CHAPTER XIX.

Roman Controversy and Charges of Romanizing--Tracts on Romanism--On Prayer for the Dead--On Purgatory--Attacks from the 'Record' and 'Christian Observer'--Archdeacon Spooner--Letter to Bishop Bagot.

1836--1837.

IT was in the year 1836 that the controversy on the subject of the claims and position of the Roman Catholic Church again emerged. That such a renewal of ancient strife should take place was inevitable. It was impossible to appeal to Church principles, as the Tractarians had appealed to them in controversy with Latitudinarian and Puritan forms of thought, without being asked the question, How far do you mean to go? For those Church principles were in the main common ground between the Roman and the English Churches. 'We agree with Rome,' said Keble, 'about our major premisses, our differences are about the minor.' This amount of agreement placed the Tractarians between two fires: they were reproached from one quarter with treachery, from another with inconsistency; and they had to show, as well as they could, that they were neither inconsistent nor treacherous; that abstract logic has to take account of the checks which are imposed on it by history; and that the real strength of a position is not to be measured by the assaults to which it may be apparently exposed at the hands of popular controversialists.

In the earlier days of the Movement nothing was heard of the Roman question.

'Romanism,' wrote Pusey, 'in our earlier days, was scarcely heard of among us. . . . It was apparently at a low ebb, and partook of the general listlessness which crept over the Church during the last century. It seemed to present but the skeleton of the right practices which it retained, and helped by its neglect of their spirit to cast reproach upon them. The writer of a work then popular would even speak of it as extinct among us' 'There was in our younger days no visible Church to which to attach ourselves except our own. The Roman communion had in this country but her few scattered sheep, who had adhered to her since the times of Queen Elizabeth. She was herself asleep, and scarcely maintained herself, much less was such as to attract others'.

The change which had taken place was not due only or chiefly to the Church revival at Oxford.

'The Roman Church also has, in some countries certainly, partaken of the same refreshing dew as ourselves: the same Hand which has touched us and bid our sleeping Church, Awake, Arise, has reached her also. Our Lord seems to be awakening the several portions of His Church, and even those bodies which have not yet the organization of a Church, at once.'

But if the revival of religious activity in the Roman Church was independent of anything in the English, it was stimulated and given a new direction by the publication of the Oxford Tracts. They at once roused its hopes and provoked its hostility, and the new situation which was thus created demanded the serious attention of their authors.

'The controversy with the Romanists,' wrote Newman in January, 1836, 'has overtaken us "like a summer's cloud." We find ourselves in various parts of the country preparing for it. Yet when we look back we cannot trace the steps by which we arrived at our present position. We do not recollect what our feelings were this time last year on the subject--what was the state of our apprehensions and anticipations. All we know is that here we are, from long security, ignorant why we are not Roman Catholics; and they, on the other hand, are said to be spreading and strengthening on all sides of us, vaunting of their success, real or apparent, and taunting us with our inability to argue with them.'

Towards the summer of 1835 Newman had been disposed, as has been already mentioned, to bring the 'Tracts for the Times' to a close. Pusey had encouraged him, for several reasons, to continue them. One was the urgency of the 'Popish controversy.' It was needed in present circumstances, and it would prevent a one-sided estimate of their position and aims. 'With the Popish question one might get at all the Low Church: on others the High Church are afraid of us.'

Accordingly -- coincidently with the struggle against Hampden's Latitudinarianism -- a campaign was opened against Roman Catholicism. The third volume of the 'Tracts for the Times' begins with two tracts 'against Romanism.' The British Magazine offered to its readers the striking and original papers entitled 'Home Thoughts abroad,' from Newman's pen. And throughout 1836 Newman was hard at work upon his 'Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church,' which contrast the Anglican position so vividly with that of Romanism on the one side and popular Protestantism on the other.

'It is plain,' he writes, 'that at the end of 1835 or beginning of 1836 I had the whole state of the question before me, on which; to my mind, the decision between the Churches depended'.

Many other symptoms of the same kind of activity were by no means wanting.

