by Edward Short
Pusey’s correspondence shows that in his relations with his family he replicated the despotic misrule that had characterized his father’s household. For example, he made altogether too much of Maria’s flippant doubts about Christianity, which might very well have been voiced simply to tease him. “It is fearful to think how near you were to the borders of entire unbelief,” he wrote to her in one letter, after she had confessed, apropos the Epistle to the Romans, that “had that Epistle been given to me to read as a mere human production, I should have thought its author … either a fool or an hypocrite, either ignorant of what he was about, or willing to deceive with a shew of understanding what no one else could.”47 For Pusey, trifling irreverence was nascent apostasy. “There is probably scarcely any male mind,” he informed his young wife, “which had got as far as you did, and to some of the principles in which you seem to have almost acquiesced, which would have stopped short of abandoning Christianity. Do not distress yourself about this; I mention it as proof of God’s mercy to you, and in part to shew the danger of principles, not to blame; I should not necessarily by any means think any man the worse for having been not only on the verge, but within the prison of unbelief … The unbeliever is to me the object of deep compassion not of censure.”48 By turns unctuous and bullying, Pusey sought to convert Maria by silencing, rather than addressing her doubts. He also insisted that she practice his own austerities, particularly with respect to fasting, and this despite the fact that she was for most of their marriage gravely ill. She was even made to share his view of the necessity for corporeal punishment in the rearing of their three sickly children, Lucy, Philip and Mary. In all things, wife and children were enjoined to comply with Pusey’s will. “I trust we shall continue to pray to be more completely like-minded,” he wrote in one letter to Maria, with an odd, almost incantatory insistence. “I do not mean in this to allude to any special thing; only I should wish that we should be like-minded in all—nor as if you were to come to me in all things, but that we should be like-minded.” If his father had run his household with what Liddon characterized as “military exactness,” Pusey ran his as though it were a theocracy.49
No one can study Pusey’s life without recognizing how adverse an influence his father had on him. From his father he inherited his imperiousness, his solipsism, his intransigence, and his need to overwork, which, in turn, explains why he fell so deeply in love with Maria, who offered him escape from the solitude to which his unhappy studies consigned him. Before he fell in love with Maria, he was “a reading automaton,” a lonely, sad, introverted youth, who seemed tailor-made for Byron’s cult of ennui.50 Afterwards, he could scarcely imagine life without her: “Everything shews me more and more how great a treasure God has given me in you …”51 Indeed, in one letter, he assured Maria that if he had “a window” in his breast, she would see, “what else you can never know, how deeply, fervently grateful and obliged is your Edward.”52 Together with this deep emotional attachment to Maria came premonitions of her loss. “I cannot picture to myself what would be my condition without you … kind as you are, beyond all human kindness to me, and deeply as I love you, we must not become so necessary to each other, as to ‘sorrow without hope’ were the other taken … I fear I shall be plunging deeper and deeper, if I continue.”53
Personal worry joined with worries over what the European revolutions of 1830 portended. As clearly as Keble and Newman, Pusey saw that the old order was collapsing. “A new order of things (whether we or our children shall see the development of it, or whether we, as is more probable, shall only witness its fearful preludes) but a new state of things must, I imagine come …” In abandoning his youthful liberalism, Pusey pledged himself to the defense of an embattled Christianity, which he saw the Prime Minister Earl Grey and the Whigs betraying. Pusey’s “apparent volte-face in political outlook is not surprising,” Forrester remarks, “when one appreciates that his fear of an impending crisis was echoed in the writings and sermons of churchmen of all parties.”54 In taking the liberals of the Grey government to task for their misappropriation of church prerogatives, Pusey suggested ways that the Anglican clergy could wrest back these prerogatives to