LIFE OF DR. PUSEY.—VoL. III.* WHEN reviewing the previous volumes

of this interesting work we contrasted the keen dialectic of Newman, never satisfied without what seemed to him a logical basis for his creed, with the more womanly quality of Pusey's mind. "The characteristics of a woman's faithfulness," we said, "are that it is very noble ; that it leads to unwearying and unwavering self-devotion: that it is never changed ; that it triumphs over logic." "We see no sign that the dilemma propounded by Newman as so urgent had any reality or force whatever to Pusey's mind." This characteristic dif- ference between the two men is conspicuous in this volume also. The fact is, that Newman was by disposition a rationalist with a vivid imagination and great religious fer- vour. He was keenly conscious of the domineering influence of his speculative reason, and was afraid of it. And he had before him the example of one brother who had abandoned Christianity for a vague theism, and of another who had dis- carded every form of theism. He gave pathetic expression to this feeling in a letter to Posey while• he was engaged on his Essay on Development some months before he left the Church of England. Pusey had "begged Newman to con- sider the unsettlement of convictions and the disunion among families which were caused by the apprehension of his leaving the English Church "

" Where are we to stop P' cried Newman in reply. • Where am I to stop ? What to believe ? Each one has his own tempta- tions. I thank God that He has shielded me morally from what intellectually might easily come on me—general scepticism. Why should I believe the most sacred and fundamental doctrines of our faith if you cast me off from the ground of development? But if that ground is given me I must go further. I cannot hold precisely what the English Church holds and nothing more. I must go forward or backward, else I sink into a dead scepticism, a heartless acedia, into which too many in Oxford, I fear, are sinking."

He had, in truth, never accepted the Church of England as a

spiritual mother, though he thought he had. And this truth began to dawn upon him while be was writing his Apologia.

"For years," he says—that is, ever since 1833—" I must have had something of an habitual notion, though it was latent, and had never led me to distrust my own convictions, that my mind had not found its ultimate rest, and that in some sense or other I was on a journey I determined to be guided, not by my imagination, but by my reason." And so he proceeded to reason about the Church of England ; not looking up to her with the reverence and affection of a son, but in the critical spirit of a philosopher. He viewed her always from without, although he did not always realise it. He made logical experiments upon her, and formed theories about her; and if his theories were rejected, he felt that he must give up, not his theory, but his Church. The Thirty-nine Articles must be shown to be reconcilable with Tridentine theology. "It was a matter of life and death to us to show it." He "had no apprehension as to the experiment." But "he did nevertheless acknowledge that

• Life of Edward Bouveria Paso, D.D. By Henry Parry Liddon, D.D. Edited by Roe. J. 0. Johnston, Vicar of All Saints, Oxford; and Et. J. Wilson, Warden of Yeble College. Vol. ilL London : Longman& he was engaged in an experimentum crucis." "I have no doubt that then I acknowledged to myself that it would

be a trial of the Anglican Church which it had never undergone before I observe also that, though my Tract (No. 90) was an experiment, it was, as I said at the time, no feeler ; ' the event showed 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." With the failure of his Via Media theory his faith in the Church of England collapsed. And yet the Church of England had pronounced no formal condemnation of the Via Media, or even of Tract 90. A university oligarchy had condemned the Tract, Bishops charged against Trac- tarianism, and there was a popular clamour. But no legal or constitutional sentence had been pronounced. The Church was not formally committed. See how differently Newman could regard a far more serious dereliction of duty on the part of a Church to which he had learnt to look up as a son. Fourteen years after he joined the Church of Rome he wrote as follows :—

" The episcopate, whose action was so prompt and concordant at Nictea on the rise of Arianism, did not as a class or order of men play a good part in the troubles consequent upon the Council; and the laity did. The Catholic people, in the length and breadth of Christendom, were the obstinate champions of Catholic truth, and the Bishops were not. Of course, there were great and illustrious exceptions."

