CHAPTER XXII. MRS. PUSEY'S PHILANTHROPIC AND RELIGIOUS WORK- DEATH-TRINITY SUNDAY, 1839-SYMPATHY OF 1839. LIVING PUSEY'S memory is so closely associated in the minds of Churchmen with his work as a theologian, controversialist and spiritual guide, that the more intimate relations of his private life are apt to be forgotten. No one, however, who was admitted to the intimacy of his home at Christ Church could fail to be deeply impressed with the influence which his character and religious convictions exercised on all who came in contact with him in his domestic circle. His religious seriousness pervaded every detail of the home life, entering into the very simplest relations with his children; and hence, in spite of the even passionate affection which he felt for them, there was probably a strictness about the discipline of the nursery and schoolroom which friends and relations, even in those severer days, thought somewhat overstrained. But indeed both parents loved their children with the deepest affection; and their correspondence, so far as it has survived, is full of the detailed and tender interest which they took in the development of the characters of their boy and two little girls. It is pleasant to read that when Mrs. Pusey was away from Oxford, Pusey himself used to be with his children at the time of their saying their prayers in the morning and evening. During such absences also they lived in his study, adding probably to its normal confusion, but relieving the stress of his severe work by their bright childish ways. Sometimes however he would frankly acknowledge that he could not join in their games :-'I do not find it in me.' They were, however, always in his thoughts. Thus on one occasion, when himself absent from home, he writes to his wife : : [April, 1837.] 'I was very much vexed to recollect on my way to the coach that I had forgotten the children and my promise. However, I blessed them, as I did you, with that choicest of all blessings, "the Peace of God," as I saw the cross on the cathedral presiding over and hallowing our dear home. Tell the children that I blessed them and thought of them much when I woke this morning.' Until the year 1837 Pusey lived much in the same way as did his brother canons. But his many charities, and, not least, his generous contribution to the London churches, had led him as early as 1835 to consider the question of his expenditure. His growing sensitiveness also on the question of social duties appears from such passages in his letters to his wife as the following: 'I am going to dine to-day with Burton to meet Dr. Russell (Charterhouse, perhaps future Bishop) and only him,-to-morrow Gaudy,-Monday week Bodley dinner. Eheu! fugaces labuntur anni in dinnering.' In the spring of 1837 they sold, as has been said, their horses and carriage, and in other ways curtailed their household expenses. All this involved some withdrawal from society; and Mrs. Pusey, who now entered with all her heart into her husband's feelings, if she did not go beyond them, sold all her jewels, and gave the money to the London churches. These particulars of Pusey's home life illustrate the way in which he practically carried out his public teaching. It was on the Sunday after quietly selling his carriage and horses that he told an Oxford audience :— Curtailment of expenditure. 83 'We confess of ourselves that we are a luxurious people, that luxury is increasing, spreading everywhere; that it is taking possession of our land; that we know not how to stem it; and yet we are secure, as if what has taken place everywhere else would not here, as if we were to be an exception to God's dealings'' On the evening of the same day he writes to his wife, who was in Guernsey: 'When we meet again we must try to live more like pilgrims [journeying] heavenwards. I am much perplexed by my own sermon: for I know not how I can act up to it, with our Heads of Houses' dinners. And it has come across me, had one not better give them up altogether?' The London congregation which listened to him on St. Barnabas' Day, 1837, within a week of the sale of his wife's jewels, probably little suspected his moral right to make the earnest appeal contained in his striking sermon on Christian kindliness and charity, in which he presses the example of the saint who, 'having land, sold it, and brought the money and laid it at the apostles' feet' (Acts v. 4). 