exportations. They actually re-elect the minister to this idol-shrine of theirs every five years, and since 1818, when it was built, they have had seven or eight clergymen; and they thought that they had done a great deal in securing the purity of their minister. One-third of the trustees are sick of the system, so it will probably receive its coup-degrace shortly. At one time they had two clergy, one of whom preached against the other, against the Wednesday prayers, and recommended the people to go to the dissenters rather than church when his colleague preached: advice which has been strongly taken, for now there are not twenty people at the Wednesday and Friday prayers (before they were daily), and the dissenting chapels are large and full. This race has passed away; however, even the Bp. of W. had to recommend to them to subscribe to the S. P. G., and was answered that it was inexpedient, because it would interfere with the Church Missionary Society. The surplice is still a badge of Papistrie, and is used only in the two English churches, although the Bishop recommended it.

If one might judge from this place, the Record, with its attacks upon us, has done good; it seems to have raised a curiosity about Catholic views, and to have prepared people to find them less bad than they were told.... Another, the oldest x clergyman in the island, father of Brock of Oriel, asked for a conference on Baptismal Regeneration. It is not come yet, and I do not expect anything from it but kindly feeling; still, I saw in these and other cases that the Record had overshot its mark. Meanwhile the young men come up to Oxford and return y's.

The most interesting phenomenon here, however, to me is the Governor, a Lt.-Colonel, Sir James Douglas, a very active, intelligent, straightforward, well-informed, painstaking man, who does simply and downrightly whatever he sees to be his duty, and who, without any help from without, has come to the Catholic views. I was sitting opposite Cornish, a little below him, at dinner, when, Ireland being spoken of, he burst out with such a strong natural eloquence, regretting that the Irish clergy had departed from our first Reformation, that of our Prayer-book, spoke of them warmly as excellent, pious, selfdevoted men, but that all their exertions were crippled; they were wearing themselves out doing nothing, neither gaining from the Romanists nor helping their own people; that it was lamentable that because the North was wrong people should think they must go due South; then spoke simply and well on the value of Ordinances: in short, it was the Via Media, coming from the lips of a layman and a veteran officer. Cornish's eyes glistened with joy; I hailed the omen and told him that that was just what we were struggling for at Oxford, of which he knew nothing.

I heard some more of his history in a conversation of two hours, and it did not appear that he had any outward help except his Prayer-book as a comment on the Ordinances (the Communion he had received

Visit to Guernsey.

25

weekly for four years where he was last quartered), only he mentioned a sermon of Mr. Sibthorp's which he said would in Ireland be condemned because it would not tell against the Papists. The only question there is, what will tell against Popery. (I imagine Mr. S.'s sermon was on the Eucharist.) And yet,' he said, 'it was only what is in the Prayer-book.' It was very encouraging—a sort of earnest that there are Corneliuses of whom we know nothing. I have been happier ever since. I cannot give you any idea of the simple, vivid straightforwardness and upright warmth with which he spoke. I have not, long, been so struck with any one.

Pusey spent a month in Guernsey, and on July 13 went for another month to Sark. There he preached three times. A Cornish miner was washed off the pier by a wave, and Pusey preached on Sudden death'.' On St. James' Day he followed up the lesson by a very characteristic appeal on 'Obeying calls 2. A third sermon to the islanders, on the ninth Sunday after Trinity, had been preached before at Holton: it was on the wisdom of the children of light, and a few alterations made it appropriate to the circumstances of his island audience. On Oct. 1st he preached for a relation, who was Curate of Churchill, near Chipping Norton, on 'grieving the Holy Spirit.' On the 5th of November he preached in the University pulpit the first of his sermons which may be described as historical. The occasion fell on a Sunday, and Dr. Gilbert, the Principal of B. N. C., who was ViceChancellor, asked Pusey to preach at rather short notice.

'I hardly know,' Pusey writes to Newman in anticipation of his duty, 'how to manage it. I am not at all at home on Church and State questions. Nor have I good historical knowledge of any sort. It would be an excellent subject for the tracing God's Providence in the Church, and how every act in the Church, as in individuals, is full of consequences, and therefore such days ought to be kept. But for this I have not knowledge nor time to acquire it. Then K.'s favourite text, "In quietness and confidence," or "Stand still, and ye shall see the salvation of God," as opposed to the bustling spirit of the present day, and the scheming one of the Church of Rome. Or, again, "The gates of hell shall not prevail against her." Or not doing evil that good may come, against Rome and the Jesuits and our expediency. In short, 2 Ib., serm. 18.

1 'Par. Serm.,' vol. iii. serm. I.

I feel like a person with a great gun put into his hands, but he does not know exactly with what materials to load it or how to use it.'

'I have been looking over our pamphlets since to see what sort of subjects they used to preach on, but I cannot make out that many preached on anything. I am rather perplexed, and yet have no time to wait to choose. . . . I think I shall take "Stand still" as my text; yet I am much inclined on the other hand to take the indefectibility and unshakenness of the Catholic Church.'

