halves. She is beautiful exceedingly, as the spouse of Christ should be; and I long to see all my countrymen sharing the blessings she imparts to individual souls, to households, to Society. If I fail to do what I would, in this respect, still I shall enjoy a sweet contentment in the good-will she inspires toward my fellowmen, and in trying to realize in my own soul the spiritual life which she bestows and develops. Dear Church! What would life be worth without her consolations; with what sorrow should I look upon my children, if, in a world so evil, her blessed communion were not their inheritance, and the sure source to them, if they will be faithful, of pleasures no riches can impart. How truly she represents to them their Saviour, her heavenly Lord : what an evidence she is that His promises

and His own institutions cannot fail. The Church of our English forefathers is the source from whence all that is precious in my country is directly or indirectly derived, though, like light and air, it is enjoyed with little reflection upon its nature and origin. Now, I ask, is she less than all this to Englishmen; to the land which she has made so great and so much envied by all the world? Why then does Dr. Pusey in his Eirenicon award her such parsimonious praise? His own book furnishes frightful evidence that her sister churches are defiled like Sardis and like Laodicea; in comparison she is an Ephesus if not a

Smyrna. He himself is shocked at their awful Mariolatry; he exposes their slavery to the imposture of the Decretals, but he forgets that he owes it to the Reformers that he himself is not as they are. Where is his tribute of gratitude to God for what he owes to them? I am ashamed of such a case as he makes out for our Church; he who dwells in Oxford, and eats the finest of her wheat. We love her better in America. There are thousands here who while they only gather up the crumbs, feel the blessedness of being her children, and would rather die than speak of her as do many in England. Year by year, we derive from her Communion the blessings that sweeten our existence, and which we honestly believe to be the richest God ever bestowed on man. And shall we hear her undervalued, even by her sons, without a remonstrance? Nay, we rise up and call her blessed. I count it my dearest privilege to be her child and servant and that this privilege is my personal inheritance from one of her faithful missionaries, by whom our Church was founded, is a claim to it which I value as my choicest birthright. God knows I love her as, in Christ, my chiefest joy, and when I forget her, "may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth." I am sure that in defending her against what ever adversary, I am obeying that precept of Inspiration, that "We ought to contend earnestly for the Faith once delivered to the Saints."

Your desire that I should explain more fully the objections I have made to Dr. Pusey's Eirenicon shall be gratified. I comply with your request cordially as a matter of duty, but not cheerfully, for my soul abhors controversy. You find much in the Eirenicon that strengthens your own aversion to Rome: hence, you are unable to feel that it may be dangerous to others, especially to the young. But the same flower from which the bee sucks honey may yield venom to the creature that is not furnished with the bee's faculties and organs. What may be even useful to a clergyman of mature age and settled convictions, may be quite the reverse to a less experienced mind, and especially to a mere Candidate for Orders, yet in the state of pupilage.

I have already allowed that there is much in the book that is excellent: the learning and industry of which it is the fruit are conspicuous, and require no comment,

I am pleased with much that the Author says about the Essential Unity of the Church; with his large extracts from Fleury; and with his reprint of the damaging responses of Roman Bishops to Pius IX., on the subject of his impious Dogma. But, I am not pleased with the fact that he fails to draw the only practical inference from his own argument; the commonsense inference that Rome must come back to Catholicity, before we can have any commerce with her, save that of trying to open her blinded eyes.1

True, then, the book is, in some respects, not only learned but instructive. So much the worse if its good be, as I affirm that it is, mixed up with faults that are deadly. A learned book infested with a false morality and an equally

1 Nor am I pleased with the very favourable views of the actual state of things in Romanism which he more than suggests, and which are quite the reverse of fact. See (p 30) concerning Extreme Unction, and (p. 33) concerning the purchase of Masses.

false conception of the matter it attempts to treat, is dangerous to both the head and the heart of the incautious reader. I propose to shew that such a book is the Eirenicon. That it contains a false morality is the graver charge, and it shall be demonstrated. In making such a charge I should not dare to trust to my own impressions wholly I find it sustained by the confessions of its admirers.

You are not too young to remember Tract No. 90. If you agree with me that it was an immoral work, justly condemned by the entire Episcopate of the Church of England, and as such repelled with disgust by the moral sense of the Church generally, it will not be difficult for me to establish the rest of my charge. My chief objection to the Eirenicon was that it is merely Tract No. 90 in a fuller and much more dangerous form. . . . Let us consult Dr. Pusey himself. He says:1

"Our dear friend's tract has done good and lasting service, by breaking off a mass of unauthorized traditional glosses, which had encrusted over the ThirtyNine Articles."

