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 mode1 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 2. We know, on good authority, that those lectures made a considerable impression, and not only among Roman Catholics 3. 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. E. B. P. TO THE REV. J. H. NEWMAN. [August], 1836. 'Woe is me, my We seem to be fallen into Jeremiah's days. 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 1 He refers to the practice of pronouncing the words once only to those assembled round the altar, and then giving the elements in silence to each individual. Pusey had probably observed this irreverent Puritan habit in Clapham Church, where he communi cated on Sunday, July 10, 1836, while staying with Rev. B. Harrison's father. Pusey rewrote the lost letter to Rose, and after some delay it was published with the signature Canonicus' in the British Magazine for Nov. 1836, vol. x. p. 531. 3 London, Booker, 1836. Dr. Wiseman's Lectures. 5 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. degree1: 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 2. 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 3. Dr. Dickinson was referring to Tract No. 72, contain. ing 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. 1 Card. Newman has written on this letter, I took my B.D. degree Oct. 27, 1836.' 2 Brit. Crit., Oct. 1836, art. 'Dr. Wiseman's Lectures on the Catholic P. 19. E. B. P. TO THE REV. J. H. NEWMAN. 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. E. B. P. TO THE REV. J. H. NEWMAN. 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 Tract on Purgatory. 7 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 2, 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. E. B. P. TO THE REV. J. H. NEWMAN. 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 2? Accordingly when in September 1836 he received some 1 Tracts for the Times,' No. 79, p. 3. 2 Eirenicon,' Pt. I. p. 4. |