Newman and His Contemporaries

by Edward Short

  Pusey, on the contrary, insisted that the doctrine of baptismal regeneration must be upheld. In 1850, together with 14 others, he signed resolutions stating that if the Church of England accepted the Gorham Judgment, the Church “forfeits … the office and authority to witness and teach,” and “becomes formally separated from the Catholic body, and can no more assure to its members the grace of the Sacraments and the Remission of Sins.” After Sumner upheld the Gorham Judgment, six of the signatories seceded from the Anglican Church, including Henry Edward Manning, Robert Wilberforce, William Dodsworth, Henry Wilberforce, Edward Badeley and James Hope. Pusey and Keble conspicuously chose not to follow them.79 Later, in a letter to his old friend Lord Blachford, Newman recalled this lamentable failure: “Pusey must be ever in the recollection that the Gorham judgment stands good in law and usage, which 20 years ago he protested would, if successful, unchurch the English Church. But I quite enter into your feeling about the old jog trot curriculum.”80

  Pusey never lived down this failure to stick to his convictions over the Gorham Judgment. Even Liddon acknowledged the indefensible position in which this failure put his hero, and did not omit from his otherwise laudatory life the public letter from the quietly heroic William Dodsworth (1798–1861), a rich Yorkshire timber merchant’s son and Cambridge graduate, who began his career as an Evangelical before joining the Tractarians. In the wake of the Gorham Judgment, despite being married, he resigned his living at Christ Church, Albany Street, to convert to Catholicism on 1 January 1851. In his letter decrying Pusey’s capitulation, he addressed Pusey directly:

  I must add one word on the grief and surprise which it has occasioned me, and many others besides me, that you should have taken this line in our present difficulties. You have been one of the foremost to lead us on to a higher appreciation of that ‘Church system,’ of which sacramental grace is the very life and soul. Both by precept and example you have been amongst the most earnest to maintain Catholic principles. By your constant and common practice of administering the sacrament of penance; by encouraging everywhere, if not enjoining, auricular confession, and giving special priestly absolution; by teaching the propitiatory sacrifice of the Holy Eucharist, as applicatory of the one sacrifice on the cross, and by adoration of Christ Really Present on the altar under the form of bread and wine; by your introduction of Roman Catholic books ‘adapted to the use of our Church;’ by encouraging the use of rosaries and crucifixes, and special devotions to our Lord … by advocating counsels of perfection, and seeking to restore, with more or less fullness, the conventual or monastic life;—I say, by the teaching and practice, of which this enumeration is a sufficient type and indication, you have done much to revive amongst us the system which may be pre-eminently called ‘SACRAMENTAL.’ And yet now, when, by God’s mercy to us, a great opportunity has occurred, of asserting and enforcing the very keystone of this system, and apart from which the whole must crumble away—forgive me for speaking so plainly—you seem to shrink from the front rank. You seem ready to hide yourself … behind ambiguous statements which can be subscribed in different senses.81

  The Gorham Judgment was not the only difficulty that Pusey encountered in the practice of his Tractarian faith. In 1843, his sermon “The Holy Eucharist a Comfort to the Penitent” also came under attack from university authorities. “In candor and fairness,” the Vice-Chancellor wrote Pusey, “I think it right to confess that its general scope and certain particular passages have awakened in my mind painful doubts with regard to its strict conformity to the doctrines of the reformed Church of England.”82 Pusey’s response was less indignant than incredulous: “I felt so entirely sure that I heartily concur with the doctrine of the Church of England, I have so often and decidedly expressed my rejection of the doctrine of Transubstantiation, and the Canon of the Council of Trent upon it, that, neither before nor after preaching my sermon, had I the slightest thought any could arraign it as contrary to the doctrines of our Church …” His inquisitors might have thought differently when Pusey proceeded to explain what he meant by the bread and wine: “I believe that after Consecration the Holy Elements are in their natural substances bread and wine, and yet are also the Body and Blood of Christ.”83 In a letter to Newman, Pusey wrote: “I have asked the Vice-Chancellor for two or three days that I might put references to my sermon. I thought this best, that they might not be exposed unconsciously to condemn e.g. St. Cyril of Alexandria when they thought they were only condemning me.” When the Vice-Chancellor and six others withdrew to consider the contents of the sermon further, Pusey wrote his mother, “It seems as if something very momentous was going on, but that I had nothing to do but to wait for it, and pray and abide, as I trust, under the shadow of His wings, and be at rest.”84 Edward Hawkins, the Provost of Oriel, who had instigated the proceedings, concluded his condemnation, in which five of his colleagues joined, by observing that, although Pusey “did not design to oppose the doctrine of the Church of England,” he was “led into erroneous views and expressions, partly by a pious desire to magnify the grace of God in the Holy Eucharist, and partly by an indiscreet adoption … of the highly figurative, mystical, and incautious language of certain of the old Fathers.”85 That not only Hawkins but five other dons objected to this language puts the judgment of mid-nineteenth-century Oxford in an arrestingly unflattering light.

