BOOKS.
LIFE OF DR. PUSEY.* [FIRST NOTICE.] THIS first instalment of the long-expected Life of Dr. Pusey will have for the student of the great religious revival known as the Oxford Movement an altogether unique interest. We have no other record of the Movement from contemporary documents to compare with it in completeness. Nearly all other accounts which we possess are in great measure retro- spects, and in all retrospects there is a tendency to look at the past through glasses coloured by the present. In the Apologia, the colour of all which tended towards Rome was deepened—or, if not deepened, it stood forth in too strong relief to make the book an adequate record of all the forces at work. In Dean Church's retrospect, the urgency of the Roman controversy at the outset, and the imperative claim for a decision upon phases of it as they were stated by New- man himself with trenchant logical force, is insufficiently recognised. In Mr. Mozley's pages, the atmosphere becomes diluted with gossip, and the strain and heart-searchings of that eventful time, which were a testimony to the depths which were being stirred, are almost forgotten. The present volume, while inferior to the two first in pictorial skill, and hardly giving an opportunity for the exhibition of equal strength in the author's grasp of the situation, and while less attractive to the general reader than any of the three, pre- sents all sides of the Movement as none of them do, and fills in the picture by details whose faithfulness is unquestionable, —by an abundant and well-chosen selection of contemporary documents. With loving care Dr. Liddon has treasured and preserved almost all available memorials of the man with whom he had an almost long-life friendship,—whom he used to speak of as " dilectiseimus amicus " ; and considering the very extensive scale adopted, and the amount of minute information which the book embodies, it is readable in a degree which evinces great literary skill. Undoubtedly, it L4r. of Edward Beuyerie PuieyHenryD.D. By Hen Parry Liddon. Edited by Be'.. J. 0. IcAnston. Vienr of All Sainte', Oxford, and Rev. R. J. Wilson, Warden el Rabb; College, London; Longman% would have been far more readable had it been reduced by at least a half; but it was not in Dr. Liddon's nature to let this consideration tell by a feather's-weight against his deep and almost pathetic sense of the worth of each fragment. And a briefer treatment would have interfered with the charac- teristics which we have noted as marking off this work from the rest of the literature of the Movement, as full contempo- rary annals. The method is characteristic, too, of the writer, and of his patient faith in the worth of all he had to record. " How elaborate," we read in the preface of the editors, " the plan of the ' Life,' as projected by Dr. Liddon was, those only can realise who are intimate with his methods of work and with his conception of what was due to all that was said, written, and done by him whom, after Cardinal Newman's example, he used affectionately to call a 1.caycq. To him at the outset any letter whatever of Dr. Pusey's or Mr. Keble's was a precious treasure which he hardly ventured to curtail, much less to omit, and it was in his nature to be dissatisfied with any account of an event which failed to trace both causes and consequences."
Any attempt to deal, in the limits at our disposal, with over a thousand pages of exceptionally small type in such a way as to give an adequate idea of their scope, would be impossible. We shall best consult our readers' requirements by presenting some of the characteristics of the book, and some of the note- worthy, and in some degree new, results it yields.
The most striking lesson of the book concerns the relations of the Oxford Movement to the modern High Church Revival, which, in its various aspects, is so important a feature in the English ecclesiastical world of to-day. That that movement followed historically from the Oxford revival, there is no doubt; how far it did so logically, is an interesting question, not for historians only, but for those who wish to estimate truly the genius of a school of thought which in its various modifications is doing so much zealous and valuable work in the Church of England. But there are two previous questions which need considering before we can approach this interesting problem, and on which Dr. Liddon's work throws much light. One is the relative positions of Newman and Pusey as factors in the original Movement ; the other is the state of thought and feeling among the Oxford men of that time, the type of mind generated in their disciples by the influence of the Oxford leaders, the subjects which absorbed their attention, as compared and contrasted with the English Churchmen of to-day.
Of Pusey's very great influence in the Movement this book gives unanswerable evidence,—all the more so because Dr. Liddon knows too much about his subject to ignore for a moment the fact that Newman, at the zenith of his influence, was, in Oxford, first, with no second ; that his teaching and influence were paramount with Pusey himself. Newman's personal ascendency seems to have been entirely without parallel. Pusey's accession was undoubtedly of great im- portance in giving the Movement a status in the eyes of the outside world,—from his position, his character, his /earning. But the wonderful subduing of the mind and heart of young Oxford, the enlisting of the sympathy of its most gifted sons in a cause which, thirty years earlier, would have appeared the merest reactionary folly, was the work of the one man of supreme genius who was associated with the Movement. Credo in Newmannum was the faith of hundreds in the Oxford of 1841), Mr. J. A. Fronde, speaking of Keble, Pusey, and his own brother, says, " Compared with Newman, they were all but as ciphers, and he the indicating number." But this does not interfere with the fact that Pusey exercised at a critical time—at the time immediately following the secessions of 1845—an influence of his own so great that he may be in a true sense considered the Father of Modern Anglicanism. Dr. Liddon points this out as giving Pusey claim to leadership, beyond that which Newman indicates in the Apologia as due to his position and character. We agree with Dr. Liddon as to the fact, but we differ in part from him• as to its causes.