Pusey had enough on his hands, but he too projected a work on the same lines as Newman's 'Prophetical Office of the Church.'

'I had made some progress,' he writes to Harrison, 'in some theses on Catholic and Church of England truths, and ultra-Protestant and Romanist errors, on the Church and Sacraments; and I had written a long letter to Rose on the new mode of administering the Lord's Supper, and lost both.'

The letter to Rose was rewritten, but Pusey found no time to reproduce and continue the first-mentioned and more important work.

The reanimation of the Church of Rome in England was quickened in no small degree by the arrival of a divine whose accomplishments and ability would have secured influence and prominence in any age of the Roman Church. Dr. Wiseman had returned to England, and had delivered in London his 'Lectures on the principal Doctrines and Practices of the Catholic Church.' We know, on good authority, that those lectures made a considerable impression, and not only among Roman Catholics. Tyler, who was Vicar of St. Giles'-in-the-Fields, brought Wiseman's lectures under Pusey's notice; and Pusey handed the implied commission on to Newman.

                                                                                                                    [August], 1836.

We seem to be fallen into Jeremiah's days. 'Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth.' Yet I think that if your acquaintance with Dr. Wiseman does not prevent it, a controversy with him would do much good. As far as I know, most of our old controversy with Rome was carried on upon wrong (Genevan) principles: it would be a good thing to have one on the whole subject on right principles: it would bring out those principles: people would see that Catholic principles can be maintained against Popish, and would receive them the rather because they are on their own side. It seems, in all ways, a good opening; so I send you Tyler's invitation to war terminated by his prayer for peace in his days.'

I have directed my banker to put £20 to your account, that you may have one scruple the less, whenever you think it right to take your B.D. degree: if you do not take it now it may accumulate until you are grand-compounder. Bishop Lloyd used to hold that the Divinity Professor was not singled out to present, but that any D.D. might do it. I send you my hood, because, mutatis mutandis, I should have liked yours. Do not be in a hurry to set free the said £20, simply because it is shut up.

                                           Ever your very affectionate friend,

                                                                                        E. B. PUSEY.

They used to do the like things of yore, so I am only falling back on old times.

Newman, whose head was at the time full of the subject, reviewed Wiseman in an article which is not the least able of his polemical efforts on either side in the great controversy.

Pusey had on his part a department of the general question assigned to him by circumstances. Dr. Dickinson, the Orange author of 'A Pastoral Epistle from His Holiness the Pope to the writers of the Tracts for the Times,' had

'through want of acquaintance with antiquity' been led to 'confound the early practice of commemorating God's departed servants at the Holy Communion, and praying for their increased bliss and fuller admission to the beatific vision, with the modern abuse of Masses for the Dead and the doctrine of Purgatory.'

Dr. Dickinson was referring to Tract No. 72, containing 'Archbishop Ussher on Prayers for the Dead,' which had appeared in the early part of the year. Pusey had himself hesitated as to the publication of this tract.

                                                                                        [Undated, but before Nov. 29, 1835.]

I feel much perplexed about mentioning the subject of Prayer for the Dead: First, there is not the same occasion for bringing it forward as forgotten points of doctrine of our Church, i.e. no necessity laid upon us, as ministers of the Church. (2) It might hinder other important views being received. (3) It, perhaps, more than any other, would bring down the outcry, not only of the Ultra-Protestants, but of most Anti-Catholics; the Tyler party and all who having been brought up in Protestantism have not gone back to the Fathers, or been led back by feeling, would think it sin. You only can answer to yourself the question, whether this outcry might not do yourself harm as the object of it; at least, it has a tendency to produce excitement, &c., not salutary (in myself). (4) In the present day, there might be much abuse of the doctrine, on account of persons' lax notions of sin, repentance, the terms of acceptance. If I inserted the passage I should accompany it with a protest against the laxity of the present day, which seems to think it scarcely possible that any can miss of Heaven.