  Rather than confront Pusey himself, Hawkins delegated Richard Jelf, a close friend of the accused and then canon of Christ Church, who dutifully presented Pusey with a document requesting that he recant the sermon’s alleged heterodox content, particularly “the idea of any carnal or corporeal presence of Christ in the holy Eucharist.”86 Pusey duly signed the document, even though he regarded its condemnation as “unstatutable and unjust.”87 In return for this sworn confession, he was suspended from preaching for two years and told to keep mum about the matter—or, as Liddon neatly put it, “He was obliged to be silent about his own enforced silence.”88 Once word leaked out about what had taken place, Frederick Faber, then Fellow of Magdalen, wrote the Vice-Chancellor to explain that “the silence of the gentlemen who examined the sermon is very perplexing to us who may have to preach at some time or other before the University. We have no means of knowing what is held to be heretical doctrine respecting the Eucharist … and consequently cannot avoid the danger which Dr. Pusey has incurred.”89 Newman and Keble advised Pusey to publish the sermon with a catena of Anglican authorities; Pusey took both their advice and published it in June of 1843. After he finally read the sermon, Keble told Pusey: “I am really quite at a loss to imagine how they can justify their sentence without condemning almost all the writers in your Catena, and certainly all the Fathers.”90 Gladstone wrote from Carlton House Terrace echoing Keble: “I am quite at a loss to account to myself for steps which seem so groundless. However unwarranted, they must be deeply painful to one whose feelings have ever been kept so much in harmony as yours with the actual Church of England …”91

  Here was the heart of the matter: what did constitute the teaching of the Church of England? For Liddon, “A narrow and ignorant view of the Anglican Formularies, not as they were meant to be, but as two or three generations—partly careless, partly bigoted, partly untheological—had taken them to be, was to be stereotyped and thrust on all the Church, clergy and laity alike. It made men despair of Anglicanism, or realize what they had to expect if they remained true to their Church awaiting its deliverance. If Pusey, with his learning, piety and position could be treated in this way, what were others to expect?”92 Newman’s response to the summary judgment was clear-sighted: the condemnation of Pusey’s sermon was “the first formal University act against us … It seems very impolitic in the House of Heads—for if there is a Puseyite who will rouse the sympathies of the people, it is Pusey. All sorts of people admire and respect him. On the other hand I am not without anxiety as to the effect upon him personally. I could fancy it making him retire into himself, and breaking his spirit both morally and spirit
ually.”93 For himself, as he told Henry Wilberforce, “I have neither time nor will to meddle with these dirty matters,” though he was very much concerned that Pusey’s explanations after the fact would only make matters worse.94 “Better say nothing,” he wisely counseled his voluble friend, “than not speak clearly …”95