strengthen the National Church. In his pamphlet, Cathedral Institutions (1833), he argued that the National Church should return cathedrals to the purposes for which they had been originally founded by becoming once again centers of learning and clerical education. For Pusey, such training was vital if the Church was to withstand the coming assault. “Our next contest,” he prophesied, “will be … with a half-learned infidelity … We shall not suffer much, probably from the shallowness of French, or from the speculations of the unsound part of German metaphysics: the one is too commonplace for us, and we are too much bent upon physical science and matters of sense to employ ourselves on the other. But the struggle will probably be with shallow views of the older Dispensation, shallow conceptions and criticisms of Divine truths, superficial carpings at the details of revelation, an arbitrary selection of such portion of its doctrines as may best admit of being transmuted into some corresponding doctrine of Deistical belief.”55 Much of the history of the Anglican Church in the last two centuries bears out Pusey’s prediction. Newman approved of the pamphlet (despite its reference to Calvin as a saint) because it argued for the indispensability of Tradition. “As to Scripture being practically sufficient for making the Christian,” he wrote to Pusey before he set sail for the Mediterranean with Hurrell Froude in December 1832, “it seems to me a mere dream—nor do I find it anywhere said so in Scripture—nor can I infer logically that what is the sole oracle of doctrine is therefore also of practice and discipline.”56
It was, in part, to reinvigorate practice and discipline that Newman and Froude founded the Oxford Movement on their return from the Mediterranean. Keble’s preaching of his sermon “On National Apostasy” (1833) at the same time that Pusey published his Cathedral Institutions, demonstrates the accord to which these highly different men made their different ways, though for Pusey it was “The Christian Year” (1827), not the sermon on apostasy, which first “turned the tide,” as Newman expressed it, “and brought the talent of the University round to the side of the old theology and against what was familiarly called ‘march-of-mind.’” Pusey entirely agreed with Newman that “In and from Keble the mental activity of Oxford took that contrary direction which issued in what was called Tractarianism.”57 In an earlier letter to Maria, Pusey had told her that “I always loved J.K. for his connection with Fairford, but all he has said and done and written makes me esteem him more.”58 When Pusey decided to throw in his lot with the Tractarians, and issued Tract 18 on 21 December 1833, it was fitting that his theme should be fasting. “I feel some hope,” Pusey wrote to his brother apropos the Tract, “that, by God’s blessing, it may have some tendency to promote a more humble, submissive, acquiescing frame of mind towards God, in these days of tumult, self-confidence, and excitement.”59 Pusey called his readers attention to the example of the early Christians.
Their whole life was a Fast, a death to this world, a realizing of things invisible. It was when dangers began to mitigate, when Christianity became (as far as the world was concerned) an easy profession, it was then that the peril increased, lest their first simplicity should he corrupted, their first love grow cold! Then those who had spiritual authority in the Church increased the stated Fasts, in order to recall that holy earnestness of life, which the recentness of their redemption, and the constant sense of their SAVIOUR’S presence, had before inspired. Fasts were not merely the voluntary discipline of men, whose conversation was in heaven; they were adopted and enlarged in periods of ease, of temptation, of luxury, of self-satisfaction, of growing corruption.60
Pusey’s own growing austerities would always keep pace with the growing corruption of the Anglican Church. Nevertheless, after the publication of the Tract, Pusey was surprised that some found his treatment of the subject objectionable. “I was not prepared for people questioning, even in the
abstract, the duty of fasting,” he wrote Newman. “I thought serious-minded persons at least supposed they practiced fasting in some way or other. I assumed the duty to be acknowledged, and thought it only undervalued.”61 Pusey would encounter similar opposition when he attempted to affirm his understanding of the Real Presence, which was an eccentric amalgam of Protestant and Catholic views.
