In the early autumn of 1845, Oxford and, indeed, the whole of England shook with the news that one of her great theologians and priests, John Henry Newman, found it impossible to remain in communion with the Church of England. For those who viewed Catholic revival in the Church of England with suspicion, Newman’s reception into the Roman Catholic Church in October of that year confirmed the inevitable logic of the teaching associated with the Oxford Movement of the 1830’s and 40’s. The one who bore the brunt of this suspicion was E. B. Pusey, Regius Professor of Hebrew at the University of Oxford and Canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, from 1828 to his death in 1880. It is his response to Newman’s secession, and to widespread calls for Pusey to vindicate his allegiance to the Church of England through a personal and public condemnation of the Roman Catholic Church, that this article will consider. (References to Pusey’s letters are from H.P. Liddon’s Life of E. B. Pusey, Vols. II and III.)
The Oxford Movement was the name given to those members of the University of Oxford associated with series of publications ranging in size from small pamphlets to lengthy treatises under the title of Tracts for the Times, written by Members of the University of Oxford. Under J. H. Newman’s editorship, a series of 90 Tracts for the Times published and circulated between 1833 and 1841 encouraged English Christians to reconsider their understanding of the Church.
The Tracts presented the Church not primarily as a department of the State, as a Church “established” by national law. Rather, the authors of the Tracts argued, the Church is first a divinely constituted society founded and maintained by Jesus Christ with supernaturally ordained powers to maintain and build up that society. The Tractarians examined the ordinances, creeds, and doctrines of the Church of England with the light of the fathers of the Undivided Catholic Church prior to the division of the Church into East and West. With such guidance, they suggested, the voice of Christ could be more clearly heard in Holy Scripture and the strictures of narrow, secular or partisan tendencies reduced. They encouraged English Christians to consider seriously and reverently the doctrines of Baptismal regeneration and of the real and objective presence of Jesus Christ in the Sacrament of His Body and Blood. The Tracts encouraged a high estimate of episcopacy, as God’s ordinance, and emphasized the acceptability of good works as a sign of God’s free and justifying grace at work in a person. The ordered public worship and discipline, feasts and fasts of the Church were, according to the Tractarians, effective means for the increase of holiness and thus deserving of the reverent regard of all Christians. For the most part, those associated with the early years of the Oxford movement argued that the Church of England as constituted and described by the Book of Common Prayer, with the Ordinal, the Creeds and the 39 articles, was, to use Pusey’s words from a later time, “the Catholic Church in England, i.e. that Church which God planted here for man’s salvation.”
Newman’s secession to the Roman Catholic Church followed almost five years after he wrote and published Tract 90, “Remarks on Certain Passages of the Thirty-Nine Articles”. In Tract 90 Newman attempts to redress anti-Catholic interpretations of the 39 articles whose origins lie more in suspicion and fear of “Papistry” than in the literal or “grammatical” sense of the articles. The Tractarians argued that anti-Roman feeling and a bias to Puritanism caused the articles to be interpreted so as to distinguish them from doctrines commonly known to be held by the Roman Catholic Church, even if the doctrines in question expressed the Catholic faith of the primitive Church. This is the same tendency against which Richard Hooker argued at the end of the sixteenth century. The Puritans of Hooker’s day criticized the Book of Common Prayer because it maintained certain prayers and a liturgical order that could be found in the Roman Catholic Church. Hooker responded in line with Cranmer’s l549 Preface “Of Ceremonies’’, that ceremonies, like doctrine, should be judged according to whether or not they edify and build up the Church in the doctrine and discipline of Jesus Christ as found in Scripture, not according to their similarity to ceremonies existing in the Roman Church.>p?
To what extent Newman’s Tract 90 lies in the tradition of careful discrimination between what is Catholic, and therefore to be taught by the Church of England, and what is a human accretion to Scriptural truth is much debated. A judicious inquiry would probably find both elements in Newman’s arguments. Popularly, Tract 90 became known for Newman’s reference to the English Church “teaching with the stammering lips of ambiguous formularies” and what many took to be a disingenuous and fanciful differentiation between the “Romish doctrine concerning Purgatory” condemned by Article XXII and a doctrine of Purgatory purified of popular and un-Catholic accretions.
