Edward Bouverie Pusey · 1 of 21

Main Body · Part 1

MY DEAREST FRIEND,

You think that, Dr. Manning's last letter having been addressed to myself, it is desirable that I should in some way reply to it. It would cost me much, not to undertake any task which you might wish me to essay. You know how long it has been my wish to part with all controversy, and to consecrate the evening of my life to the unfolding of some of the deep truths of God’s Holy Word, as God might enable me, by aid of those whom He has taught in times past. This employment, and practical duties which God has brought to me, were my ideal of the employments of the closing years of a laborious life. The inroad made upon the Gospel by unbelievers, or half-believers, compelled me in part to modify this my hope. Still, since there is a common foe, pressing alike upon all who believe in Jesus, I the more hoped, at least, to be freed from any necessity of controversy with any who hold the Catholic faith. The recent personal appeal of Dr. Manning to myself seems, as you and other friends think, to call for an exception to this too; yet, since “the night cometh when no man can work,” I trust that I shall not be thought to shrink from duty, if, hereafter, I should maintain a silence, in order to give myself to that which seems to me more especially my calling.

Ordinarily, it would be of very little moment what is said of any individual. Yet since, in this juncture of the conflict with unbelief, I have felt it my duty to seek for hearty cooperation with those who have often felt it their duty to oppose me, and Dr. Manning calls this “a drifting back from old moorings,” it seems to me a duty both to them and to those with whom I have more commonly acted, to explain that it is not.

Ever since I knew them (which was not in my earliest years) I have loved those who are called “Evangelicals.” I loved them, because they loved our Lord. I loved them, for their zeal for souls. I often thought them narrow; yet I was often drawn to individuals among them more than to others who held truths in common with myself, which the Evangelicals did not hold, at least explicitly. I believe them to be “of the truth.” I have ever believed and believe, that their faith was and is, on some points of doctrine, much truer than their words. I believed and believe, that they are often withheld from the clear and full sight of the truth by an inveterate prejudice, that that truth, as held by us, is united with error, or with indistinct acknowledgment of other truths which they themselves hold sacred. Whilst, then, I lived in society, I ever sought them out, both out of love for themselves, and because I believed that nothing (with God’s help) so dispels untrue prejudice as personal intercourse, heart to heart, with those against whom that prejudice is entertained. I sought to point out to them our common basis of faith. I never met with any who held the Lutheran doctrine of justification, that “justifying faith is that whereby a person believes himself to be justified.” To others, who were not Calvinists, I

used to say, “I believe all which you believe; we only part, where you. deny.” I formed some lasting friendships with some among them who have finished their course, and with others who still remain. When occasion came, as in some of our struggles at Oxford, we acted together.

What, then, I ventured on one occasion to remark to Archdeacon Manning, was not, that he “used to join with those with whom I could not,” but that he joined them in a way at which I was surprised. In plain words, he remained a member of, I think, two religious societies, some of whose principles I thought that we both held to be faulty. I have united with the Evangelicals now, as I did before, whenever they would join with me in defence of our common faith; I have not united with them in any of those things which were not in accordance with my own principles. It was not any thing new, then, when, in high places, fundamental truths had been denied, I sought to unite with those, some of whom had often spoken against me, but against whom I had never spoken. It was the pent-up longing of years. I had long felt that common zeal for faith could alone bring together those who were opposed; I hoped that, through that common zeal and love, inveterate prejudices which hindered the reception of truth would be dispelled. This, however, was a bright vista which lay beyond. The immediate object was to resist unitedly an inroad upon our common faith. This I had done before, upon occasions less urgent.