He adds in a note, "I vindicated it in my Letter to Dr. Jelf, as the natural, grammatical interpretation of the Articles."

I might quote more, to the like purpose, from the Eirenicon, but it shall suffice to take Dr. Pusey's own admissions in his Letter to a Romish periodical, the Weekly Register. He

says:

"There is nothing in our Articles which cannot be explained rightly, as not contradicting anything held to be bona-fide in the Roman Church."

I suppose nobody who remembers No. 90 has any doubt that this is the essential principle of that Tract; and stated in equivalent terms it amounts to this, that there is nothing in our Articles which conflicts with Romanism, if we accept as Romanism the minimum of what Rome tolerates. To this statement I shall have occasion to recur; happily, it may be easily disproved, if it be not a proposition too monstrous for serious confutation. My present business is to shew that it is the principle of the Eirenicon, as it is that of the Tract aforesaid.2

I shall not refer to the expressed opinions of one whom I profoundly respect, the learned and laborious Canon Wordsworth,3 but, rather, I will take the opinion of an enthusiastic admirer of the Eirenicon and its author, the writer of a review in the Christian Remembrancer. If Dr. Pusey's own admissions be not enough, we may accept the statements of his friends in his behalf; they are not so much confessions as proud boastings. He writes as follows:4

"It is, in fact, the traditional interpretation of the Articles from the Bishop of Salisbury, of 1689, to the Bishop of Ely of 1865, inclusive, which has to be upset. Dr. Pusey is not the first divine, who has done this. For, in point of fact, as far as this part of his work is

1 Eirenicon, p. 37, New York Edition.

This was almost lost labour, as it is no longer concealed that the Eirenicon is only No. 90 in triple brass. See Christian Remembrancer, July 1666.

3 Now Bishop of Lincoln.

See Christian Remembrancer, January 1866, p. 160.

concerned, it is neither more nor less than an endorsement of the celebrated Tract which brought the Tracts for the Times to an untimely close. In the elaborate analysis

of the Articles which are supposed to be specially antiRoman, Dr. Pusey has been anticipated by Mr. Newman."

After giving five pages of the Remembrancer to a comparison between the points made by No. 90 and those of the Eirenicon, the Reviewer says:1

66 Surely, again, here, if there is any difference between Dr. Newman's Tract and Dr. Pusey's Eirenicon, the latter has gone beyond the former."

He is surprised that so few remonstrate :2

"One might almost have thought that the Protestant part of the community had been paralyzed at the astounding audacity of its author in so uncompromisingly vindicating the position occupied by his friend, Mr. Newman, in the publication of No. 90."

Again :3

"We should have expected the Protestant feeling of the country to be lashed into absolute fury, that the condemnation of the author and his book would have been loudly called for, on the ground of his sacrifice of those very doctrines for which our Protestant forefathers were brought to the stake."

And all this is from an admirer of the book, and from so servile a devotee of the author that he says .4

"To avow any serious difference of opinion (with him) would partake of the nature of impertinence."

Finally, the Reviewer gives us his estimate of the effects of the Eirenicon as follows:5

"In the times that are coming over the Church of England the question will arise-What service have the Articles of the Church of England ever done, and of what use are they at the present day? The latter question must be answered very fully and satisfactorily, if the answer is to be any make weight against the condemnation of them, virtually pronounced by the Eirenicon. But we venture to go a step beyond any suggestion contained in this volume, and boldly proclaim our opinion that, before union with Rome can be effected, the ThirtyNine Articles must be wholly withdrawn."

If, then, it be a settled thing that the Eirenicon and Tract No. 90 are what King James would have called only different "toots on the same horn," it may help us to a just view of the Eirenicon to examine the precise state of mind which No. 90 represented. Happily, its author supplies us with abundant testimony in his Apologia.

In that melancholy account of his mental processes which the erratic but brilliant genius of its author has furnished, he thus speaks of his Tract and its leal spirit:6

"Though my Tract was an experiment, it was, as I said at the time, no feeler. The event shewed it; for, when my principle was not granted, I did not draw back, but gave up. I would not hold office in a Church which would not allow my sense of the Articles."

That Mr. Newman's sense was one which despised history, and the venerable authority of the Reformers, he does not conceal. He had got so far as to call Rome "the Catholic Church," even then, and he said: "

"It is a duty which we owe both to the Catholio

Church and to our own, to take our reformed confessions in the most Catholic sense they will admit; we have no duties toward their framers."