He names Athanasins and a few more. But at the Council of Arles "the Pope's legate subscribed the condemnation of Athanasius," and he quotes Cardinal Baronius's allegation that " Liberius, after he had been in banishment for two years, gave way, and from fear of threatened death was in- duced to subscribe," and Jerome's more damaging accusa- tions of "heretical pravity " against the Pope, not from fear of death, but from "the tedium of exile." The condemnation of Tract 90 by the Heads of Houses was a small matter com- pared with this ; yet it sufficed to make Newman "give up" the Church of England.

But he could not join the Church of Rome without some rational basis for his conversion, and so he wrote his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. The Church of his adoption was too cautious to accept his theory, and some of her leading divines wrote strongly against it. Newman's craving for a logical fulcrum to his faith comes out in one of the most brilliant passages in that Essay, where he sug- gests that the heresy of Arius, which assigned to the Second Person of the Trinity a dignity superior to all created intelli- gence, yet made him inferior, because created, to Deity, had "discovered a new sphere in the realms of light, to which the Church had not yet assigned an inhabitant,"—a vacant throne, that is, reserved for the coronation of the Virgin Mary. This made the error of Arius to consist in assigning a wrong inhabitant to the "new sphere" which he had discovered.

Arius ascribed to Jesus all the titles of Deity ; but the Church decided that this did not amount to divine worship, since Arius still left Christ a creature; therefore it is lawful to heap divine worship on the Virgin so long as we admit that she is a creature. Such is Newman's argument. "The votaries of Mary do not exceed the true faith unless the blasphemers of her Son come up to it. The Church of Rome is not idola- trous unless Arianism is orthodoxy."

This is a good instance of Newman's passion for theorising, for constructing a rational basis, or what appeared to be such, for his faith. His rich imagination suggested a solution for some difficulty which puzzled his reason, and his reason was thereupon led captive into the ser- vice of his imagination to provide a logical defence of the solution. It was this intellectual peculiarity which led Kings- ley and others to accuse Newman of indifference to veracity,— an accusation which genuinely and justly aroused his indigna- tion, for he was always sincerely honest and truthful in intention. He refused to accept conclusions without logical evidence, and was thus, as he saw in retrospect, "on journey" towards a goal where he would be obliged to submit his reason to a visible authority as the alternative to what be dreaded most of all,—" a dead scepticism," most hateful of all mental states to a man of his exuberant imagination and abounding affection.

Pusey's mind was the antithesis of all this. Immeasurably less brilliant than Newman, he was in some ways much more logical. His " Evidence " on the Oxford University Bill- really a well-composed treatise on the comparative merits of the English and German University systems—is a most powerful and lucid argument from his point of view. And Newman paid a humorous compliment to Pusey's controversial skill when he accused him of having, in his " Eirenikon," "fired his olive branch out of a catapult." Lacking Newman's fertile and flashing imagination, which, like a ray of electric- light, while illuminating with dazzling brightness what it immediately played upon, was apt sometimes to envelop the surrounding space in deeper shadow, Pusey possessed in larger measure than Newman what Aristotle would call yo6Inair;,—practical wisdom, the faculty of possessing his soul in patience, holding on to what the practical reason believed to be true in spite of the doubts and difficulties suggested by the speculative intellect. Of all the Tractarian leaders Dean Church was the one who has always seemed to us to have possessed this faculty in the most eminent degree. Full of enthusiasm and fire and zeal, and even righteous wrath, he always kept his balance when others—even Pusey—lost their heads. But Pusey's loyalty to the English Church partook a good deal, as already observed, of a woman's loyalty to the man or cause of her choice, with the difference that it was more discriminating. He saw very plainly, and admitted, the faults and deficiences which marked her; but with these he saw also what be believed to be the tokens and evidence of her divine lineage and the omens of her future triumph. More learned than Newman, he knew that many of the short- comings and lapses, which distressed Newman in the past and present of the English Church, had their parallels in other ages and countries, yet without destroying the Church or obliterating the evidence of her divine origin. The same phenomenon, too, was visible in the history of the Jewish Church, which nevertheless still remained a divine institu- tion, EAU' bore witness to precious and eternal truths in the midst of a licentious idolatry. In Pusey's view, therefore, the Church of England, in all her vicissitudes of good and ill, shared the fortunes in that respect of the Church of the Old Dispensation and of the Christian Church everywhere and in all ages. Indeed, her sorest trials, her deepest humili- ations, might be urged as an argument in her favour; for what but her connection with the True Vine could have enabled her to recover from blows which at the time seemed to many fatal ? She survived the irreligious and sacrilegious handling of worldly princes and statesmen, and during the Commonwealth nothing was left but "the stump of her roots in the earth," like the tree in Nebuchadnezzar's dream. Could she have emerged from that calamity if her roots had not been planted in congenial soil and kept "wet with the dew of heaven "?

