He wrote and said he must have been very wanting. I said "it was my own doing, I could not bear it." So I lived on, my real self sealed up, except when I had to sympathize with deep sorrow, and then I found that my letters were of use, just because I owned the human hopelessness.

'But then, my dearest Mary, it must be only "human" hopelessness. Since God chasteneth whom He loveth, the deeper the chastening the deeper the love. And so God has some great work for you in you, since His hand has been so heavy. But He will, I trust, give you joy in your other children; but you cannot anticipate now what He will do. "What I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know hereafter."'

CHAPTER XXIII.

RETIREMENT

PREACHING

A NARROW ESCAPE-KEBLE'S PSALMS— STAY AT BRIGHTON-CRITICISM OF BAPTISMAL TRACT BY AN EVANGELICAL.

1839.

MRS. PUSEY'S death had effects upon her husband's life and career which it is not easy to exaggerate. Perhaps no one but his intimate friend Newman realized what the blow would be to him. Writing to a friend the day after Mrs. Pusey's death, Newman says: 'It is now twenty-one years since Pusey became attached to his late wife when he was a boy. For ten years after he was kept in suspense, and eleven years ago he married her. Thus she has been the one object on earth in which his thoughts have centred for the greater part of his life 1.' To use his own phrase, from that hour the world became to him a different world.

His intense feeling showed itself even in the use which he made of his own house. During his wife's lifetime they had made great use of the drawing-room, which from its size, its southern aspect, and the view which it commands over the country, is one of the best rooms in Christ Church. After her death he never voluntarily entered it many years passed without his ever doing so. He would not allow, however, this feeling to interfere with the comfort of his guests. When, after Lady Emily Pusey's death, his widowed brother came to live, and, as it proved, to die at Christ Church, the drawing-room was again brought into use; and Pusey, contrary to his own inclinations, was often in it. But after his brother's death he avoided the use of it as much as possible. He told me once,' writes his niece, Mrs. Fletcher, not to suggest it to him.'

1 Newman's' Letters,' ii. 282.

Although as a young man Pusey had enjoyed general society, even before 1839 the difficulty of finding time for his multifarious work, or of finding money for anything besides his large charities, had made him again and again wish, as has been already said, to withdraw from it. When his wife died he bade farewell to everything of the kind. His sorrow was a call to retire from the world. And, whether rightly or not, he never returned to it. He carried this so far as year after year to decline invitations to dinner in the chapter-house or in the hall, which he might have accepted as resting on a distinct ground from any private entertainments; and by doing this he undoubtedly incurred the censure of more than one of his brother canons. One cannot draw lines,' he said; if I accepted one invitation I should find it difficult to refuse another without giving offence.' He even had doubts about entertaining the meetings of the Theological Society at his house.

'I shrink at present,' he writes to Newman on August 27, 1839, 'from anything which involves a return to former habits; and opening one's house in the evening would involve all sorts of business, visiting, &c. One could hardly consistently avoid it. On the other hand, it would be good to resume it soon, and that perhaps the rather because I could read my paper on Pelagianism.'

Pusey was not blind to the disadvantages of a life of such complete retirement as his henceforth became. But he took his course for reasons which such considerations did not touch, while, on the other hand, he 'did not wish to condemn others who had not been called out of the world by a great sorrow.' But the crape which he wore on his hat to the end of his life, and the crape scarf which he always used when attending the cathedral service, were symbols of the new mode of life which befitted a sorrow that could only end with death. To all who could understand the higher pathos of human experience, his new habits of complete retirement from the world suggested the appeal of the old saint of patience: 'Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends; for the hand of God hath touched me ''

1 Job xix. 21.

A Penitential Retrospect.

109

Pusey's sorrow threw him back on himself and on God. His first disposition was to see in his bereavement only a punishment for past sin. Keble and Newman both warned him against this exaggerated feeling, and against regarding his case as exceptional. It led him to review his work in past years more unsparingly than ever before. In the summer of 1839 Blanco White's lapse into complete infidelity was reported in Oxford; and Pusey bitterly reproached himself for the encouragement which his book on German Rationalism might have given to that distinguished but unhappy Spaniard in his downward spiritual career. Later in the summer Newman reported to Pusey: 'Strauss's book is said to be doing harm at Cambridge: the only way to meet it is by your work on Types.' Pusey could only see in this circumstance another reason for recollecting the influence of his own work on German theology.

'It is very shocking,' he writes to Newman, 'that Strauss's book - should be doing harm at Cambridge, or that, without any practical end, they should be even reading it. I know nothing, except from general report, about it; so I cannot imagine in what way it is doing harm. For we cannot imagine that any there should not be offended with it as a whole, such as it is described. My lectures on Types are incomplete, even as relates to the Pentateuch for of all the Types of the Levitical worship I had only got through the chief sacrifices. I should be glad to do something for Cambridge, for I fear my book on Germany did harm there.'

:

This sad crisis in his life could not but influence also his preaching. From this time forward the nothingness of this world, the disciplinary value as well as the atoning power of the Cross, the awfulness and reality of the Day of Judgment, assume a new prominence in his sermons. His first sermon after his bereavement was preached at Budleigh Salterton: it was on 'The Cross borne for us and in us 1.' Then at Brighton, on the 13th of October, he preached one of the most remarkable and searching of his sermons--on the Day of Judgment; and on returning to Oxford he preached, before the University, on the real lessons of the Book of Ecclesiastes, so often misunderstood. The text was Eccl.

1 'Parochial Sermons,' vol. iii. serm. 3.

xii. 13. The scene produced by one passage in the sermon has been graphically described by the Rev. J. B. Mozley:

'Pusey preached last Sunday, the first time in Oxford since his wife's death. When he came to the last sentence of the prayer before the sermon, in which the dead are mentioned, he came to a complete standstill, and I thought would never have gone on. He has very little mastery over his feelings. In the course of the sermon there was a piece of friendly advice given to the Heads of Houses, for which they would not be much obliged to him. He had been talking of increase of luxury amongst the undergraduates of late years, from which he took occasion to say that those in station might do well to live more simply than they did. He dropped his voice at this part, which had the effect of course of giving increased solemnity to the admonition; for there was breathless silence in the church at the time ''

The passage uttered in a low tone runs as follows:

'It is miserable to think that, amidst much real improvement, luxury in this favoured place has even within these last fifteen years much increased, that it is increasing, and yet that it is selfishness, the path to forgetfulness of God, the special hardener of the heart and the minister to other sin. And (may it be said with real reverence for some yet older than myself, both for their persons and office?) might not those in our station benefit both ourselves and others by returning to the greater simplicity of times not long past, and whose memory is still vivid, and from which we have departed by assimilating ourselves to the world? Can we expect the luxuries which are enervating and injuring our youth to be abandoned until our own habits are simpler?'

Pusey wrote to Dr. Gilbert, the Principal of Brasenose, who was then Vice-Chancellor, about some unimportant misunderstanding respecting the entrance of the procession into church, and he took the occasion to express a hope that his plain speaking had not given offence.

'I cannot conceive any one,' said the Vice-Chancellor, 'taking offence at what you said, in allusion to some habits of expense among ourselves. I believe there are few if any among us who do not agree with you on that point; at least, I can say I have heard the subject several times mentioned, and always with regret at least, if not condemnation of it.'

After his wife's funeral Pusey remained in Oxford in

1839.

Letters of the Rev. J. B. Mozley': Letter to his Sister (p. 94), Nov. 24,