  If Newman was prepared to give Pusey moral support in his wrangles with Oxford’s anti-Tractarian authorities, he was also unstinting in practical help. In this regard, Newman’s solicitude for the physical well-being of Pusey and his wife was characteristic. In August 1838, when Maria Pusey’s long-suffering health had taken a turn for the worse, Newman counseled Pusey to go South for the winter months. “I am concerned you do not give an improved account of Mrs Pusey. Are you quite sure that the South might not be expedient for her? If you went to Malta, you could have all your books with you – a steamer carries any quantity of luggage. In the winter you would have hardly any fellow passengers to incommode you – and would hardly lose a day’s work. When there, you would be settled quite as much as in England. You would find probably Rose there – and you might instil good principles into Queen Adelaide, who deserves them. I am quite sure that in point of usefulness, you would lose no time at all. They have a superb library attached to St John’s Church – and I doubt not the MSS are well worth inspecting. They come from Vienna.”96 Pusey was game but his doctor advised against it, telling him that his wife had only months to live. When Newman heard the news, he offered ready support: “You know, should you like me to walk with you in the morning, there is no reason why I should not come to you at six as well as at any other times. You have but to send me a note overnight … Pray tell dear Mrs. Pusey that I am continually thinking of her, and pray (what I doubt not) that you may have grace so to part from each other that you may meet again in peace.”97 Pusey wrote Newman back: “Anything from you must always be soothing … My six o’clock walk is at an end, for from four or five or seven in the morning is now her time of greatest suffering … I am afraid of misleading you, as if I felt better than I do; yet I wish this to be a season of penitence.”98 To Pusey’s tendency to see all misfortune as retributive, Newman countered with more balanced advice: “I hardly know how to answer your note … But it seems to me you must not suffer yourself to suppose that any punishment is meant in what is now to be. Why should it? I mean, really it is nothing out of God’s usual dealing. The young and strong fall all around us. How many whom we love are taken out of our sight by sudden death, however healthy—Whether slowly or suddenly, it comes on those in whose case we do not expect it. I do not think you must look on it as ‘some strange thing.’ Pray do not.”99 When Maria’s state worsened, Lady Lucy left Grosvenor Place to be with her son in Christ Church. On the morning of Trinity Sunday, Newman wrote to his friend to assure him that prayers were being said by all his friends. “This, you will see, requires no answer. I have nothing to say—only I wish you to remember that many persons are thinking of you and making mention of you, where you wish to be mentioned. Do not fear you will not be strengthened according to your day. He is nearest, when He seems furthest away. I heard from Keble a day or two since, and he wished me to tell you they were thinking of you at Hursley. This is a day especially sacred to peace—the day of the Eternal Trinity, who were all blessed from eternity in themselves, and in the thought of whom the mind sees the end of its labours, the end of its birth, temptations, struggles, and sacrifices, its daily dyings and resurrections.”100

  When the end came, Lady Lucy sent for Newman. Shortly afterwards, Pusey wrote to Keble: “God has been very merciful to me in this dispensation, and carried me on, step by step, in a way I dared not hope. He sent Newman to me (whom I saw at my mother’s wish against my inclination) in the first hour of sorrow; and it was like the visit of an angel. I hope to go on my way ‘lonely, not forlorn’ …”101 Later, Pusey thanked Newman directly, “God bless and reward you for all your tender kindness towards us.”102 On 1 June 1839, Maria was buried in the nave of Christ Church Cathedral, a day Pusey would never forget. Years afterwards, whenever he crossed the quadrangle to the cathedral, Pusey would always keep his eyes on the pavement, rather than risk seeing again, if only in his mind’s eye, the shroud on his wife’s coffin as he followed it to her grave.103 On her tombstone, Pusey considered inscribing the line, “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et Lux perpetua eis,” though taking anything from the Breviary caused him concern: he did not wish to be thought condoning “the modern corruptions of Rome.”104 It was only after Newman told him that he had nothing to worry about that he went ahead with the incision. Nevertheless, here was pitiable proof that even in moments of the most shattering bereavement Pusey continued to agonize over his Anglican difficulties.

  It was after his wife’s death that the image of the mature Pusey—unsociable, donnish, ponderous, grim—took permanent shape. As the biographer of Dean Church observed, “Any taste which Pusey might have had for the sights of this world was sternly put aside with other gentlemanly amenities after his wife’s death.”105 In his reminiscences of the Canon of Christ Church, Tuckwell recalled: “In those days he was a Veiled Prophet, always a recluse, and after his wife’s death … invisible except when preaching … I can see him passing to the pulpit through crowds … the pale, ascetic, furrowed face, clouded and dusky always as with suggestions of a blunt or half-used razor, the bowed, grizzled head, the drop into the pulpit out of sight until the hymn was over, then the harsh unmodulated voice, the high-pitched devotional patristicism, the dogmas, obvious or novel, not so much ambassadorial as from a man inhabiting his message; now and then the search-light thrown with startling vividness on the secrets hidden in many a hearer’s heart. Some came once from mere curiosity, and not again, some felt repulsion, some went away alarmed, impressed, transformed.”106 Later, after becoming friendly with him, Tuckwell noted, “Two things impressed me when I first saw him close: his exceeding slovenliness of person; buttonless boots, necktie limp … unbrushed coat collar … and the almost artificial sweetness of his smile contrasting as it did with the somber gloom of his face when in repose.” Newman would write to the convert T. W. Allies at the height of his controversy with Pusey, “It is harsh to call any mistakes of his, untruthfulness. I think they arise from the same slovenly habit which some people would recognise in his dress, his beard, etc.”107 What Tuckwell and most others at Oxford could not see beneath the dour public persona was Pusey’s lacerating self-recrimination, which he attempted to describe to Keble: “My dear wife’s illness first brought to me, what has since been deepened by the review of my past life, how, amid special mercies and guardianship of God, I am scarred all over and seamed with sin, so that I am a monster to myself: I loathe myself, I can feel of myself only like one covered with leprosy from head to foot: guarded as I have been there is no one with whom I do not compare myself, and find myself worse than they.”108 With thoughts like these preoccupying his mind, it is no wonder he neglected his appearance.

