by Edward Short
In the midst of this gathering darkness, Pusey lost his eldest daughter Lucy, whose sickly constitution finally gave way after a severe attack of whooping cough. As Liddon avows, “Lucy was more to Pusey than his other children, more, perhaps than any other person in the world.”117 She sympathized with his religious interests, read Newman’s sermons after she had been confirmed, and even resolved to devote herself to the religious life to look after the sick and poor. “She was the one being,” Pusey told Newman, “around whom my thoughts of the future here had wound.”118 To his son, Philip, he confided, “I cannot tell you how her simplicity and devotion and love wound round my heart, and how I loved her …”119 Lucy reminded Pusey not only of his departed wife but of Newman. In a letter to his friend, written in the throes of his impending loss, Pusey related how his daughter had told him, ‘Now I am so near death, it seems that my love of God is not what is should be,’” which prompted her distraught father to tell Newman “She is a child of your writings.”120 Newman, whose loss of his sister Mary brought home to him death’s full, life-illuminating significance, wrote Pusey back a letter showing how shared grief united the two men, even at a time when their ecclesiological views were increasingly at odds. “You may fancy what heart ache your note of to-day has given me. Yet all is well, as you better than I can say. What would you do more than is granted you as regards dear Lucy? She was given you to be made an heir of heaven.” Indeed, for Newman, Lucy, like Mary, must be accounted a saint, who required of Pusey nothing less than self-sacrificial love. “Have you not been allowed to perform that part towards her? You have done your work—what remains but to present it finished to Him Who put it upon you? You are presenting it to Him, you are allowed to do so, in the way most acceptable to Him, as a holy blameless sacrifice, not a sacrifice which the world sullied, but as if a baptismal offering, perfected by long though kind and gentle sufferings. How fitly do her so touching words which you repeat to me accord with such thoughts as these! ‘Love’ which she asks for, is of course, the grace which will complete the whole. Do you not bear in mind the opinion of theologians that it is the grace which supplies all things, supersedes all things, and is all in all?”121 Later, in 1879, doubtless recalling these vital letters from Newman, Pusey would ask an Anglican colleague, who had falsely suggested that Pusey had tried to dissuade Newman from accepting the Cardinal’s hat: “Why do people gossip about such a sacred thing as a love of above half a century?”122
The dejection into which Lucy’s death threw Pusey was aggravated by concerns about the deteriorating state of the Anglican Church. “It is not that I mistrust God’s goodness,” he wrote to Newman, “but man’s, our own, prayerlessness. I hear of continual prayer among the Roman Catholics; there may be such among ourselves; but there is much want of love and disunited prayer.”123 In August 1844, while traveling down to Oxford from London, Newman heard of Pusey’s deepening gloom from a mutual friend and tried to buck him up by suggesting that Rome might not be the unalloyed evil Pusey imagined. “Will you, please, think of this—that whatever be the event of things, (of which we know nothing, and whether good or bad we may know nothing) yet nothing can hinder the fact that it has pleased God to work, and to be working, through you more good than can be told. Is it a good that souls should be made more serious? that they should be turned towards themselves and towards repentance [sic]? that they should spend their substance, not on themselves, but in the service of religion? that they should have truer views of the creed? more reverence, more faith, more love? Now, has not Divine Mercy made you the means of all this in a way far beyond your own expectation? … Is it not a hundred times more certain that these things are good than that joining the Church of Rome is evil? Is it not wrong to be downhearted?”124 If Newman’s main purpose in this heartfelt letter was to suggest to Pusey that Rome might be a welcome alternative to an English Church fraught with “disunited prayer,” it was not a purpose Pusey acknowledged. Instead, like Keble, he insisted on regarding continued membership in