But while, on the one hand, I profess plainly that love for the Evangelicals which I ever had, I may be, perhaps, the more bound to say, that, in no matter of faith, nor in my thankfulness to God for my faith, have I changed. This was understood on both sides. We united to oppose unbelief, holding, each, what each believed that God had taught him. And this, perhaps, may be an occasion to mention what relates to a very sacred season of my life, when, sixteen years ago, amid increasing fever and decreasing strength and apparent inefficiency of remedies, death seemed, day by day, nearer. Then, had it so pleased God that I should then die, I should have worded the confession of my faith in words like these: “I believe explicitly all which I know God to have revealed to His Church; and implicitly (implicitè) any thing, if He has revealed it, which I know not.” In simple words, “I believe all which the Church believes.” This is my habit of mind now. This I confess when I say to God, “I believe one Catholic and Apostolic Church.”

It is somewhat hard that when I, who ought to know myself best, have denied that I have “shifted my ground,” the statement that I have should be reiterated. It is sowing mutual mistrust. This, however, is but personal. The real point of Dr. Manning’s letter is to assert the contradictory of the statement, “that the Church of England is in God’s hands the great bulwark against infidelity in this land.” This saying was not mine, but that of one of the deepest thinkers and observers in the Roman Communion. I see that I did not say this distinctly. My words were: “While I know that a very earnest body of Roman Catholics rejoice in all the workings of God the Holy Ghost in the Church of England

(whatever they think of her), and are saddened by what weakens her who is, in God’s Hands, the great bulwark against infidelity in this land, others seemed to be in an ecstasy of triumph at this victory of Satan.” In this last category, I would say at once, that I did not include Cardinal Wiseman or Dr. Manning. They “wrote gravely,” as I said, although I certainly thought Dr. Manning’s letter dry, hard, unsympathizing. He seemed to me so intent on proving his point against the Church of England, for the sake of those whom he wished to detach from it, that all sorrow for the triumph of Satan was dried up. I said nothing of this. But I imagined that he identified the glory of God with the gaining fresh converts to the Roman Church; and so he seemed to me to forget, that each blow which he thought ought to help to detach us from the English communion, was destructive to souls and a dishonour to God.

The saying itself, that “the Church of England is, in God’s hands, the great bulwark against infidelity in this land,” relates plainly only to a present fact. It does not aver, that the Church of England is the best possible bulwark; but only, as a matter of fact, that it is at this moment in God’s Providence a real and chief bulwark against it. Of course, any Roman Catholic must think that the Roman Communion, if it were of the same extent in this land as the English Church is now, would be a much stronger bulwark. But this is not the question. The battle has to be fought now. Dr. Manning speaks of the evils resulting from “seventeen or eighteen thousand men [the English Clergy] educated with all the advantages of the English Schools and Universities, and distributed all over England, who maintain a perpetual protest, not only against the [Roman] Catholic Church, but against the belief that there is any divine voice immutably and infallibly guiding the Church at this hour in the declaration of the Christian revelation to mankind.” On this last hereafter. But then, these 18,000 clergy have, to say the least, the same advantages for that, which they are vowed to do, viz., to “banish and drive away all erroneous and strange doctrines contrary to God’s Word,” which Dr. Manning attributes to us for that, which we have no thought of doing, and which he must suppose us to do by virtue of our position, not by any word of most of us, since we are thinking of nothing less. Faith is, of course, the gift of God; but, whatever advantages our intellectual training can give to any of us for what we have no intention of doing, that it must with God’s blessing give to us, for that end to which our lives are consecrated, the maintenance of God’s truth, as far as in man lies, and the teaching it to the salvation of souls for whom Christ died. But the teaching of the Clergy is only a small portion of the efficacy of the Church in repelling unbelief. They act but as individuals, subordinate to the Church in which they are God’s ministers; the Church is a whole. And since we are more acted upon by what we do, than by what we hear, the Church, by putting into the mouths of all her members the ancient Creeds and Prayers which embody the faith, is, yet more, a continual unchanging teacher of the truth which Christ revealed and delivered to

her at the first. She, through our mothers whom God had taught by her, taught us our faith at our mother’s knee; she, through her Prayers and Creeds, has taught us all our life long; and our faith which we professed and uttered became, by God’s gift of faith, part of ourselves. Our bodies could be severed from our souls, but our faith could not, without our will, be severed from our hearts.