He otherwise expressed the same idea, in a letter to Dr. Jelf, thus:

"The Articles are received not in the sense of their framers, but (as far as the wording will admit, or any ambiguity requires it,) in the one Catholic sense."

Mr. Newman was then living too near his old training in the Catechism not to feel qualms of conscience about the morality of his position, and so he tells us he wrote a letter in October, 1840, "to the friend whom it was most natural for him to consult on such a point." In that letter he explains the state of mind in which a man who subscribes on the principles of No. 90 remains, even for a time, in the Church of England. He says:

2

"I cannot disguise from myself that my preaching is not calculated to defend that system of religion which has been received for three hundred years in this place."

He adds: 3

"They understand that my sermons are calculated to urdermine things established. I cannot disguise from myself that they are. I am leading my hearers

to the Primitive Church, if you will, but not to the Church of England. I fear I must allow that whether I will, or no, I am disposing them towards Rome."

As he had already reached that mental stage of his disease in which he could imagine Rome more "Primitive" than our own Communion, it is not difficult to account for a moral sense which was rapidly conforming itself thereto. Still he had qualms: some sense, at least, of the fitness of things; and he goes on to tell his friend what follows:4

"People tell me that I am exerting at St. Mary's a beneficial influence on our prospective clergy: but what if I take to myself the credit of seeing further than they, and of having, in the course of the last year, discovered that what they approve so much is very likely to end in Romanism."

He goes on to say that he had unbosomed himself to "A. B., than whom I know no one of a more fine and accurate conscience, and it was his spontaneous idea that I should give up St. Mary's, if my feelings continued." Of course, any man of accurate conscience" could say nothing else; what then must be thought of the conscience of the other friend, whose " judgment was in favour of my retaining my living, at least for the present?"

66

Afterwards he says, with respect to these among other views:

"Such was about my state of mind on the publication of Tract 90, in February, 1841."

Surely that friend not of "accurate conscience," was particeps criminis. Mr. Newman had a clearer head and a less enviable heart; he soon began to talk in the shameless way he has since adopted, as a habit, and he says, writing to a friend, of the Heads of Houses:

"They have said that my interpretation of the Articles is an evasion. Do not think this will pain me. You see no doctrine is censured and my shoulders shall manage to bear the charge. If you knew all, or were here, you would see that I have asserted a great principle, and I ought to suffer for it; that the Articles are to be interpreted, not according to the meaning of the writers, but (as far as the wording will admit) according to the sense of the Catholic Church."1

What he already had begun to call "The Catholic Church," we have seen. Trent and Liguori and the Glories of Mary were his Catholicity, and as for the faithful old Confessors who, under God, delivered the English race from the moral and civil condition of Spain and Italy and South America, his scornful sentiment is-" we have no duties toward them."

The author of the Eirenicon makes an awful admission as to his own state of mind, which nevertheless does much to explain how it is that a pervert to Romanism becomes so soon transformed into the spectacle which Dr. Manning now exhibits :

"For myself, I have always felt that had (which God of His mercy avert hereafter, also) the English Church, by accepting heresy, driven me out of it, I could have gone in no other way than that of closing my eyes and accepting whatever was set before me."2

Here are two important notes of the state of mind in which the Eirenicon is written. First, its author would strain out a gnat in the Anglican chalice, and then blindly swallow the whole cup of Rome's fornications. Second, if not the Church of England, the only alternative with him is Rome, and blind submission to Liguori and Pio Nono! Why so? Is it not evident that such a writer has no sense of the primary claims of the East, which preserves the Catholic Creed intact, and the authority of Holy Scripture, and which demands no such blind and brutal degradation? This, then, is to be taken merely as a sign of his mental condition: what must be the moral condition3 of a guide and leader in Israel, who is so sensitive as to a possible heresy in the Church to which he owes everything under God, that he deliberately proposes, as the remedy, habitually kept before him, a blind acceptance of the Roman system, with its unspeakable heresies, its awful idolatry, its imposture of the Decretals, and the Morals of Alphonsus de Liguori?

1 Apol. p. 176.

2 Eirenicon, p. 98.

3 The Moral Theology of Alphonsus de'Liguori might seem to account for Dr. Pusey's position as here professed See Liguori, Theologia Moralis, Tom. ii. De juramento, Dub. iv.