the Anglican fold as a kind of necessary mortification for unexpiated sin. “Jeremiah was allowed to weep for his people, and Ezekiel to sit astonished seven days, and St. Paul to have great heaviness of heart for his kinsmen according to the flesh; and so, now that the work which God seemed to have in store for our Church seems threatened, I, a sinner, may have sorrow for what my own sins may, to an extent I know not of, have caused.”125 As for the likelihood that Newman himself would ever contemplate secession, Pusey was categorical: “write or speak or act as I may, I do not believe that it can ever be; it goes against my whole nature to believe it. I cannot think that we should be so utterly deserted as that it should be permitted.”126 Newman was at a loss. “What am I to say but I am one who, even five years ago, had a strong conviction, from reading the history of the early ages, that we are not part of the Church?” In August 1844, Newman might not have been fully convinced of the rightness of Rome but he was convinced of the wrongness of Canterbury. “For a long, long time my constant question has been, ‘Is it a dream? Is it a delusion?’ and the wish to have decisive proof on this point has made me satisfied to wait—it makes me satisfied to wait still—but, should such as I be suddenly brought down to the brink of life, then, when God allows no longer time for deliberation, I suppose he would feel he must act, as is on the whole safest, under circumstances.” Newman could not have been more explicit, and yet, recognizing the sort of stubborn denial he was up against, he ended the letter with an obviously weary plea: “And now, my dear P do take in the whole of the case, nor shut your eyes, as you do so continually, and God bless all things to you, as I am sure He will and does.”127 Pusey’s reply could have inspired no confidence in Newman that he was getting through to his obdurate correspondent. “I do not shut my eyes now; I feel everything I do is hollow, and dread its cracking. But though I feel in a vessel threatened with shipwreck, I trust that our Lord is still in her, and that, however periled, she will not perish.”128 Pusey, at any rate, would muddle through. When, in early 1845, Convocation threatened to condemn Tract 90, Pusey wrote to Newman, “Recollect that I am committed to Tract 90 as well as you,” which elicited from Newman a response that showed that he was not in need of reassurances. “Long indeed have I been looking for external circumstances to determine my course, and I do not wish this daylight to be withdrawn. Moreover, I have had to take so lukewarm a part about Ward that I am really glad and relieved to find myself at last in the scrape.”129 As it happened, the censure against Newman was vetoed, though indignation over the anti-Tractarian Heads of Houses who threatened the censure was considerable. “Sorrow for Oxford and the Church is even at this moment the strongest feeling in my breast,” Gladstone told Pusey, “yet indignation at this proposal to treat Mr. Newman worse than a dog really makes me mistrust my judgment, as I suppose one should always do when any proposal seeming to present an aspect of incredible wickedness is advanced.”130 Newman looked on the proceedings with indifference. “The matter now going on has not given me a moment’s pain, nay or interest,” he told one correspondent.131 He was coming to final terms with the radical realization, which had first dawned on him six years before that “the Church of England is in schism” and, in comparison, the threats of Oxford dons seemed trumpery things.132
In February 1845, Newman wrote to Pusey, “My dear P, please do not disguise the fact from yourself that … I am as much gone over as if I were already gone. It is a matter of time only.”133 The Fathers of the ancient Church proved decisive: “this line of reading and no other,” he told Keble, “has led me Romewards.”134 Levi Silliman Ives, the only American Episcopal bishop to convert as a result of the Oxford Movement, also credited the early Fathers with sealing his conversion. That the Fathers should have proven to Newman the untenably schismatic character of the Anglican Church could not have been easy for Pusey to accept. This may explain the odd surprise he affected at Newman’s secession, despite the innumerable indications he had been given that his friend’s conversion was
indeed imminent.