  If 1839 was a turning point in Pusey’s life, it was even more so in Newman’s, when, in the course of studying early Church history, he discovered that there were grounds for doubting the legitimacy of the Anglican Church. For the next six years, he subjected his doubts to careful re-examination. However, no sooner did his doubts about the illegitimacy of Canterbury become confirmed than his doubts about the legitimacy of Rome intensified. If Newman was slow to convert, it was only because he feared that his developing convictions about the claims of Rome might be delusive. As he wrote to Manning, “What keeps me yet [within the Anglican fold] is what has kept me long—a fear that I am under a delusion …” He was understandably leery of a Roman Church about which he knew so little: “I was scarcely ever for an hour in the same room with a Roman Catholic in my life,” he admitted.109 Indeed, as late as December of 1844, he confided to his dear friend John Keble: “No one could have a more unfavorable view than I have of the present state of the Roman Catholics—so much so that any who joined them would
be like the Cistercians at Fountains, living under trees till their house was built …”110 Despite these doubts, Newman’s Catholic faith was becoming stronger day by day. During the long period in which he feared that his doubts might be the result of sinfulness—a fear Anglicans inclined to Rome were encouraged to feel by an Establishment Church naturally hostile to Rome—he undertook St. Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises, which, he told Keble, he found of “extreme utility.” For Newman, Loyola “and his followers after him, seem to have reduced the business of self discipline to a science—and since our Enemy’s warfare upon us proceeds doubtless on system, every one, I suppose, must make a counter system for himself, or take one which experience has warranted.”111 Undertaking the Spiritual Exercises finally proved to Newman that his growing confidence in the truth of Catholicism was not delusive. When the Bishop of Oxford ordered Newman to cease publication of the Tracts in response to the furor over the presumed heterodoxy of Tract 90, Pusey was confident that Newman would abide the episcopal condemnation, just as he had abided the condemnation he had received over his sermon on the Eucharist. As late as 1844, Pusey sent Newman a birthday note telling his friend that, “If such as I might express anything in sending what is solemn, it would be the hope that in all the sorrows and anxieties whereby you are to be perfected, you may be bathed and refreshed by that Sudor Sanguineus, and that as each pang comes over you … you will commit our Church to Him, who endured It for us.”112 Newman wrote back that Pusey was under “a false impression from which I can relieve you. I am in no perplexity or anxiety at present. I fear that I must say that for four years and a half I have had a conviction, weaker or stronger, but on the whole constantly growing, and at present very strong, that we are not part of the Church. I am too much accustomed to this idea to feel pain at it … Alas! I fear I have removed pain from your mind in one way, only to give a greater pain in another. And yet is it possible you can be quite unprepared for this avowal? It was the Monophysite and Donatist controversies which in 1839 led me to this clear and distinct judgement.”113 It was possible: Pusey would not hear what Newman was telling him and chose instead to imagine that his friend was simply over-reacting. “I have such conviction that you are under God’s guidance, that I look on cheerfully still, that all will be right,—I mean for our poor Church and you … Indeed, of late, I have wished to know nothing, lest my very knowing it should be hurtful. I have the same confidence in you as ever.”114 Nevertheless, Newman again sought to disabuse his friend. “I think you do not put yourself enough into my position, and consider how a person would view things, and at the end of near five years. I suppose it is possible for a Church to have some profound wound, which, till healed, infallibly impeded the exercise of its powers and made attempts to act futile. How should we feel, e.g., if we saw a man with a broken leg attempting to walk?”115 Keble, at least, knew what was coming. “I myself for some time,” he wrote Pusey, “have hardly dared to expect any other event than you now fear … Yet when one does a little realize it, it seems a depth of disappointment beyond imagination. But surely there are those to whom there will be light in the darkness.”116