But, to return to Dr. Pusey's account of himself, such is the last phase of his development, as appears by the report of the "English Church Uuiou," in its late noisy assembly. It need not frighten any one to find such a meeting adopting the Eirenicon as its fetish. The meeting was not composed of those who lead the sentiment of England: not a single Bishop was present; few names of note are observed among those of the attendants: and Dr. Pusey himself reminded them that " very few of them" knew anything of three-and-thirty years since. Such was the assembly that rejected a proposed amendment which was designed to guard against a complete surrender of Anglican principles: and which, before it separated, took all the steps necessary to the formation of a visible Trentine party in the Church of England, with the author of the Eirenicon as its leader.

I do not wonder that superficial readers of that work were unable to credit my remarks as to the structure of its argument. It is true that a great part of it is a conclusive argument against Popery how then could the rest of it be designed as a compromise with Rome? Does a man take pains to prove that a house is a pest-house, when he wishes us to walk in? Well might one be puzzled with such a non-sequitur; yet it is not more strange than true that such is the scheme of a book in which the piety and truth of its author work in one direction, and his theories of unity in another. Utterly illogical as it is, we have the facts before us, and after his utterances at the meeting aforesaid, there is no longer any possibility of denying that he proposes a reunion of the English Church with the Roman, by a surrender of the Thirty-Nine Articles, in their spirit and intent, and by the acceptance of the Papal Supremacy, with a concordat.

Such are the ultimate consequences of the morality of No. 90, and it is well for us that we can no longer be blinded as to the fact. I have spoken in strong terms of its duplicity; but, though friendship has beguiled Dr. Pusey into accepting it, it must always be remembered that the author of it is Dr. Newman, who carried it out, to its consequences, long ago. It is impossible that anybody should practically adopt it, and remain true to the Anglican Church.

A few words may here be said of the great Oxford movement, which, like Methodism, has passed into the life of the Church, in one form, and is going out of it in another. There can be no doubt that if such a man as Hugh James Rose had lived, and had held its helm, it would have taken the form of a grand revival of such Catholicity as that of Bishop Ken, and would have been wholly primitive and Nicene. But the movement unhappily fell under the engineering of John Henry Newman, a man, in many respects, inferior to his co-workers, but full of that audacity which was not natural to them, and of that nervous genius which utters oracles and creates a following. By his own confession, Mr. Newman was never a genuine Catholic, never a sound Anglican. From a

feeble Evangelicalism he flew to an opposite extreme, and very soon his ruling idea became a dislike of the Reformation, which he identified with his former Calvinism. This antipathy suggested a mere reactionary movement, and his mind took its Romeward turn. He conceived No. 90 and he soon followed his Own Jack o' lantern into the mire.

Happily, the great movement communicated to the Church at large was Catholic; but, as it was left in the hands of Dr. Pusey, it was doomed, like Wesley's, to develope a counterspirit. He had, himself, begun his ministry in the Evangelical School, or in something like it. He never felt himself firm on the grand old Anglican Rock where the foot of Ken was planted. His practical horizon was bounded by the Reformation-epoch, and he confounded Catholicity with Western Christianity. To get back again to union with the Western Churches became his ruling thought, To do so, by first calling on these Churches to revert to Catholic Antiquity, never entered his mind. We must take them as they are, Trent-Creed and Papacy included, and we must make our Articles square with these as we may. His friendship for Dr. Newman had fixed his thoughts on No. 90 as the grand Catholicon; and this idea having produced the Eirenicon, is now about to culminate, as he promises, in a work designed to "astonish" Englishmen, with his discoveries in France, as to what is really de fide among the Romanists. As if any Englishman, who has any information on such subjects, could possibly be ignorant of Gallicanism, and of Port-Royalism! As if everybody did not know that all that is nominally conceded, is practically exacted, in the one simple fact that you must accept every decree of the Pope or be excommunicated! If Dr. Pusey would really “astonish” us, let him show that there is any freedom of thought or opinion left in the Communion to which Pius IX. gives absolute law and prescribes new dogmas; and to which he claims to be "the Way and the Truth and the Life.”

Such is the movement that is now passing out of the Church, like the serpent out of the chalice of St. John, in the form of a small but mischievous Trentine party. In its last efforts to identify itself with genuine Catholicity, it invokes the saintly name of Keble, and pretends to claim its patronage. If it could be shown that his strong affection for his friends had blinded his pure eyes to the real nature of their theories, what would be gained? Keble was but human, and had some infirmities like other men, I dare say. His career has been widely different in many respects from that cf his old companions; his genuine love for the Church of England has been the real drag to their Romeward tendencies and if he loved them too well to see all their mistakes and faults, there is evidence that he regarded Newman's course with strong aversion, and was deeply pained by his bitter and remorseless writings against the Church of England. What that holy man finally thought on many subjects connected with the movement,