It was this robust faith, stronger than logic, that enabled Pusey to weather the storms which at length cast Newman adrift from his moorings, and storms still fiercer and more staggering after Newman left. He was suspended by his University for two years on a ridiculous charge of false doctrine; was inhibited by his own diocesan and by other Bishops from the public exercise of his ministry ; was thwarted and slandered in his early efforts to start sister- hoods ; was cruelly disappointed in circumstances connected with the Church which he built and endowed in Leeds ; and was for years a byword of scorn and hatred in the public mind. And on the top of all these trials came the Gorham Controversy and Judgment, and the subsequent Controversies and Judgments on the Eucharist, Essays and _Reviews, and Ritual, involving questions infinitely more fundamental and crucial than the trumpery Jerusalem Bishopric and the academic condemnation of Tract 90,—the rocks on which Newman's faith in the English Church was shipwrecked. How trivial these questions seem now in the light of subsequent events ! It is much to Pusey's credit that his theological instinct and great learning, combined with his sober and sagacious judgment, enabled him to take the true measure of the ism in eaeh case. Newman lost heart and abandoned the ship when the Bishops turned against him. Posey gauged the crisis more accurately. "1 at least," he said, "never leant on the Bishops ; I leant on the Church of England." And the event justified his confidence, as it had justified the small minority who had clung to Athanasius when the Episcopate, including the Pope, deserted him—as Newman himself has reminded us—and the faithful laity saved the faith of Christendom. It was by one of those unerring instincts, therefore, which sometimes make vox poputi the voice of truth, that the popular judgment labelled the Oxford Movement with the name of Pusey, not of Newman; Puseyites, not Newmanites. It was the policy of Pusey, marked by sagacity, prescience, stedfastness, loyalty to first principles, that prevailed.

Since Newman left the Church of England in despair she has made such progress as he would have been happy, when he belonged to her, to contemplate as possible a century after his death. And the progress continues. The lesson seems to us plain. One of the stock arguments of some Roman Catholic controversialists against the Church of England, is that she owns to the existence of corruptions, heterodoxies, divisions, while claiming nevertheless to be an integral portion of the Church of Christ. But the perfection which we observe in God's works, alike in the kingdom of nature and of grace, is an ideal perfection, hardly ever realised on earth. Spotlessness, permanence, indefectibility, were predicated of the Jewish Church in psalm and prophecy; but the reality differed widely from the ideal. Prophecies still more glowing heralded the advent of the Christian Church ; yet we know that the tares of heresy and schism mingled with the pure wheat even in the Apostolic age. The human mind, too, naturally craves for an infallible voice in seasons of perplexity ; but infallible guidance has never been the method of God's government of mankind. Patriarchs and prophets and sages "all died in faith," their path through life illumined with light enough for guidance, but not light enough to dispense with earnest effort and diligent search after truth.

Lack of space forbids our touching on the more personal parts of this volume, and it remains only to add that the editors have done their work well and judiciously. The bio- graphy is honest too, not hesitating to point out the weak- nesses and faults of Dr. Pusey, while doing fall justice to what was great and noble and saintly in his character.