Even Pusey in his role of calming the storm of conflict that arose after the publication of Tract 90 and of clarifying Newman’s meaning and intention could not but find some of Newman’s language at least misleading and unfortunate. For those who challenged the entire enterprise undertaken by the authors of the Tracts for the Times, Tract 90 showed the logical movement from the teaching of the Tractarians, to Newman’s retraction of his harshest and most passionate censures of the Roman Church in 1843, to his reception into that same Church in the autumn of 1845.
Tract 90 also displayed a growing divergence between Newman and Pusey as to how the teaching of the primitive Church should be maintained and lived in the modem world. Pusey later recalls how this difference grew: “Dear J.H.N. [John Henry Newman] said to me one day at Littlemore: ‘Pusey, we have leant on the bishops, and they have given way under us.’ Dear J.K. [John Keble] and l never did lean on the bishops, but on the Church.” This conversation illustrates how Newman and Pusey thought differently about the form in which the Church exists under the conditions of human fallibility in this world, a difference which showed itself in Tract 90.
As certain of the ceremonies set out in the Book of Common Prayer were tainted in Puritan eyes through association with the Roman Church, Pusey’s close friendship and working relationship with Newman undermined his claim to be a faithful son of the Church of England in the years following Newman’s secession. Animosity toward Pusey increased after 1843 when, in the disquiet following the censure of Tract 90, Pusey’s sermon “The Holy Eucharist a Comfort to the Penitent,” which teaches the real, though spiritual, presence of Christ in the Sacrament of His Body and Blood, was condemned. This condemnation by six university doctors, albeit without a hearing, carried with it a two year suspension of Pusey from preaching at the university of Oxford and a de facto ban on his preaching in most parishes in England. Within little more than a year after Newman’s succession, Pusey’s reputation was such that a preaching engagement on Christmas Day 1846 earned him the following account in the Guardian of February 3, 1847:
... in a pew under the pulpit in a plain black gown sat the man whose name is known throughout the kingdom — arraigned on the platform of our great cites, and pronounced with something like a supernatural sense of dread by the smallest coteries of the remotest village.
After noting the contrast between Pusey’s reputation and his humble and self-forgetting demeanor (and we all know how rare that is!), the reporter remarks what at least some in the Church expected to see:
the celebrated Pusey (an heresiarch in the eyes of at least half the Church) of some fearful outline, differing from other men in his form and visage: [however] no horn or cloven hoof ... protruded to reward their curiosity.
Such were the consequences of Pusey’s assuming the spiritual and practical leadership of the Tractarian party, coupled with the infamy associated with his suspension from preaching. He was very much a marked man.
Distrust of Pusey increased through his refusal publicly to condemn the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church, a measure that was urged upon him as the best way to reassure those whose confidence in the catholicity of the English Church was shaken by Newman’s departure. The passionate and partisan spirit of the age made Pusey’s refusal to condemn the Roman Church, of whose errors he felt certain, all the more surprising. In the past Pusey had written, not the fierce denunciations of Rome that Newman later retracted, but reasoned arguments pointing out the contradictions between Rome and the primitive Church. For example, Pusey believed “the authority of the Pope... to be human and not Divine.” He asserted the error of novelties such as “the system of the Blessed Virgin as the Mediatrix and Dispenser of all present blessings to mankind.” Why, then, would Pusey not write something similar for the good of the Church at this time?
Pusey’s letters from the months preceding Newman’s departure show that he was alive to the consequences of Newman’s decision both as a great personal trial and as a blow to the Church. On Good Friday Night, 1845, he wrote to the Rev. H. A. Woodgate concerning Newman:
His energy and gifts are wasted among us. But for us it is a very dreary prospect. Besides our personal loss, it is a break-up, and I suppose such a rent as our Church has never had. Besides those who are already unsettled, hundreds will be carried from us, mistrusting themselves to stay when he goes. It is very dismal.