We, of course, believe that God the Holy Ghost, the “One Spirit” who animates and informs the “One Body” of Christ, teaches truth in her in a way different from that in which He, the Author of all Faith and Grace, is present with all Truth, wherever it is taught, and accompanies it by His Grace.

As individuals, we, too, thankfully acknowledge that whoever teaches any true faith in Jesus is, so far, one of God’s instruments against unbelief. Nay, such is the power of Divine faith, that every child, who has it, is such. “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings Thou hast perfected praise.” When our Lord came in His great humility, the faith of children rebuked the unbelief of the Scribes and Pharisees. The simple faith of a child now has power against unbelief, because it is the gift of God. The faith of dissenters, although often a very naked and fragmentary faith, must in its degree be a power of God against unbelief. I rather implied that there were other bulwarks against unbelief, when I spoke of the Church of England as “the great bulwark.” But I think that Dr. Manning has overlooked the fact, that the dissenters among us are indebted for very much of their faith to the Church from which they dissent. The dissenters, in the main, correspond to the Protestant bodies abroad. When then one compares the general condition of the English dissenters with that of the like bodies abroad, the unbelief in Holland, the rationalism in Germany, the Socinianism of Geneva, the Arianism or Semi-Arianism prevalent among the French Calvinists, or the Universalism which is desolating the United States, and (with the exception of one body) the almost entire neglect of baptism there among those who are the descendants of the English dissenters,—one cannot but think that the degree of faith surviving among them here is very much owing, under the mercy of God, to the English Church, which enfolds them all around even while they are hostile to it.

My own duties have not brought me into contact with dissenters; so nothing which I say can have a personal character. But I have understood that many of the more devout among the older denominations have acknowledged, that now there is more “life” in the Church of England than among them. I fear that those bodies which have most admitted among them the character of political dissent, have lost, as bodies, much of the life which they originally carried with the m from the Church, and which God the Holy Ghost has preserved in individuals among them. The body, which apparently has most life in it, is (according to the universal rule) that which last and very slowly parted from the Church, the Wesleyan.

Individual portents, such as those which Dr. Manning points to, Dr. Colenso and the writers in the Essays and Reviews, prove nothing as to a large system. Rather the temporary notoriousness which they gained shows the more their anomalousness. The

attraction about the m was, a curiosity to see what men in the position of Dr. Colenso (then a Bishop, although under no jurisdiction in England) and of the clerical writers of the Essays and Reviews would venture to say. The curiosity was an evidence to the unnaturalness and strangeness of the facts. People are curious, not about the indigenous productions of a country, but about exotics. Any thing more superficial than Dr. Colenso’s first volume I never saw: the authors of the Essays and Reviews paid the tribute to the faith of the Church and people, that they did not speak out, for the most part, the unbelief or misbelief which they suggested. They were mostly unsystematic, disjointed, unreasoning. Any one who should wish to see what grounds were alleged for their statements, would have to go to the rationalist works of Germany, or to the infidel or Socinian press in England.!Not any intrinsic demerits on their parts above other writings of their class gained them this unenviable repute; but the miserable fact, that persons who had pledged themselves to the defence of the faith had become its assailants. Dr. Davidson’s work on the Old Testament, gathered mostly from the German rationalist works against it which he largely translated, although more systematic and argumentative, excited no surprise, because he did not belong to the Church of England. The anomaly of such books as Dr. Colenso’s and the Essayists did surprise people in England. Pious minds among the Protestants in Germany (and, I have heard, in France also), who correspond to pious English dissenters, were surprised not at the attacks, which among them are every-day things to which they were inured, but at the strong feeling which those attacks called forth. The union of 11,000 or 12,000 Clergy, on occasion of the judgment of the Judicial Committee, to restate the doctrines which had been impugned (representing, as they did, other thousands of the same faith, who on different grounds did not join in that protest), showed how little that misbelief had penetrated among the Clergy of England. Mr. Wilson, on his trial, when he affirmed the everlastingness of future punishment, and denied that he had taught more than what is a modification of the Roman doctrine of purgatory, bore witness to the faith of the Church, in that he shrank from denying before his judges the truth which, in the simple meaning of words, our formularies affirm and he had denied.