I am unfit to decide: my first bias was against it; my second an unwillingness to hinder it, on the ground of my first note, and also because, if introduced hereafter, when persons might be riper, it might look like an afterthought. My abiding feeling doubts as to its expediency, but I have a conviction of my own inability to decide, knowing and seeing so little of people's sentiments. Thanks for this morning's call. I am still free from cough, and hope to be kept so.

When, however, the tract had been written, and Pusey had had time to go through it, he saw reason to change his mind.

                                                                                                Christ Church, Nov. 29, [1835].

I have read this through again with great satisfaction: if I part with any it is with reluctance, and I should part with as little as possible, thinking the restoration of the whole of the old views a gain, and that it is hard to go on teaching men to go counter to their natural feelings and impulses, and that they should not pray to God when they fain would, i.e. when He suggests to them so to do. I do not like recommending that it should be struck out: it is written: I was at first inclined to think it to be parted with as giving a handle; but since there are so many ripe for it, and to whom it would be a blessing, I should be unwilling to keep it back: only you might distinguish more fully between the Romish abuse and the primitive use. I gradually lean more and more towards retaining it.

When then Dr. Dickinson, in his notorious 'Pope's Pastoral Epistle,' attacked the Oxford writers with advocating prayers for the dead, Pusey himself took up the defence. The few pages in which he accounts for the omissions of such prayers from the English Liturgy, while insisting, not merely that they are lawful, but a duty which charity owes to the departed, are among the most careful that he has written. The reason which may have determined the Edwardian reformers to abandon their public use is no longer valid; and if antiquity is to count for anything as an interpreter of the mind of Scripture, they cannot be set aside as of no account in a practical Christian life. They have the sanction of some of the highest names in Anglican divinity; and they satisfy some of the best and finest aspirations of the human heart.

Not long after Pusey had occasion to insist on the negative side of his position in this matter. Newman had sent him the MS. of his tract on Purgatory, which was suggested by the earlier tract on Prayers for the Dead from Archbishop Ussher.

The tract did not meet with Pusey's approval, and he wrote his mind with a plainness unusual in him when writing to one whom he loved and trusted so greatly.

                                                                                                                   Thursday night.

I have marked such passages as I think would most startle people; and made some notes which might soften the effect. But, somehow, your way of writing against the Romanists is so different from what people are accustomed to, that it will take much pains not to shock them; you seem to take lower ground in the first instance than you do at the end, and so people are pre-disposed against you; and what comes at last, though decisive, hardly seems to come heartily, because it has not come before, but comes laggardly. As if you were reluctant to say that the Romanists are in the wrong, although at the end truth compels you to do so!.... In such an apology, as it were, for the theory of Purgatory, something stronger against the practice is the more needed· A few sentences would suffice; for they might give a colouring to the whole, which it now wants·.I think it might be done without trouble if you would write some few lines, as you have elsewhere, on the practical effects of Purgatory.

This is the first indication of a divergence between Pusey and Newman. It was suspected at the time by neither of them. Newman may well have written the introduction to Tract No. 79 in consequence of this letter. It is in the main what Pusey wanted, namely, 'a few lines on the practical effects of Purgatory.' The following passage describes accurately enough the balance of Newman's mind at that time.

'Since,' he writes, 'we are in no danger of becoming Romanists, and may bear to be dispassionate, and, I may say, philosophical, in our treatment of their errors, some passages in the following account of Purgatory are more calmly written than would satisfy those who were engaged with a victorious enemy at their doors. Yet, whoever be our opponent, Papist or Latitudinarian, it does not seem to be wrong to be as candid and conceding as justice and charity allow us'.

No precautions, however, on Pusey's part could silence the charge of Romanizing which was being brought against the writers of the Tracts by Puritans as well as by Latitudinarians. Pusey always had a much warmer feeling for the former than for the latter class of opponents. As he wrote in 1865:--

'Ever since I knew them (which was not in my earliest years) I have loved those who are called "Evangelicals." I loved them because they loved our Lord. I loved them for their zeal for souls. I often thought them narrow, yet I was often drawn to individuals among them more than to others who held truths in common with myself, which the Evangelicals did not hold, at least explicitly.'