God comfort you. lt makes me almost indifferent to anything, as if things could not be better or worse. However, if one lives, one must do what we can to gather up the fragments that remain, and meanwhile pray for our poor Church.
A letter to John Keble, the spiritual father of the Tractarians, on Easter Friday, March 28, 1845 echoes Pusey’s pain and foreboding over Newman’s leaving:
It looks like an approaching parting. I fear, whenever it is, the rent in our poor Church will be terrible; I cannot conceive where it will end, or how many we may not lose.
Another letter to Keble (July 8, 1845) shows that Pusey was aware also of the danger of despondency that the Newman trials could precipitate:
People have been anxious that you [i.e. Keble] should in some way do something to cheer and reassure people at such a time as this. They are so discouraged that it would seem as if some would join Rome out of mere hopelessness. They resign themselves as by a sort of fascination, as though it would be sooner or later, ‘Why not at once? and so the step would be taken, and all suspense at an end.'
Here Pusey shows an acute spiritual as well as psychological awareness of the temptation to give up the trial of living as strangers and pilgrims away from our native country to seek an otherworldly security secure from human frailty. Faced with such an offer, the weary are tempted to seize it from whomever claims to offer it in the present. It is in this sense that Newman’s cry, “The Bishop’s have given way under us” displays a correct understanding of the almost tangible certainty that the Roman Catholic Church claimed to offer (along with, paradoxically, certain fundamentalist denominations today). Pusey’s friends’ including W.E. Gladstone, later to become Prime Minister, and Dr. W. F. Hook of Leeds, later Dean of Chichester, struggled to understand Pusey’s reluctance to issue the type of anti-Papal statement that would reassure them along with disheartened adherents to Tractarian teaching. Pusey’s adversaries simply assumed that his reticence proved the weakness and inherent conflict of the Catholic or Tractarian position. For some churchmen, the catholicity of the Church of England remained a concept so abstract as to be empty of any real meaning.
In light of the gravity of the consequences surrounding Newman’s secession, the potential among those with whom Newman laboured for a destabilising fusion of a sense of betrayal with anger and personal loss, and despite the intensity of the attacks Pusey suffered, he nonetheless refused to accept deliverance through anti-Roman invective. Pusey’s letters display his reasoning. To Dr Hook, (September, 1845), he wrote simply, “What I wish to do is to treat positive truth uncontroversially, and leave the issue with God.” One month before the dreaded events of October 9, 1845 finally came, Pusey explained what he meant by “positive truth” in a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s chaplain, the Rev. B. Harrison. In the place of declamation, Pusey would attempt to encourage the disheartened by pointing to the work of God in their midst. He wrote to Harrison:
...I ought to say that I can only take the positive ground of love and duty to our own Church, as an instrument of God for man’s salvation, in which He is present, and gives us the gifts of life, His Body and Blood, and all which is needful to salvation, — as descended from that Church which He planted here, to save souls. I cannot any more take the negative ground against Rome; I can only remain neutral.
Eighteen months later, Pusey wrote Gladstone to say that “finding the contrary [with Rome] would irritate those to whom alone it could be any use.” Condemnations not only served to “engender a bad spirit...”, but it was a poor way to seek Christian unity and to promote holiness. In light of the trials facing the Church of England, Pusey remarked, “I think that we have enough to do at home...“ and that he would not denounce Rome. Pusey’s insistence on teaching positive truth extended beyond his affirmations of God’s presence as a ground for duty and love to the Church of England. He could not offer the general condemnation of the Roman Church that people wanted from him, because such a tactic would be an offence against Charity:
If I did say anything publicly about the Church of Rome, it would be that no good can come of this general declamation against it, without owning what is good and great in it. Many feel this, who love the Church of England deeply... Our protest can I think, only be healthful, effective, if we allow what we ought... If ever, as a Church, we should put forward all we can admit as true, we might be listened to as to what we except against. But this vague declamation is solely against ‘Caritas’.