But Dr. Manning goes further. He not only denies that the Church of England is “in God’s Hands the great bulwark against infidelity in this land,” but he maintains the paradox, that it is “the cause and spring of the existence” of that unbelief; and this, (1) by its denials of truths which, he says, it has rejected; (2) by detaching the truths which it has received from the divine voice of the Church;” (3) by “denying the perpetual and ever-present assistance of the Holy Spirit, whereby the Church, in every age, is not only preserved from error, but enabled to declare the truth.”

Happy world, if infidelity were the product of one time or clime, or of one set of causes only! It is one form only of man’s rebellion against God. Any one who knows but a little of this side of human nature, knows that tendencies to unbelief, as well as a

capacity for faith, lie deep in man’s heart; he knows, too, what variety of causes, dispositions, circumstances, what want of balance of intellectual or moral qualities or culture, what neglects of grace or spiritual defects predispose men to forfeit the gift of faith. It would then plainly be unphilosophical and untrue to charge upon any special cause alone, a spiritual disease, which is part of man’s unsubmission to his God. Unbelief may be a strange epidemic at particular times or among particular natio ns. Now, among us, every thing comes to the surface. But the same causes were in operation when Julian apostatized, or he who became St. Augustine fell, before his conversion, among the Manichees. The same spiritual defects hindered the conversion of philosophers, to whom the Cross of Christ or the resurrection of the flesh appeared foolishness, which now destroy the faith of half-believers. A very thoughtful writer in the Roman Communion has said, “I prefer the open infidelity of the nineteenth century to the hidden infidelity of the middle ages; for we know now what we have to meet.” The English Reformation cannot have been the cause of the infidelity of the middle ages, or of that which our countrymen found on their first renewed intercourse with Italy. It was not the cause of the unbelief, which absorbed successively the young Italians who went up to the capital under the late régime in Naples. For the causes of that unbelief are well known. Nor did it originate the worship of the Goddess of Reason in the first French Revolution, since Catholic bishops and priests apostatized. Since it did not occasion the apostacy of Renan, why should it be charged with the heathenism of Colenso? The middle classes in France, I have been told by well-informed French Catholics, are well-nigh lost to the faith. I remember the time when processions in France and Catholic Germany were attended only by a few women and children. It is said that when the churches were reopened in Paris after the first revolution, there were only fifty communicants at Easter. There has been, blessed be God, a great restoration of faith there, as among ourselves also. It is sad to point out a common misery, the destroyer of souls here and there. Yet so much is clear, that it is wrong to charge upon the English Church a terrible evil, under which every other part of the Catholic Church has suffered. It is more to our purpose to consider those grounds which Dr. Manning alleges for his assertion.

(1) That it “rejects much of Christian truth.” What we believe, Dr. Manning states thus: “The Church of England has also preserved other doctrines” (besides those of the existence of a supernatural world, the revelation of Christianity, the inspiration of Holy Scripture) “with more or less of exactness, such as the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, the Incarnation, Baptism, and the like. I will not,” he adds, “enter into the question as to what other doctrines are retained by it, because a few more or a few less would made little difference in the final estimate a Catholic would make of it.”

Fourteen years must have strangely dulled the memory of that faith which Dr. Manning had before he entered the Roman Church, and it is strange to contrast his niggard concessions with the large-hearted statements of Roman Catholics of other days.