Accordingly when in September 1836 he received some very violent letters from a worthy clergyman of this description, he answered them at great length, but without producing any effect. The clergyman told him that it was the Record which had guided him to form so unfavourable an opinion of Pusey and his friends. Could not something be done, if Pusey were only to appeal to the wisdom and justice of the Record?

'I send you,' Pusey writes to Newman, 'a letter to the Record. If they put it in, it will obtain us a hearing among the readers of the Record: if not, I shall send it to the British Magazine.' 'I almost, question,' answered Newman, 'the pro dignitate of your corresponding with the Record.'

Pusey then forwarded to Newman the letter of his clerical correspondent 'as a specimen of the times and of the effects of the Record.' 'I have,' he added, 'written a rather long answer.' Newman replied:--

                                                                                                                           Sept. 7, 1836.

'I am not pleased at your corresponding with the Record. Your paper is so good and valuable that some use must be made of it: but I altogether protest against the Record. Again, I am not for answering all misrepresentations. Things come right in a little while, if we let them take their course. Opportunities arise. The more I think of it, the more I am against your writing to the Record. You do the editor, &c. harm, by making him a tribunal, and you make it seem as if you were hurt and touchy. At present it strikes me I would alter it into the third person, whatever I did with it. Sometimes I may go into extremes; but I like leaving events to justify one.'

Newman himself had written to the British Magazine about the 'Lyra Apostolica,' when the Record had interpreted it as reflecting upon Dr. Chalmers, and those who looked up to him might be hurt. A similar motive had led him to write to the papers when he declined to marry a parishioner who had not been baptized. But he would not write simply to defend himself or his writings.

Sept. 7, 1836.

'I agree,' replied Pusey, 'altogether with your criticisms: I was surprised to find the paper so apologetic; I have struck out every word of apology, and everything, as I thought, which could look like an appeal to the Record (even to the words "writer in your paperä), so that now, if they were to insert it, it is at most an "appeal to the clerical readers of the Record." I need not give you the trouble of looking through all this interlining, the first sentence will show you the character of its new dress.

'It seemed to me an object to get at the readers of the Record, if one could, most of whom, I suppose, one cannot get at but through the Record. Manning says they are doing mischief: my letter from -- confirms it; perhaps, writing with my name, I might come into contact privately with some of them. At all events, it will make some people see what right principles are, who have perhaps never seen them except through the distorting lens of the Record.'

'Take care,' rejoined Newman, 'you are not knocked up. I am so afraid these various letters will overset you. You must not mind a letter like Mr. --'s; I have some idea I have heard of him as a ranting, self-confident man. His letter shows him to have no mean opinion of himself. Depend upon it, whatever you said in explanation, a certain number of persons will misunderstand you, and not those whom you would feel distressed about. They, though perplexed for a time, will in time understand you, and the Truth. "The wise shall understand." By going through evil report we attain good report. I do not see why you should not answer Mr. --'s immodest letter, as far as the thing itself goes. But I see many reasons, as far as your health goes...; You will suffer for it afterwards.'

But, after all, the Record might not insert what it had cost Pusey much to write. A party newspaper inserts or rejects communications without much regard to the justice of the case, but as the prejudices of its readers or the theory it upholds for truth may seem to require.

'From what I have since heard, the Record,' wrote' Newman, 'will not put anything in. I doubt if you sent it yourself it would do more than say in the notices to correspondents, "We have received Dr. Pusey's letter, but it does not alter our opinion: however, we shall keep it by us, &c. or "We respectfully inform Dr. Pusey that our paper is not intended as an arena, &c."I would still wait, were I you, and see what comes of it.'