The sermon was eventually of the type to which Pusey inclines in these extracts. Its title is descriptive of its contents: 'Patience and confidence the strength of the Church.' It is an assertion of the application and place of the passive Christian virtues in any adequate conception of political duty. The Gunpowder Plot is regarded as, among other things, a repudiation of the passive side of Christian morals; but Guy Fawkes was in this respect a sample and predecessor of many very differently minded persons of a later time.

The service for the 5th of November commemorated the landing of William of Orange as well as the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot; and the principle of passive obedience to Governments, which was the condemnation of Guy Fawkes, could hardly be invoked in support of the Revolution of 1688. Accordingly Pusey insists upon its application with an impartiality which made criticism from many sides. inevitable. Certainly the arrival of William 'saved the nation from the miseries of anarchy and civil war'; and 'for this and the preservation of the Church amid this convulsion we have great cause of thankfulness.' But the line which men took in resisting James' evil' was in principle as indefensible as the wicked enterprise of Guy Fawkes; and it was not unconnected with the 'deadness' and 'shallowness' which characterized the English Church and theology during the eighteenth century. Nay, the precedent has not ceased to be a power for evil in our own day.

'The present storm which lowers around our Church and State is but a drawing out of the principles of what men have dared to call the

Passive Obedience.

27

"glorious revolution," as that revolution was the sequel and result of the first rebellion.'

This was enough to raise, and it did raise a storm, though, as storms were in those years, not a violent one.

'Pusey's sermon,' wrote James Mozley to his sister, 'is making a great fuss: I suppose it is the first time of the Revolution being formally preached against since Sacheverel.'

A clergyman wrote a pamphlet to prove that passive obedience to one authority in the State when in opposition to other authorities was unsanctioned by Holy Scripture. The Edinburgh Review in a temperate article, understood to be by Merivale, attacked Pusey's position on its practical side, as involving an unquestioning invariable submission to all the administrators of the law which is inconsistent with true social well-being: if James II. might not be misled, neither might a foolish and misguided parish constable. Pusey had a right to reply that it was not a question of resisting James-James had been resisted by Ken and Sancroft-but of deposing him; and Pusey does not maintain the divine origin of Kingly rule, but the divine origin of Government. The two appendices to his sermon which were Pusey's answer to his critics are probably the most purely political piece of writing which Pusey ever attempted. Certainly the political question involved a case of conscience; but the days were passing, if they had not already passed away, when the Church of England would identify herself with any particular political opinions; and, in Pusey's own words, he had in later life little heart for themes which did not more directly concern the well-being of souls.

It was a proof of the felt reality of Pusey's sermons that they always involved him in subsequent private correspondence; and on this occasion Mr. Robert Scott, then Fellow afterwards Master of Balliol College, and Dean of Rochester, wrote to ask Pusey whether the literal enforcement of the rules in the New Testament respecting non-resistance to temporal rulers would not involve a like duty of taking no

steps to avert calamity, and refusing to prosecute criminals for personal injuries, and whether such a construction of the moral teaching of the Gospel would not bring it into conflict with principles and duties upon which society rests.

'Ch. Ch., Nov. 1837.

'I felt,' wrote Pusey in reply, 'the difficulty you name. But I felt also that it must be met by raising our tone on that other class of subjects. We see the evil of resistance on a great scale, and since it is founded on a number of particulars, do not on a small scale; but it may be as bad, and, since more frequent, worse. Individual prosecutors seem to me wrong in principle. The State, I think, ought to do it, as the father of the family, and only call upon individuals to bear witness, as a father would ask another child if one did not answer.

'The difficulty as to the rules in the New Testament is surely in themselves or in us. They seem to direct plainly certain things, and men cannot bring themselves to think that they mean what they seem to mean. The difficulty of explaining "resist not evil" is intrinsic to itself. In St. Justin's time they took it literally, and seem to have gone on much more happily. But one may take measures to prevent injuries, e. g. lock one's door-let the law protect one if it will. If individuals did not prosecute, the law would, and then the same result would be arrived at, as far as public peace is concerned, by the way of obedience, and without revengeful feelings.

'Taking wrong patiently would turn more hearts than are converted by discussion.'

Pusey's correspondent's second question was whether an English King had not entered into engagements, the breaking of which forfeited the allegiance of his subjects— engagements which did not bind Roman Emperors whose authority is contemplated by the New Testament precepts. Pusey replies:

'With regard to the Coronation Oath, it binds the Sovereign, of course, though it seems a part of the "compact-system" now to think that a portion of his subjects can release him. But I do not think that, though more bound to his subjects than Caligula, he is more responsible to them...; that they have any more right to take the redress into their own hands. He is morally bound, and they may, and ought, to remind him, to expostulate with him, but then leave him in the Hands of God, as David did (1 Sam. xxvi. 10). . . . With consequences I think we have nothing to do; though even on that ground, with all the evils of resistance before our eyes, one could not easily be brought to think that those of non-resistance would be greater. However,