“We are not in most things,” says Du Pin to Archbishop Wake, “so far removed from one another that we may not be mutually reconciled. And would that all Christians were one fold!” “This union,” said Dr. Doyle, “is not so difficult as appears to many. It is not difficult; for, in the discussions which were held, and the correspondence which occurred on this subject, as well that in which Archbishop Wake was engaged, as the others which were carried on between Bossuet and Leibnitz, it appears that the points of agreement between the Churches were numerous, those on which the parties hesitated few, and apparently not, the most important. The effort which was then made was not attended with success: but its failure was owing more to princes than priests; more to state-policy than a difference of belief.” We have been wont to dwell with pleasure on the amount of faith which we confess in common with the Horn an Church. In the three Creeds we confess together the whole doctrine as to the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation of our Blessed Lord; not, “with more or less of exactness,” but in the self-same words, the only words in which the Church has ever embodied it. We teach alike the one end of man, the resurrection of the dead, and of the flesh specifically, the judgment to come according to our works, and the life everlasting, or the everlasting fire. We have the self-same doctrine of original sin and its transmission; the same prayer against “deadly sins;” the same belief in the “full, perfect, and sufficient Sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction” made by our Dear Lord, “by His one oblation of Himself once offered for the sins of the whole world.” We both alike acknowledge our own unworthiness, that His merits alone can stand between us and our sins; both alike believe in the efficacy of “His most precious Blood,” wherewith He cleanseth us; both, in His perpetual Intercession for us at the Bight Hand of God. We use the self-same prayers in Baptism, and thank God, in the same words, that He has been pleased to regenerate our children therein. We both confess “one Baptism for the remission of sins.” After confession, the Church directs the self-same words to be used in absolving from sin. I believe that we have the same doctrine of grace and of justification. There is not one statement in the elaborate chapters on Justification in the Council of Trent which any of us could fail of receiving; nor is there one of their anathemas on the subject, which in the least rejects any statement of the Church of England. As to all the heresies which distracted the early Church, whether in regard to the Person of our Lord or His kingdom, or the Person and Office of God the Holy Ghost

(those of Arius and his followers, Macedonius, Nestorius, Eutyches, Marcellus), or again, the practical heresies in the West (of Novatian, Pelagius, Donatus), we reject alike the same errors.

Even on other points, in the spirit of that prayer in which we all unite, that God would “inspire continually the Universal Church with the spirit of truth, unity, and concord,” and that He would “grant that all they who confess” His “Holy Name may agree, in the truth of” His “holy word, and live in unity and godly love,”we used ever to be glad to point out (as those whom we reverenced had done before us) how much there was in common even where there was divergence.

ii. Dr. Manning says, “If it” (the Church of England) “sustains a belief in two sacraments, it formally propagates unbelief in the other five.” We have pointed out again and again, how the Church of England, while teaching (as the fathers often do) that Baptism and the Holy Eucharist have a special dignity, symbolized by the Water and the Blood which flowed from our Redeemer’s side,is careful not to exclude other appointments of God from being in some way sacraments, as channels of grace, or (in the old definition of sacraments), “visible signs of an invisible grace.” This is indeed inseparable from the idea of Confirmation, Orders, Absolution, Marriage.

Marriage is, we know, directly called a “Sacrament” in the Homilies.Of “Ordination” it is said, that neither be it nor any other sacrament else, such sacraments as Baptism and the Communion are. “Absolution, it says, “has the promise of forgiveness of sins.” “Our Articles,” I said long ago,“do not introduce words at random. It has then some meaning when our Articles say, they ‘are not to be counted for Sacraments of the Gospel,’ that they ‘have not like nature of Sacraments;’ or the Homilies, ‘that in the exact signification of a Sacrament there be but two,’ or that ‘Absolution is no such Sacrament as Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are,’ or that ‘neither it nor any other Sacrament else be such Sacraments as Baptism and the Communion are,’ or that ‘the ancient writers in giving the name not only to these five, but also to divers other ceremonies, did not mean to repute them as Sacraments in the same signification as the two;’ or that ‘S. Augustine, in the exact meaning of the word, makes mention expressly of two.’ And with this coincides the definition of our Catechism, that there are ‘two only, generally (i. e. universally) necessary to salvation,’ the others so entitled not being of universal obligation, but relating to certain conditions and circumstances of life only. Certainly persons, who denied these rites to be in any way Sacraments (according to those larger definitions of S. Augustine, ‘a sacred sign’ or ‘a sign applied to things of God, or of

the Schoolmen‘a sign of a sacred thing’), would have said so at once, and not have so uniformly and guardedly said on each occasion, that they were not such, in ‘exact’ or ‘the same signification,’ the ‘exact meaning,’ ‘such,’ ‘of the like nature;’ nor, of one which they regarded as in no sense a Sacrament, would they have said ‘neither it, nor any other Sacrament else.’”