But if Newman thought that Pusey had better not defend himself. In the columns of the Record, he was very willing to defend Pusey. The Christian Observer had attacked the tract on Baptism. Dr. Pusey, it said, ought to lecture at Maynooth or the Vatican. He had taught that while the patriarchs of the Old Testament were not regenerate persons, Voltaire, as being baptized, was regenerate. He had denied that God conveys grace only through the instrumentality of the mental energies; holding that infants might be baptized, or even communicate, with possible spiritual advantages. He had taught that the Sacraments are the appointed instruments of justification.

'He may,' it continued, 'construe some of the offices of the Church after his own manner; but what does he do with the Articles and Homilies? We have often asked this question in private, but could never get an answer. Will any approver of the Oxford Tracts answer it in print?'

.It must suffice to refer to Newman's brilliant answer to this challenge which is contained in the 82nd Tract. The writer in the Observer had misunderstood Pusey when he had not misquoted him; although as to the worth and effect of the Christian Sacraments, and their relation to justification, there was a very wide gap between Pusey and the Christian Observer. But the most interesting part of the paper is that in which Newman meets the challenge thrown out to Pusey. He denies that he has subscribed the Homilies or anything more than a certain statement about them. He points out that they contained a great deal of language which no consistent Low Churchman could possibly accept. He insists that the Articles may fairly be interpreted in more ways than one--thus foreshadowing the argument of Tract 90. The paper is full of interest, both in itself and as illustrating the history of its author's mind; here it is only referred to as exhibiting the defensive attitude which the Tract-writers already had to assume in respect of the charge of Romanizing. But as yet there was no more doubt in Newman's mind than in Pusey's of the strength and worth of the Anglican position, whatever Puritanism or Romanism might say about it.

At the beginning of 1837 attacks upon the Movement became frequent.

'I hear,' writes Mr. Dodsworth on January 6, 1837, 'that there was a most violent and abusive attack on us at a meeting of clergy at Islington yesterday, and great alarm expressed at the spread of High Church principles, which they did not scruple to denounce as heretical. This looks well for the cause, but is sad for them.'

'Nothing,' wrote Newman in commenting on this, 'inspires me with greater hope for our cause, or rather brings home to me the fact that we are on the whole right, and they on the whole wrong.'

At this period too we find the name of the Rev. C. P. Golightly for the first time among the opponents of the Movement. 'Mr. Golightly was a kind-hearted and in his way an earnest man, if somewhat self-important. He had taken a warm part in the Hampden controversy, and against Hampden: he was now gossiping all over Oxford about some of his old allies--not Pusey himself--in a way which, to say the least, did not help him or others to understand them. Pusey, not having been himself attacked, with characteristic directness wrote to Golightly what the latter called 'a severe' scolding,' and 'warned him against the dangerous occupation of talking over or against people.' Golightly was much ruffled; Pusey, he held, had not been justified in thus writing, either by seniority, or station, or by the terms of their acquaintance. The correspondence was prolonged, as such correspondences are, without leading to any valuable result. Golightly from this time ranged himself in conscious, and, it, must be added, increasingly bitter opposition to the Oxford leaders.

Another less considerable opponent who now declared himself was the Rev. Peter Maurice, Chaplain of New College.

'The walls of Oxford,' wrote Pusey to Rev. B. Harrison on Easter Day, 1837, 'have been placarded for the last week with "Popery of Oxford,"and its citizens have been edified with the exhibition of Newman's and my name as Papists--all done by Rev. P. Maurice, of New College, author of "Popery in Oxford."I have not seen the placard or the pamphlet. . . . N. only hopes that no one of our friends will answer it, for we ought not to stand upon the defensive.'

An opponent of a very different order was the Venerable W. Spooner, Archdeacon of Coventry, who, in the spring of 1837, when charging the clergy of his archdeaconry, had warned the clergy against the Tracts in energetic terms. Mr. Spooner's early associations had been with the Evangelical party, and he had studiously held aloof from the Oxford Movement. But he was an uncle of the Wilberforces, and was already acquainted with Pusey. The elevation, sincerity, and mildness of the Archdeacon's character secured for his judgment a deserved weight with all good men; but his Charge is principally noticeable as the first expression of official condemnation which the Oxford writers had incurred. Upon receiving the Charge, Pusey addressed to the Archdeacon a respectful remonstrance in a letter of which the following is the central passage:--

                                                                                                                Oxford, June 8, 1837.