For Newman, Pusey’s decision to join the Tractarians was cause for celebration. “His great learning, his immense diligence, his scholar-like mind, his simple devotion to the cause of religion, overcame me, and great of course was my joy, when, in the last days of 1833, he showed a disposition to make common cause with us … Without him we should have had little chance, especially at the early date of 1834, of making any serious resistance to the Liberal aggression. But Dr. Pusey was a Professor and Canon of Christ Church; he had a vast influence in consequence of his deep religious seriousness, the munificence of his charities, his Professorship, his family connexions, and his easy relations with University authorities … He was able to give a name, a form, and a personality, to what was without him a sort of mob …”62 If Pusey had misgivings about taking up with this mob, they were dispelled by Thomas Arnold, the Broad Church Headmaster of Rugby, who wrote, in response to Tract 18, “you are lending your co-operation to a party second to none in the tendency of their principles to overthrow the Gospel.” Here was criticism from one of the most notable of the march-of-mind men, the shallowness of which proved Pusey’s point: Anglican divines were in need of better training. “Your own tract is perfectly free from their intolerance as well as from their folly,” Arnold assured Pusey, “yet I cannot sympathize with its object, which has always appeared to me to belong to the Antiquarianism of Christianity,—not to its profitable history …” Critics frequently claimed that in embracing the doctrinal concerns of the Fathers the Tractarians were embracing antiquarianism. One reason why Pusey launched the Library of the Fathers was to prove such critics wrong. If readers could see what the Fathers wrote, they would see that the concerns of the Fathers were theirs. Arnold, however, refused to concede that there was anything the early Church could teach nineteenth-century Christians. “The history and writings of the early ages of the Church have their use,—but it is an indirect not a direct one,—like the use of some of the historical parts of the Old Testament; that is, it will not furnish examples or precedents to be applied in the lump to present things.” Forrester rightly points out that it is questionable how familiar Pusey was with the Fathers when he first joined the Tractarians; so much of his time was taken up with the Bodleian catalogue and with his duties as Professor of Hebrew, not to mention his wife and four children; but he certainly knew enough about the Fathers to know that Arnold knew less.63 When the Headmaster of Rugby wrote that he was “amazed at some apparent efforts in this Protestant Church to set up the idol of Tradition: that is, to render Gibbon’s conclusion against Christianity valid by taking like him the Fathers and the second and subsequent periods of the Christian History as a fair specimen of the Apostles and of the true doctrines of Christ,” Pusey must have felt his concern for the training of Anglican clergy richly vindicated. Liddon observed that “It was not likely that Pusey would be influenced by such criticisms.”64 Arnold’s fulminations opened Pusey’s eyes to aspects of liberalism—particularly its designs on the National Church—of which he had not been adequately aware. “The system pursued in Oxford seems to be a revival of the Nonjurors,” Arnold contended, “a party far too mischievous and too foolish ever to be revived with success. But it may be revived enough to do harm,—to cause the ruin of the Church of England first, and so far as human folly and corruption can, to obstruct the progress of the Church of Christ.”65 Since Pusey had immense respect for Keble precisely because he had acquainted him with the Nonjurors, the high-churchmen of the seventeenth century who remained loyal to the Stuarts, Arnold’s comments only confirmed his growing antipathy to liberalism. “It was at Fairford,” Pusey wrote to Keble in 1837, “many years ago when I was thoughtlessly, or rather, I must say, confidently, taking for granted that the Stuarts were rightly dethroned, that I heard for the first time a hint to the contrary from you. Your seriousness was an unintended reproof to my petulant expression about it, and so it stuck by me.”66
In 1836, in Tracts 67–69 on baptism, Pusey corroborated the aspect in Keble that Newman singled out for praise: his grasp of what Newman called “the Sacramental system; that is, the doctrine that material phenomena are both the types and the instruments of real things unseen—a doctrine which embraces in its fullness, not only what Anglicans, as well as Catholics believe about Sacraments properly so called; but also the article of ‘the Communion of Saints;’ and likewise the Mysteries of the faith.”67 After the loss of his daughter and wife, Pusey had a deep personal need to embrace the Communion of the Saints. He also had a direct personal motive for affirming the sacrament of baptism. “A pupil of mine,” he recalled, “was on the verge of leaving the Church for Dissent, and on the ground that the Church taught Baptismal Regeneration in the Prayer-book. So I set myself to show what the teaching of Scripture of Holy Baptism was.”68 This was a task for which the biblical scholar in Pusey was peculiarly suited, and he went about it with gusto.