Pusey here insists on following the principle that the best of the English reformers followed in shaping and defending the Book of Common Prayer: the wheat must not be pulled up for the sake of the tares, the good must be discerned among that which is imperfect. The continued suspicion which Pusey’s silence engendered demonstrates the rarity of careful reason and charity during times of crisis. Pusey’s insistence on positive teaching over passionate invective and sweeping generalities still presents a standard that few are able or willing to follow.
If there were such evils and problems demanding remedy at home, such evils as Pusey believed undermined Newman’s confidence in the Church of England, how did Pusey propose to face them? To remedy the evils of division in the Church of England, what Pusey saw to be proud contempt and a willingness to accept the denial of fundamental truths, he made the following suggestions to Harrison:
And the most effectual way to relieve them I have found, in combination with our own succession, is to point out how God has owned and is owning our Church, His good Providence over here, His gifts in her, the life He is giving Her. These encourage people and give them heart. And so I should say, any great movement in the right direction, as the Colonial Bishoprics...any decided token of like, cheers them. We are in danger, lest people drop off out of mere despondency. My practical line (if God continues me here) would be much as heretofore, to teach whatever Antiquity teaches as being herein the line of our Church, and to try to promote practical holiness, leaving the result to God, and praying Him, with good Bishop Andrewes, to heal our divisions, &c.
In asking for prayers for ‘unity’, I meant that we should ask of God to bring us into one mind, His Own, without presuming what that mind is. Let us all desire to be conformed to His, and surely we shall. If we wait until we are agreed wherein we ought to be at one, this is not to pray for it, until we know it. If people are convinced that are they wholly in the right and their opponents wholly in the wrong, then, if they formed definite thoughts of unity, it would by that others should be as they. Be it so, only let us pray for one another, and God will hear us in his way. If we pray not, we shall never be at one. ‘God maketh men to be of one mind in one house.’
Pusey here displays a breadth of Spirit without easy sentimentality that was not at all characteristic of the conflicts of his day nor, for that matter, of ours. First, he trusts absolutely in God’s providence. Trials and frustrations present an opportunity to die again to self in order to live unto God. Beyond the demands of the conflict that pressed in on him, what Pusey thought to be the greater good of conformity to the mind and will of God demanded his allegiance. Finally, in the midst of crises and loss, Pusey insisted on discerning the work of the Holy Spirit and the hand of God. If that sounds like capitulation in the guise of an easy Providential trust, Pusey insists on promoting practical holiness. Anyone who knew his zeal for prayer and fasting, and the self-sacrifice that his charities required could not find in this plea any easy retreat.
Perhaps the best example of Pusey’s vision of “conflict-management” comes from an open letter he wrote immediately after Newman’s secession from the Church of England. The letter appeared in The English Churchman, on October 16th addressed simply, “My Dear Friend”. Here Pusey laments the loss of a servant that the Church of England found impossible to employ. In the first paragraph, Pusey asserts his trust in the guiding of divine providence, displays his understanding of the need for faithfulness amid trial and affliction, and points to the ultimate decisiveness of practical holiness as displayed in prayer:
My Dear Friend,
Truly ‘His way is in the sea, and His paths in the great waters, and His footsteps are not known.’ ... [In] these troubled times... what, to such dulled minds as my own, seemed as a matter of course, as something of necessity to be gone through and endured, was to his [to Newman’s], as you know, ‘like the piercing of a sword.’ You know how it seemed to pierce through his whole self. But this is with God. Our business is with ourselves... And may we not have forfeited him because there was, comparatively, so little love and prayer? And so now, then, in this critical state of our Church, the most perilous crisis through which it has ever passed, must not our first lesson be increase of prayer?