We are conscious of no intention but that of recalling to the minds of such of our brethren as we may forgotten truths; we wish to introduce no new doctrines, we appeal (as for instance in the Catena) to standard divines of our own Church, as well as to the Fathers; we do not wish to supersede, but to uphold the authority of our Church, by pointing out its agreement with the primitive Catholic Church. We teach nothing but what has been taught before us. Some things which we have insisted on, as Fasting and Ember-days, have found their way even into the pages of those who censure us. Neither do we wish to give any of these things an undue (and so injurious) prominence; if indeed, we think any point neglected, and so that it is useful to the Church to write on it, we must write on that subject mainly, for one cannot bring the whole fulness of theology into each tract. But it is not part of our system; and I might refer you to Mr. Newman's three volumes of sermons, to show that we do not attach ourselves exclusively to a portion of Christian truth.

The Archdeacon replied with characteristic courtesy. He disclaimed any intention of imputing any dishonesty of motive or intention to the writers of the Tracts. He entertained a high respect for their character and attainments. But he sincerely believed that

'the respectable and learned authors of those Tracts were, unawares to themselves, injuring the pure and scriptural doctrines of the Protestant Faith.'

Another critic who added largely to Pusey's correspondence at this time was the Rev. George Townsend, Canon of Durham. Relying upon the accuracy of the Rev. P. Maurice's pamphlet, and an article in the Christian Observer and 'private information,' he had addressed the clergy of the Peculiar of North Allerton and Allertonshire in the Province of York on the subject of new practices--not doctrines--that were growing up among the adherents of the Oxford school. With great labour, and at the cost of an immense expenditure of time, Pusey convinced him that he had been misled by the authorities on which he depended and the exaggerated reports which he had heard. But the Charge served to swell the gathering volume of unintelligent protest; and the Bishops, or at least Bishop Bagot, began to receive those anonymous denunciations of men and opinions which are inevitable in such circumstances. At last Bishop Bagot wrote to Pusey, enclosing at least one composition of the kind, and begging him to explain how matters really stood. Pusey's letter, the substance of which appeared in an expanded form some months afterwards, is interesting historically as well as on personal grounds:--

                                                                                                            September 26, 1837.

MY DEAR LORD BISHOP,                         

As they have troubled your lordship with those strange statements of what some of the clergy in Oxford are supposed to have done, it seems due from us to inform your lordship what the real state of the case is.

The reports began with a Mr. Maurice, a chaplain of New College, who seems a very excited and vain and half-bewildered person, who seems to think that he is called by God to oppose what he calls the Popery of Oxford. He published a heavy pamphlet, which would have died a natural death had not the Christian Observer wished to have a blow at Mr. Newman and the 'High Church,' and so taken it up though with a sort of protest against identifying itself with Mr. Maurice's language; and thence, I am sorry to say, Mr. Townsend, Prebendary of Durham, has repeated it in a 'Charge to the Clergy of the Peculiar of N. Allerton and Allertonshire.'

The charges made have been 'needless bowings, unusual attitudes in prayers, the addition of a peculiar kind of cross to the surplice, and the placing the Bread and Wine on a small additional table near the Lord's Table or Altar.' These are, at least, what Mr. Townsend repeats.

With regard to the 'needless bowings,' I cannot imagine the origin of the report: there have been no bowings, except at the Name of our Lord.