One critical reader, H. V. Elliott, distilled the essence of the Broad Church opposition to the tract: “My great fear … is lest you should introduce an extreme value of forms and rites, to the detriment of spiritual worship, and ultimately of real holiness: lest you should exalt the Church to a par with, or above, the Word of God; and bring religion to be so much identified with the outward reception of the Sacraments as to disparage that private and secret walk with God, without which the Sacraments themselves will lose their power.”69 For Pusey, those who rejected the doctrine of baptismal regeneration, far from engaging in any “private and secret walk with God,” “entered into a most perilous path, which … must end in the rejection of all Scripture truth.”70 Newman recognized that the Anglican Church’s predominantly negative attitude towards baptismal regeneration was indicative of a general antipathy to the sacramental. In 1834, he wrote his friend John Bowden: “The Evangelicals, taking advantage of the distracted state of the Church, are making a push to get their way in it – and the Bishop of London … [is] temporizing, conceding ½ way, and so making matters clear for their ultimate triumph. The organs of the innovators profess they account the doctrine of baptismal regeneration heretical.”71 To another correspondent, he wrote: “My friend Bowden tells me his wife has just heard a sermon in Petersham Church in which it was positively asserted, that Baptismal Regeneration was an invention of our Bishops of the last Century. The unsettled opinions of the Clergy in our own parts is what has led Pusey to write his Tract. I suppose we must expect to be taken with the controversy as with a snare – it will blaze up all round us before we know where we are. Indeed in all matters the state of the Church is most deplorable – scarce one man in ten thousand knowing any one reason for any one part of our doctrine or discipline, and relinquishing the most sacred things carelessly from not knowing their value.”72 For Newman, Anglicans had been misguided by “certain celebrated Protestant teachers, Puritan or Latitudinarian, and have suffered in consequence. Hence, we have almost embraced the doctrine that God conveys grace only through the instrumentality of the mental energies, that is, through faith, prayer, active spiritual contemplation, or (what is commonly called) communion with God, in contradiction to the primitive view according to which the Church and her Sacraments are the ordained and direct visible means of conveying to the soul what is in itself supernatural and unseen.” Moreover, Newman recognized that Pusey was taking up the subject of baptism to expose “a modern system of theology of extensive popularity and great speciousness” that tended to deny the validity of all the sacraments.73 One of the chief architects of that modern theology, Frederick Denison Maurice, confided in his son how he took Pusey’s Tract “with him on a walk … and how as he went along it became
more and more clear to him that it represented everything that he did not think and did not believe, till at last he sat down on a gate, in what were then the open fields of Clapham, and made up his mind that it represented the parting point between him and the Oxford school. He always spoke of it with a kind of shudder, as it were, of an escape from a charmed dungeon. ‘They never have allowed any one who has once come within their meshes to escape,’ was often his last sentence on the subject.”74 This would confirm the view that Newman eventually took of the relation between Tractarianism and the Established Church, to which he gave trenchant expression in Anglican Difficulties. Tractarianism could not thrive within an Established Church that was so fundamentally at odds with the sacramental.
The description of baptismal regeneration that Pusey included in Tract 67 shows how essential it was to his Tractarian faith.
“Baptismal regeneration,” he wrote, “as connected with the Incarnation of our Blessed Lord, gives a depth to our Christian existence, an actualness to our union with Christ, a reality to our sonship to God, an interest in the presence of our Lord’s glorified Body at God’s right hand, a joyousness amid the subduing of the flesh, an overwhelmingness to the dignity conferred on human nature, a solemnity to the communion of saints who are the fullness of Him Who filleth all in all, a substantiality to the indwelling of Christ, that to those who retain this truth the school which abandoned it must needs appear to have sold its birthright.”75
The person who first persuaded Newman of these truths was John Bird Sumner (1780–1862), whose Apostolical Preaching considered in an Examination of St. Paul’s Epistles (1815) made a great impression on him. In 1873, when a correspondent asked Newman advice about baptism, 40 years after he had first read Sumner’s book, he wrote: “I think Sumner’s Apostolical Preaching might be of use to you. It is a very good book. When its author wrote it, he was a mild high churchman, according to the character of his day. He wrote it against ‘Evangelical’ Preaching, and there can be no doubt that, when he wrote it, he did profess Baptismal Regeneration. His book would be of use to you as showing you the ground work on which that doctrine is commonly held— and the place it holds in the system of Christian teaching. It is one doctrine out of many, one out of a consistent whole. It is implied, it is required by the whole. Sumner’s book sets before you that whole.”76 After becoming Archbishop of Canterbury in 1848, Sumner repudiated baptismal regeneration by acquiescing in the Gorham Judgment, which ruled “that a clergyman of the Church of England need not believe in baptismal regeneration.” If the head of the Anglican Church could connive in such a ruling, the Tractarian contention that the Anglican Church was “catholic” could carry no conviction. Nevertheless, latter-day apologists for Sumner’s acquiescence bring an amusing ingenuity to their defense of the Archbishop. For Peter Nockles, when Sumner denied the heretical import of Gorham’s rejection of baptismal regeneration he “protested his own consistency”—surely a nuanced way to account for the abandonment of settled conviction.77 Nigel Scotland, in his entry on Sumner in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, claims that in deserting the doctrine, the Archbishop showed “diplomacy and savoir-faire.” Owen Chadwick tries to put as good a face as possible on the proceedings by remarking that “Even Archbishop Sumner agreed with Blomfield that the judicial committee was unsatisfactory as a judge of unsound doctrine.”78