If Keble responded to the crisis of Tractarianism with agonizing indecisiveness, Pusey responded as though there really had been no crisis. Newman went over to Rome, Pusey claimed, out of over-sensitive pique. “It is an exceeding mystery that such confidence as he had once in our Church should have gone,” Pusey wrote in a long letter to the English Churchman after Newman’s secession. “Even amidst our present sorrows it goes to the heart to look at that former self, and think how devotedly he worked for our Church; how he strove to build her up. It looks as if some good purpose for our Church had failed; that an instrument raised up for her had not been employed as God willed and so is withdrawn. There is a jar somewhere. One cannot trust oneself to think, whether his keen sensitiveness to ill was not fitted for these troubled times. What, to such dulled minds as my own, seemed as a matter of course, as something of necessity to be gone through and endured, was to his … ‘like the piercing of a sword.’”135 Newman, from his standpoint, confessed that he and Pusey were at cross purposes well before 1845. “I had from the first,” he wrote in the Apologia, “a great difficulty in making Dr. Pusey understand such differences of opinion as existed between himself and me. When there was a proposal about the end of 1838 for a subscription for a Cranmer Memorial, he wished us both to subscribe together to it. I could not, of course, and wished him to subscribe by himself. That he would not do; he could not bear the thought of our appearing to the world in separate positions, in a matter of importance. And, as time went on, he would not take any hints, which I gave him, on the subject of my growing inclination to Rome.” In his resolute assumption that Newman was somehow at one with his own adherence to the English Church, Pusey behaved with something of his father’s accustomed imperiousness. In the Apologia, Newman catalogued the long history of Pusey’s quixotic denial of facts. “A common friend of ours broke it all to him in 1841, as far as matters had gone at that time, and showed him clearly the logical conclusions which must lie in propositions to which I had committed myself; but somehow or other in a little while, his mind fell back into its former happy state, and he could not bring himself to believe that he and I should not go on pleasantly together to the end. But that affectionate dream needs must have been broken at last; and two years afterwards, that friend … set himself, as I have said, to break it. Upon that, I too begged Dr. Pusey to tell in private to any one he would, that I thought in the event I should leave the Church of England. However, he would not do so; and at the end of 1844 had almost relapsed into his former thoughts about me, if I may judge from a letter of his which I have found. Nay, at the Commemoration of 1845, a few months before I left the Anglican Church, I think he said about me to a friend, “I trust after all we shall keep him.”136 When Manning shared with Pusey letters Newman had written to him in 1843 clearly preparing him for his conversion, Pusey would not credit them and, later, wrote Gladstone: “Knowing Newman intimately, I do not think that the portentous expression in his letters (forwarded to me by Manning) have a necessary or immediate bearing upon certain steps of outward conduct.”137 This tendency to ignore evidence contrary to his own wishes or prejudices can also be seen in Pusey’s reading of the Fathers, whose affirmations of papal primacy, the honors due to the Mother of God, and the nature of the Real Presence he simply passed over.138
On 9 October 1845, Father Dominic, the Passionist came to Littlemore to take him away for good into the Roman Catholic Church. Liddon’s comment on the momentous day is worth quoting: “The period of hesitation and suspense, within which Pusey had never quite ceased to hope, and certainly had never ceased to pray, was at an end. The dreaded event had come at last; Newman was lost to the English Church.”139 If Pusey never ceased to hope and pray that Newman would somehow remain within the Anglican communion of his birth, Newman, for his part, once he converted, never ceased to hope and pray that Pusey would join what he called “the One Fold of the Redeemer,” though he was never unmindful of the many hindrances that stood in the way.140 Indeed, in this regard, Newman might have agreed with the Bishop of London, who, on hearing of Newman’s secession, consoled himself with the thought that if the English Church retained “only ten” communicants, Canon Pusey would be one of them.141