'If all cannot be parted with lawfully, why not some? Why not some, not merely of our superfluities, year by year, but (what only requires faith) of our substance, so that we may be poorer in the sight of men, richer in the sight of God?... Would there be no blessing if our women broke off the ornaments (which it is at least safer for Christian women not to wear), as the Jewish women of old, for the service of their God? Is there no blessing on luxuries abandoned, establishments diminished, show of display laid aside, equipages dropped, superfluous plate cast into the treasury of God, the rich (where it might be) walking on foot here, that they may walk in glory in the streets of the City which are of pure gold'?' It may be that the clergy are sometimes charged justly with being merely rhetorical in the pulpit. It is a terrible charge but certainly it is not one which could be laid at Pusey's door. In this matter of charity, it has been seen, Mrs. Pusey was entirely at one with her husband; in fact, the growth of her character during the eleven years of her married life was a remarkable testimony to the strength and 1 'Par. Serm.' iii. pp. 311, 312. Preached May 25, 1837, in Oxford. nature of her husband's influence. She had been before her marriage occupied almost exclusively with the social duties and enjoyments of a country home; and, as her earlier letters show, without those formed and intense convictions which controlled the later years of her life. Her tastes corresponded to her education and position, and she had carried many of them with her when she first came to Christ Church. Her letters show how all other interests gradually gave way to religious ones. Oxford interested her at first mainly through its social aspects; and it was inevitable that she should see a good deal of its society. As time went on, other occupations and duties withdrew her gradually, and before her death almost completely, from those early interests. She spent a great deal of time in educating her children. She was a regular visitor of the poor in St. Aldate's and St. Ebbe's parishes. She assisted the Rev. W. K. Hamilton, Vicar of St. Peter's-inthe-East, afterwards Bishop of Salisbury, in setting on foot a penitentiary and in other good works. She became a regular attendant at the daily services of the cathedral. She set aside a portion of time each day to private prayer and intercession, and to spiritual reading. She spent long hours of work at manuscripts for her husband in the Bodleian Library. She even began, with her husband's full sanction, a Commentary on St. Matthew's Gospel. She always had possessed literary tastes; as she grew out of girlhood into womanhood her tastes steadily developed, and the heroic literature of the ocean gradually made way for Byron, then Walter Scott, Goethe, Schiller, Lessing. She kept fairly abreast of the better books that appeared each year. She was a Latin, as well as a German and Italian scholar; and could enjoy Tacitus in his own unrivalled Latin. Thus she was enabled to be of great service to her husband in the works which he had most at heart. She seems to have collated the Tauchnitz text of St. Augustine's Confessions with the Benedictine, for the Bibliotheca Patrum; and she it was who chiefly enabled her husband to contribute to Prof. Carl Witte those collations of the Dante MSS. in Mrs. Pusey's Religious and Literary Work. 85 the Bodleian which enrich his great edition of the poet'. Writing to Tholuck on March 6, 1837, Pusey says:— 'At last my wife and I have collated all the MSS. I fear that the papers are confused at first sight; for I did not look at the directions until lately, thinking that I had understood from you what was to be done. They are, however, accurately done, and must have been collated a second time for the sake of the orthography.' Tholuck was very grateful : 'The collation for Dante,' he writes, April 4, 1837, 'has made me quite sad. You and your delicate wife ought not to do this. It is an act of loving self-denial, but the subject is not worth the sacrifice. Is not your dear wife's health and your own time given you for much more important tasks? Certainly in such a case it would have been quite as Christian to have said that as no one could be found to undertake the work, it must remain undone. How grateful Witte is he will have told you in writing.' Mrs. Pusey was also working at one time on the Latin text of St. Cyprian. But this was only a part of her literary work. One day she writes from Oxford to Pusey, who was in London : 'The darkness here about four was really oppressive, and the snow heavy. I could not see to read the print of the small St. Augustine by the fireside I collated about two folio pages, and was then obliged to put it by, feeling my head uncomfortable. I met with three various readings. I then tried to do the Jeremy Taylor, but that was too much for my head. The Greek Testament I have not opened to-day.' The next day she writes: 'I had a restless night, but got up at nine, and before ten was seated before St. Augustine, and worked at it till five this afternoon, without any intentional interruptions; but first the children came, then Henry Bunsen, then Mr. Mozley and his brother, then the Miss Biscoes, then Frederick, then Mr. Ashworth, and lastly the Provost and Mrs. Hawkins. By-the-by, the very last was Dr. Wootten.' She had a dread of parading her literary accomplishments. 'Dr. Spry,' writes Pusey to his wife, 'asked me whether "the young man" had done anything about the MSS. I said, "the person who was to, &c., had not been well, but will, I have no doubt, soon." She was a great ''Div. Commedia ricoretta da Carlo Witte,' Berlino, 1862, pref. lxxiv. 'Frai viventi devo moltissimo ai Sign. riv. Dott. Pusey di Oxford.' |