The final part of Pusey’s letter considers first the cause of divisions between the Churches of Rome and of England and then comments on signs of God’s owning and blessing the Church of England. His counsel speaks equally well to any struggle within the Church where there yet remains any charity or good will on opposing sides of a conflict. Pusey’s confidence is not first a confidence in the Church of England, but in the God who builds, guides, checks, and extends it. In entrusting himself and the Church which bore him to the perpetual workings of divine providence, Pusey finds the confidence and hope to sustain the most weary pilgrim. As Pusey’s biographer, H.P. Liddon, reminded those who doubted Pusey’s loyalty to the Church of England as the Catholic Church in England, “it is a letter which no man could have written who had any doubts about his own religious position:”
You [the imaginary “dear friend”] too have felt that it is what is unholy on both sides which keeps us apart... As each, by God’s grace, grows in holiness, each Church will recognize, more and more, the Presence of God’s Holy Spirit in the other; and what now hinders the union of the Western Church will fall off... But while we go on humbled, and the humbler, surely neither need we be dejected. God’s chastisements are in mercy too. You, too, will have seen, within these last few years, God’s work with the souls in our Church. For myself, I am even now far more hopeful as to our Church than at any former period — far more, than when outwardly things seemed most prosperous. It would seem as if God, in His mercy, lets us now see more of His inward workings, in order that in the tokens of His Presence with us, we may take courage. He has not forsaken us, Who, in fruits of holiness, in supernatural workings of His grace, in deepening devotion, in the awakening of consciences, in His own manifest acknowledgement of the ‘power of the keys’ as vested in our Church, shows Himself more than ever present with us.
These are not simply individual workings. They are too widespread, too manifold. It is not to immediate results that we ought to look, ‘the times are in His hands’; but this one cannot doubt, that the good hand of God, which has been over us in the manifold trials of the last three centuries, checking, withholding, guiding, chastening, leading, and now so wonderfully extending us, is with us still. It is not thus He ever purposes to leave a Church. Gifts of grace are His Own Blessed Presence. He does not vouchsafe His Presence in order to withdraw it. In nature, some strong rallying of life sometimes precedes its extinction. It is not so in grace — gifts of grace are His love, and ‘whom He loveth, He loveth unto the end.’ The growth of life in our Church has not been the mere stirring of individuals. If any one thing has impressed itself upon me during these last ten years, or (looking back into the orderings of His Providence) for a yet longer period, it has been that the work which He has been carrying on is not with individuals, but the Church as a whole. The life has sprung up in our Church and through it. Thoughtful persons abroad have been amazed and impressed with this. It was not through their agency nor through their writings, but through God’s Holy Spirit dwelling in our Church, vouchsafed through His ordinances, teaching us to value them more deeply, to seek them more habitually, to draw fresh life from them, that this life has sprung up, enlarged, deepened. And now, as you too know, that life shows itself in deeper forms, in more marked drawings of souls, in more diligent care to conform itself to its Divine Pattern, and to purify itself, by God’s grace, from all which is displeasing to Him, than heretofore.
Never was it so with any body whom He purposed to leave. And so, amid whatever mysterious dispensation of His Providence, we may safely commit ourselves and our work, in good hope, to Him Who hath loved us hitherto. He Who loved us amid negligence so as to give us the earnest desire to please Him, will surely not forsake us now He has given us that desire, and we, amid whatever infirmities individually, or remaining defects as a body, do still more earnestly desire His glory. May He ever strengthen you.
Ever your very affectionate friend,
E. B. Pusey
Pusey’s letter displays the vision which the cultivation of practical holiness, blessed and guided by God, alone offers as much as it simultaneously calls the faithful to commit themselves and their work to “Him Who hath loved us hitherto.”
The Rev'd George Westhaver, a native of Nova Scotia and graduate of McGill University, Montreal and Wycliffe College, Toronto, is a priest of the Diocese of Ely where he is serving his Title at St. Andrew's Church, Cherry Hinton with All Saints, Teversham, Cambridgeshire.