If Newman’s relations with Keble broke down altogether after Newman’s conversion, only resuming 20 years later, when a mutual friend suggested they meet, his relations with Pusey never broke off, though they became distinctly strained. On his 47th birthday, Newman wrote to Pusey, “Would I could say something which would sound less cold … but really I dare not. I could not without saying something which would seem rude. Alas! I have no alternative between silence and saying what would pain.”142 Nevertheless, he did manage to write to Pusey with some candor, as was evident in one of the first letters he wrote as a Catholic, when he was still at Maryvale, Oscott. “I cannot conceive, and will not, that the subject of so many prayers as are now offered for you, beginning at Rome, and reaching to Constantinople and England, should ultimately remain where you are. This, my dearest Pusey, is an earnest which satisfies me about the future, though I don’t tell others so – nor am I anxious or impatient at the delay, for God has His own good time for everything—.” But, by the same token, Newman was concerned about reports he was hearing of the unwarranted authority Pusey was arrogating to himself. “What does make me anxious, is, whenever I hear that, in spite of your evident approximation in doctrine and view to the Roman system, you are acting in hostility against it, and keeping souls in a system which you cannot bring out into words, as I consider, or rest upon any authority besides your own.”143 This was frank, but not as frank as a letter he did not send, in which he returned to the ticklish subject of Pusey’s trying to dissuade Anglo-Catholics from converting. “I will say at once then, that it has affected me very much to hear that you are taking the salvation of others upon yourself. You say to them ‘Remain in the English Church – I will be answerable for you.’ O my dear P. who gave you authority, who taught you thus to speak? – where is such a responsibility contemplated in the Anglican formularies? What precedent is there for it? The awe and terror which this step has excited has been one cause of people’s praying for you at this moment so earnestly.”144 Even though unsent, this letter is important, because it shows the extent to which Newman regarded Pusey as the de facto leader of the Tractarian party and, as such, accountable for the considerable sway he exercised over Anglo-Catholics. The saintly Keble might have been more beloved but Pusey was the acknowledged arbiter of the party’s patchwork theology. In April 1841, Mrs. Brookfield, Thackeray’s friend, acknowledged this by drolly confiding to her diary: “To day I am going to dine with some ultra-ultra-ultra evangelicals of aunts, who believe Pusey to be the Pope in disguise and Newman the head of the Jesuits.”145
When Mrs. Bowden eventually chose to follow Newman and convert to Rome, Pusey sent Newman a letter which reaffirmed his allegiance to Canterbury, after sending one to Mrs. Bowden in which he wrote as though she had not converted, telling her at the same time that it remained “a mystery” why Newman had made his own move.146 Again, Pusey ignored whatever contravened his wishes. Moreover, what is remarkable about this letter is how much it defines the position that he would maintain for the rest of his long life. “I could hardly write anything which would not pain you,” he confessed to Newman. “For you have one wish for me; and I am no nearer that than heretofore. I cannot unmake myself; I cannot see otherwise than I have seen these many years … I am no nearer to thinking that the English Church is no true part of the Church, or that inter-communion with Rome is essential, or that the present claims of Rome are Divine. I earnestly desire the restoration of unity, but I cannot throw myself into the practical Roman system, nor renounce what I believe our gracious Lord acknowledges. And so I must go on, with joy at the signs of deepening life among us, and distress at our losses, and amazement that Almighty God vouchsafes to employ me for anything, and thinking it less than I ought to expect when everything is brought to
a contrary issue from what I desire.”147 Here was the reasoning with which Pusey reconciled himself to remaining within the Anglican Church, to which he would return again and again until his death in 1882. It was with this in mind that Newman wrote in the Apologia, “When I became a Catholic, I was often asked, ‘What of Dr. Pusey?’ When I said that I did not see symptoms of his doing as I had done, I was sometimes thought uncharitable. If confidence in his position is, (as it is) a first essential in the leader of a party, this Dr. Pusey possessed pre-eminently. The most remarkable instance of this was his statement, in one of his subsequent defenses of the Movement, when moreover it had advanced a considerable way in the direction of Rome that among its more hopeful peculiarities was its ‘stationariness.’”148 This was an astute observation on Newman’s part because if one took away the odd Roman trappings from Pusey’s Tractarianism, what Newman called its “mimic Catholicism”149—the auricular confession, the sisterhoods, the training of Anglican monks at St. Saviour’s Leeds—it was not much different from the Anglicanism that the Provost of Oriel, Edward Copleston, described when he claimed that, “The scheme of revelation we think is closed, and we expect no new light on earth to break in upon us … We hold it our especial duty … to keep strict watch round that sacred citadel, to deliver out in due measure and season the stores it contains, to make our countrymen look to it as a tower of strength …”150