Even as to Extreme Unction, it only objects to the later abuse before the Council of Trent, when it was customarily administered to those only, of whom there was a moral certainty that they could not recover; and, if they should recover, it was a question whether it should be again administered to them when they should again be sick. This is manifestly the meaning of the words, “the corrupt followers of the Apostles,” Art. XXV., viz., that the unction of the sick, which the Apostle’s words implies was to be given with the view or hope of their recovering, was given whe n, but for some special interposition of God, they could not recover. The Council of Trent, too, we used to point out not only makes a distinction between the dignity of the Sacraments which it acknowledges, but pronounces an Anathema on those who deny it.

iii. Dr. Manning proceeds: “If it” (the Church of England) “recognizes an undefined Presence of Christ in the Sacrament, it formally imposes on its people a disbelief in Transubstantiation and the Sacrifice of the Altar.” Those before us have pointed out, how the Church of England taught, not an “undefined,” but “a Real Objective Presence of Christ’s Blessed Body and Blood.” Take, e. g., the statement framed word by word on our Formularies, in a work which received the sanction of two of our then Archbishops, to whom it was, with permission, inscribed, and which used to be recommended to Candidates for Holy Orders.

“Taking as her immutable foundation the words of Jesus Christ—’This is My Body—This is My Blood of the New, Covenant, and, Whoso eateth My Flesh and drinketh My Blood, hath Eternal Life,’ she believes that the Body or Flesh, and the Blood of Jesus Christ, the Creator and Redeemer of the world, both God and Man, united indivisibly in one Person, are verily and indeed given, taken, eaten, and received by the faithful in the Lord’s Supper, under the outward sign or form of Bread and Wine, which is on this account the ‘Partaking or Communion of the Body and Blood of Christ.’ She believes, that the Eucharist is not the sign of an absent Body, and that those who partake of it receive not merely the figure, or shadow, or sign of Christ’s Body, but the reality itself. And as Christ’s Divine and Human Natures are inseparably united, so she believes that we receive in the Eucharist, not only the Flesh and Blood of Christ, but Christ Himself, both God and Man.”

With regard to the term “Transubstantiation,” there must be a real difference between the meaning which it had in the minds of the Schoolmen, and that which it must now have since the Catechism of the Council of Trent. For it is there taught with

authority, that “the Eucharist has been called bread, because it has the appearance, and still retains the quality, natural to bread, of supporting and nourishing;” but the Schoolmen thought, that with the “change of substance” that power of nourishing ceased. Yet this being granted, I know not what can be included in our term “substance,” which the English Church affirms to remain, which is not also included in the Roman term “accidents,” which they also affirm to remain. Clearly the doctrine which the Church of England rejects under the term “Transubstantiation, or the change of the substance of bread and wine,” is only one which “overthroweth the nature of a sacrament,” in that the sign and the thing signified became the same. This was so, according to the doctrine of the Schoolmen, in which “substance” was equivalent to “matter.” The meaning of the word “substance” being changed, the Roman doctrine must be so far changed too. Archbishop Plato, in the Greek Church admits the term metousiwsiV in a sense which, if proposed to it, the English Church must accept. “The Eastern and Greek-Russian Church admits the word ‘Transubstantiation,’ in Greek metousiwsiV, not that physical and carnal transubstantiation, but the sacramental and mystical, and receives that word Transubstantiation in the same sense in which the oldest fathers of the Greek Church received the words metallagh, metaqesiV, metastoiceiwsiV.” A sacramental or a hyperphysical change no English churchman, who believes the Real Presence as his Church teaches, could hesitate to accept.