The 'unusual attitudes in prayer,' I suppose, refer to the new chapel at Littlemore, where there is, as in old times, an eagle instead of reading-desk, and the minister during the prayers kneels towards the East, the same way as the congregation, turning to the congregation in the parts addressed to them in the way recommended by Bp. Sparrow in his 'Rationale of the Common Prayer,' and which Bp. S. doubts not is implied by our rubric before the Te Deum, which speaks of the minister's 'turning himself as he may best be heard,' which implies, he says, that before, he was turned some other way. And he speaks of this practice as still existing about his time. Mr. Newman does the same in his Morning Daily Service in the chancel of St. Mary's, when he has a congregation in many respects different from that which attends the Sunday Service; but in the Sunday Service he has introduced no change whatever. In the Daily Service, being a new service to a new congregation, he thought himself free to follow what seemed to him the meaning of our rubric, according, as it does, with primitive usage and that of our own Church, sanctioned by Bp. Sparrow (whose comment on the rubric has been reprinted by Bp. Mant in the Christian Knowledge Common Prayer-book) and by the practice in Cathedrals in the Litany and Qrdination Services, as your lordship well knows.

The 'additional cross' was, as I mentioned to your lordship, worn by one individual only; but I had not time to explain that this was no device of his own, but according to one interpretation of the rubric prefixed to the Morning Service about the 'Ornaments of the Church and the Minister' being 'the same as in the 2nd year of Edw. VI.' The scarf there directed to be worn had crosses on it. I saw the scarf in question: it was a very narrow one, about three inches I think, with two very unpretending crosses at the two ends, and was meant to be exactly the same as that prescribed in Edward VIth's time, and, as some think, enjoined still. For myself, though the ornaments in Edward VIth's time were much handsomer than those now in use (especially the Bishop's is very beautiful), yet I am content with that explanation of the rubric which dispenses with our observing it; we have too much to do to keep sound doctrine and the privileges of the Church to be able to afford to go into the question about dresses. Still, as Bp. Cosin and others maintain the opinion that this rubric is binding, I did not think it worth while to advise the young clergyman who wore the one in question against it, further than giving him the general advice not to let his attention be distracted by these things from others of more moment. A rigid adherence to the rubric cannot, in its own nature, lead to extravagance, and it seemed a very safe way for the exuberance of youth to vent itself in. I have said the more because he was a pupil of my own; he was a very active and energetic man, and likely to make a very good parish priest, but he has now left Oxford. While here he officiated occasionally at St. Thomas', there only, and Mr. Newman did not know him. Two other individuals wore the same scarf, without the crosses, thinking it safer. Mr. Newman and myself were not acquainted with them when they began the practice. It was in Magdalen College Chapel.

With regard to the remaining charge I need not say anything to your lordship. The innovation clearly is with those who allow the Bread and Wine to be placed upon the Altar by clerks or sextons; only I would say that the 'small additional table' has not been unnecessarily introduced. In St. Mary's and St. Aldate's the Elements have been placed in a recess already existing near the Altar; in St. Michael's the old custom has never been disused; in St. Paul's and Littlemore only, there being no other provision, since the Elements must be placed somewhere, a small neat table has been used as being the more decent way.

I have taken up much of your lordship's time by this long explanation, but I was vexed that your lordship should be troubled by complaints against any friend or acquaintance of mine; it is, in fact, only a side-blow at sound principles, because it is easier to talk about 'dresses' and 'innovations' than to meet arguments.

I have written to Mr. Townsend, stating to him the case and requesting him to correct his misstatements, and, if he does not, purpose to send the letter to the British Magazine, and so I hope that your lordship will not be further troubled in consequence of these exaggerations. In the meantime, if this explanation can be used in any way to prevent any further annoyance, your lordship will of course make any use of it.

Mr. Newman as well as myself much regrets that these idle reports have caused these explanations to be made to your lordship. We would have contradicted them sooner had there seemed any sufficient reason, such as this. I join myself, because these papers always join Mr. Newman and myself, although we maintain no one doctrine or practice which has not the sanction of the great divines of our Church.

Begging your lordship to excuse the length of this letter,

                                    I have the honour to remain,

                                                Your lordship's faithful and obedient servant,

E. B. PUSEY.

These attacks and suspicions were but a foretaste of what was to come on a larger scale. But as yet nothing had occurred to warrant mistrust of the Movement by any large body of Churchmen, or discouragement on the part of its adherents.

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