Dr. Pusey has written to the editor of the Catholic
paper the TVeekly Register, to thank him for his favourable review of Dr. Tusey's Eirenicon, a work in which apparently the Doctor tried to discover articles of peace which might restore the Roman Catholic Church to communion with the Anglican and the Greek, —a communion to which Dr. Pusey sees "no insurmountable objection." Dr. Pusey thinks that "our maximum and your [the Catholic] minimum might be found to harmonize." He says that he and his friends "readily recognize the primacy of the Bishop of Rome ; the bearings of that primacy upon other local churches we believe to be matter of ecclesiastical, not of divine law, but neither is there anything in the supremacy itself to which we should object ; our only fear is that it should, through the appointment of one Bishop, involve the reception of that practical quasi-authoritative system which is (I believe) alike the cause and (forgive me) the justification in our eyes of our remaining apart ; "—from which it would appear that nearly the only objection of Dr. Pusey to the Church of Rome is its admission of the dogmatic authority of the Pope's decisions. There always will be men who split hairs and are obstinate for trifles, but we have seldom met with one willing to risk what Dr. Pusey thinks so grave a sin as schism, not for the right of believing only what convinces him and disbelieving what tloes not, but for the right of resisting authority on a few doctrines while submitting to it on many,—in short, for rejecting it when- ever it seeks to impose those dogmas which lie between the minimum and the maximum faith of a good Catholic. This is .a truly unique application of quantitative measures,—rules of maxima and minima,—to dogma. We could swallow the maxi- mum of Romanist dogma quite as easily as the minimum, if we had once swallowed the principle.
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