Dr. Pusey's influence after Newman's secession was due, we believe—though it may seem a paradox to say it-- not only to very high moral excellencies, but almost as much to certain intellectual deficiencies. Readers of the Spectator are aware that we are unable to concur either in the via media elaborated so fully by Newman in the early Tracts and in the lectures of 1837, or in his ultimate acquiescence in the teaching of Rome. Given the critical character of the problem Newman propounded, given that the Anglican Church could only be justified against Rome by establishing its Catholic character by precedents from antiquity, and its condemnation must follow. It is the belief that precedents from antiquity do not fully meet the case, and that Rome obliges belief in what is, for Englishmen, untenable, coupled with the zeal and success of the actually existing English Church, which forms at the present time her primary justification. It is on these facts that Dean Church has ably insisted in his work on the Oxford Movement, And the further success of the Catholic doctrine and devotion inculcated by the High-Church party in stimu- lating piety, and in helping the Church of England to en- counter the difficulties of the age, the claim of the Anglican advocates of these doctrines, to be better able to cope with modern conditions than the comparatively rigid and antiquated Church of Rome,—this is the further and special justification of those Anglicans who have retained much of the ethos of the Movement, without going over to Rome. This justifica- tion is, however, a far less ambitious attempt than Newman's original plea ; and appealing as it does to actual results, its full strength has only become apparent after lapse of time. How, then, was the Movement to live after Newman's a priori ground had failed, and before the argument a posteriori had any exist- ence P We believe with Dr. Liddon that its survival was due to Dr. Pusey's confidence. But we hold that confident steadfast- ness to have resulted not only from Dr. Pusey's deep moral earnestness and patient zeal, but in great part from the intellec- tual defects which enabled him without difficulty, after having identified himself with Newman's earlier position, to slide cora- fortably on to the lower level, instead of pressing the original scheme of the Movement to its logical issue, Had Pusey owned, when Newman went over to Rome, that the Movement was defeated, the zeal it had aroused might easily have been dissi- pated, and spent its force in other directions. It certainly would never have borne the fruit it has done in the English Church. But his perfect confidence and patience, at a time when he had logically no defence to make, supported his followers. Their zeal bore fruit. The new arguments from the success of Catholic preaching within the Established Church were enabled to come into existence ; and the new position was recognised and gradually analysed. That the existing Church of England is Catholic in the sense that its doctrine is distinctively Catholic, and that it is in communion with the Catholic Church, are assertions which can hardly be made without a smile by any save extreme partisans. But that it has in its comprehensive pale a large number of devoted men, Catholic in devotion and in doctrine, and that it is doing a great work for England by means of these men, it would be idle to deny. This, then, was the strength of the new position, and it arose primarily from Dr. Pusey's patient and almost saintly earnestness ; and, secondly, from the calm serenity of mind with which an intellect as untenacious as his affections were tenacious, succeeded in passirN through stages of logical inconsistency, sanguine that all would be right in the end. The appeal to the Bishops as witnesses to Catholic Anglicanism fell; the appeal to separation from Protestant Christendom received a rude shock in the case of the Jerusalem bishopric ;
the appeal to the Anglican formularies as sacred and final became a dead-letter ; and when years of toiling for Catholic doctrine and devotion among Anglicans, with no exact intel- lectual defence of his labour, had borne splendid fruit, Pusey could say complacently, and with no sense of transition, "I, at least, never leant on the Bishops ; I leant on the Church of England."
We have said that Pusey's heart was tenacious, and this deserves being dwelt on a little further. Pusey had a woman's faithfulness. The characteristics of a woman's faithfulness are that it is very noble ; that it leads to unwearying and un- wavering self-devotion ; that it is never changed ; that it triumphs over logic ; that, even though it be misdirected, it cannot even for a moment endure or enter into reasons against a feeling or a state of mind which are part of its very life. Pusey had faithfulness of this kind to Christianity, to the Church of England, to Newman himself. In early life he made a close study of German rationalism ; but we see no sign in this book of his even for a moment apprehending the
rationalist's frame of mind in reference to Christianity. Later on be accepted the early Traetarian teaching, in which the con- troversy with Rome was so vital and so essential ; but we see, as we have intimated, no sign that the dilemma propounded by
Newman as so urgent had any reality or force whatever to Pusey's mind. Faithfulness to the Church of England re- mained while he followed Newman to the very brink. Newman left off speaking against Rome. Pusey followed his example. Newman told Pusey that he had made up his mind to become a Roman Catholic. Pusey, after some pangs at the separation, expressed his belief that Newman was quite right ; and half a year later we find him asking Newman's advice as to what counsel he should give to certain Anglican disciples of his who were disposed to join the Church of Rome. When Newman actually seceded, Pusey's sanguineness and faithful- ness went so far as to make him regard Newman as the sub- ject of a special Providence, and as commissioned by God to join the Roman Church for its regeneration. Faithful alike to his Church and to his friend, he remained absolutely blind to the logical opposition between the two sentiments,—for, be it observed, his faith its Newman involved throughout a belief that he was acting rightly. And when the opposition reached its climax, he excogitated the wonderful dens ex machina, in- dicated by Dr. Liddon at the end of the second volume, to set all to rights. It was not right, in the abstract, to become a Roman Catholic; but Newman was right in becoming one. We cannot agree with Dr. Liddon that his was the attitude of a strong man. But it was that of a very devoted one ; of one who had, as we have said, the passion of fidelity to friend and Chnrch,—a kind of passion which is more often charac- teristic of women than of men.
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