throwing himself into the tractarian movement, "This I did with a view to the deepening of the piety of individual souls and to the restoration of the whole English Church, by God's blessing, to the high ideal which she set before her, namely, to represent in life and in doctrine the teaching of the Undivided Church." And great was (great always must be) the power of personal holiness in this man, so lowly in his own esteem, so lovely in his patience; "making many rich," and yet in his own esteem "poor," "possessing all things" of intellectual furnishing, and yet, as he thought "having nothing." I know no rarer proof of this, than the wonderful way in which he took his scholar's gown into the arena of public contention, and wrestled there, and wore it back again with no Olympic dust upon the silken folds of its meditative serenity; took even his Eucharistic linen vestment into great controversial gatherings, and brought it back to the Altar of our Offering, "unspotted from the world." Saint and sage, scholar and soldier, somehow he was holy enough to take the Ark of God down into the field of battle, and it took no harm.

Pusey's position as a controversialist is a rare instance of the combined power of his learning and his life. His charity, being intense love, rejoiced in the truth in its entireness. And he never confused hatred of error and love for those who were in the wrong. Nay, the more he loved the truth, the more he longed to make men, whose souls he loved, sharers of it. And the more he hated error, the more he held to the duty of making the truth attractive by loving statements of it. In the sorrow and alarm over the perversion of those whom he had trusted as his fellow-workers, he wanted no manifesto of violent denunciation or of personal loyalty. He would only live and "die in the Church of England." When he went back to resume his place as University Preacher after his suspension, he began his sermon, as though the last had been preached a week before with no break between. And when that other master of another school, Dean Stanley, wrote, "Let us think of our controversies as they will appear when we shall be forced to sit down at the feast with those whom we have known only as opponents here, but whom we recognize as companions there;" Dr. Pusey said, crusader and cross-bearer that he was, first, "We are bound, not through any fear of man, or faintheartedness, or sloth, or dread of repelling an already alienated world, to soften or pare down the truth with which we are intrusted." And then he said (and let us say, Amen), in the very spirit of the crucified: "Would God it may be so! Joyous, besides its joy in God, will be that reunion of His redeemed, when those who have been severed for awhile, through no wilful rejection of the truth, shall, in the sight of the ever-blessed and adorable Trinity, together see and adore the perfect truth."

His faith was so loving, and his love was so believing that he never prostituted his belief to bitterness, nor altered with its priceless purity through cowardice, misnamed charity. His life was so learned, and his earning so alive, that he was seldom, if ever, proved inconsistent; and though he was a living library of the Fathers, he never seemed a fossil or an antiquity. And, above all, the fire from God's altar that kindled his lips, so consecrated his character, that his life adorned, illustrated and enforced his doctrine. And so he lived, prayed, worked, talked, died. And his kopoi, his labors of controversy and strife have ceased, with the rest into which he has entered; where he is "kept secretly in God's tabernacle from the strife of tongues." But his works (erga) not only "live after him," they have "gone in with him," in utter harmony, with the eternal occupation of the Saints; contemplating the Fatherhood of God, looking deeply and clearly into the Word, drinking of the very presence and personality of the Holy Spirit, longing and praying for the perfecting of the Saints, for the consummation of the kingdom, for the coming and the crowning of the Lord.


APPENDIX.

THE foregoing sermon was preached at the request of the Pusey Memorial Committee of Philadelphia, and is printed with the conviction that it will awaken fresh interest in the subject of the Memorial. It is thought not inappropriate to append to it the original circular of the Philadelphia Committee, which sets forth briefly the needed particulars, and the letter of Mr. Phillimore, giving the state of the fund. A list of the contributions in the United States, so far as known, is also added, in the hope that other cities may be stimulated into taking part.

CIRCULAR.
MEMORIAL TO EDWARD BOUVERIE PUSEY, D.D.
PHILADELPHIA, April, 1883.

THE shape which this Memorial Fund has taken commends it to all. Dr. Pusey's valuable library has been purchased; a suitable house obtained near St. John's College, Oxford, and enough beside to secure the service of one competent librarian.

What is wanted now is, to so increase the fund as to provide several associate resident teachers able to aid and direct young men in their theological studies; to strengthen them in sound church principles, and to send forth from the venerable centre of Oxford a healthful influence which shall extend to all parts of the Anglican communion.

Dr. Pusey's name appeals to us here, not as a controversialist, but as one whose contributions to the elucidation and defence of the Holy Scriptures are second to none.

When the faith of many seemed shaken, the appearance of his great book on Daniel was hailed with delight by all Christians; and those whose hearts had well-nigh fainted took new faith and courage.

His quarto volume on the minor Prophets, so many years in preparation and in publication, has filled a gap in Biblical comment, and takes its place at the head of all, while his volume on the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, in which he had the aid of the great erudition of the learned Rabbi Dr. Neubauer, does for that all-important portion of God's Word what had never been attempted before. Dr. Neubauer gained such love for Dr. Pusey from his experience his great humility and rare learning, while associated with him in the work, that he asked to be allowed to contribute his share to the Memorial Fund.

It may be added that this is no party memorial, but one in which may properly be asked to join. All shades of opinion within the Church are represented by the contributors in England and elsewhere, while members of other religious bodies have also been glad thus to testify their appreciation of the man and his work. Committees have been formed in New York, Chicago, and Baltimore. At a meeting held in Philadelphia, on April 9th, 1883, the gentlemen whose names appear below were appointed a committee to further the object in this city and vicinity.

Contributions may be sent to the Treasurer, or to any member of the committee.

COMMITTEE.

The REV. ISAAC L. NICHOLSON, D.D., Chairman.
The REV. JAMES W. ROBINS, D.D.,
The REV. CHARLES A. MAISON, D.D.,
The REV. THEODORE S. RUMNEY, D.D.,
The REV. W. W. BRONSON,
The REV. H. INGERSOLL MEIGS,
MR. GEORGE W. HUNTER,
MR. J. VAUGHAN MERRICK,
MR. GEORGE M. CONARROE,
MR. FRANCIS C. YARNALL,
MR. W. PLATT PEPPER.

MR. GREVILLE E. FRYER,
Secretary and Treasurer,
232 Walnut Street.

The following letter of Mr. Phillimore shows the condition of the fund in April, 1883:

THE PUSEY MEMORIAL.

SIR: Your readers will be glad to know what progress the Memorial Fund to Dr. Pusey has made. We have already collected (as the list advertised in your columns will show) over £21,000 out of the £50,000 first proposed to be raised; and Churchmen in the United States are making a collection of their own, which will, we hope, considerably swell our total. We have bought Dr. Pusey's valuable library, and we have acquired a house and land in an excellent situation in Oxford, opposite St. John's College, which may readily be made the site of an institution worthy of him whose name it would commemorate. We have also funds enough already to enable us to endow at least one residentiary librarian, whose duties will not be confined to the mere guardianship of this material deposit, but will extend to every agency by which the deposit of the Faith may be preserved and extended among the members, especially the undergraduates, of the University. We want, however, a considerable increase of our fund for the endowment of an adequate band of associates, and for the erection of a fabric fit to contain the Doctor's library, and serve the various needs of our proposed institution.

WALTER G. F. PHILLIMORE,
Treasurer to the Fund.
86 EATON-PLACE, S. W. LONDON.

CONTRIBUTIONS IN THE UNITED STATES.

Philadelphia (£256. 6s.), . . . $1234.00
New York (£132), .... 660.00
Baltimore (£37), ..... 185.00
Albany, N. Y. (£5), . . . . 25.00
Troy, N. Y. (£6), ..... 30.00


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