Edward Bouverie Pusey · 13 of 21

Main Body · Part 13

theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity, infused into them in their Baptism.” And so he comes to the result, that in England too, as well as in every other country, separate from the communion of Rome, there are indeed some few who grow up in Baptismal grace, some who have, in some imperfect degree, faith, hope, and charity, and these last chiefly among the dissenters, whose piety, he says, “is more like the personal service of disciples to a personal Master, than the Anglican piety, which has always been more dim and distant from this central light of souls.” With the exception of these few, the rest are, according to him, in a doubtful state, which he does not describe, yet which, since it is the result of a fall from grace given and since a Christian’s sins are against light, is a state worse than heathenism, except for the possibility of an uncertain and difficult recovery. To the Church of England he accords nothing which does not exist in any Protestant body except something of the idea of a Church (which, according to him, we have not), and some probably inoperative truth, and some heathen virtues, since what piety we have, or have had, is and always has been, according to him, “more dim and distant from the central light of souls,” Jesus. I say, “heathen virtues; “for the cardinal virtues, fortitude, justice, prudence, temperance, although of course they cannot be practised, without the grace of God, are yet, while unanimated by the special Christian graces of Faith, Hope, and Charity, only heathen virtues, such as heathen have practised, with the grace of God. Specifically Dr. Manning denies “the validity of our Orders and absolutions,” and, with our Orders, whatever depends upon Orders.

The Church of England, then, according to him, teaches her children falsely, that in the Holy Eucharist “the Body and Blood of Christ preserve their bodies and souls unto

eternal life; “for, according to him, the Holy Eucharist among us is but “the empty sign of an absent thing.” She ordains her priests, according to him, with lying words, “Receive the Holy Ghost, for the office and work of a Priest in the Church of God, now committed unto thee by the imposition of our hands. Whose sins thou dost forgive, they are forgiven; “since he holds that the Holy Ghost is not given, and that sins remitted by them are not remitted. In like way he holds that she requires of her Priests to pronounce a material lie in the Name of the God of Truth, since we are directed to say, “By His [our Lord Jesus Christ’s] authority committed unto me, I absolve thee from all thy sins in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost,” whereas he denies that we have any authority committed to us, or do at all absolve.

And yet God blesseth through these Sacraments; and God blesseth through truth. If a Wesleyman minister preaches his naked Gospel, that “we are all sinners,” that “Christ died to save sinners,” that “He bids all sinners come to Him,” and saith, “whoso cometh unto Me, I will in no wise cast out,” this is, of course, fundamental Gospel-truth, and, when God blesses through it those who know no more, He blesseth them through faithful reception of His truth. So again, as to the Presbyterians. They deny, in regard to the Holy Communion, what we believe; and their account of their Communion is somewhat less than what we mean by a spiritual Communion. For they speak, rather, of “ascending in mind into heaven,” and feeding upon Jesus there by faith, than of praying Him to come by His Spirit into the soul. I mean, that the Calvinist Confessions seems to me to speak rather of man’s part than of His; of what faith, enabled by Him, does, than of what it receives. Still, be this as it may, they speak of a religious act; and although (as some of them say) there is no need, to this end, of any thing outward, and what they describe might be done in every prayer, still, doubtless, He Whom, they seek, is found by them, for that which they seek. They seek a spiritual communion, and doubtless God admits them to that spiritual communion with Him which they desire. Nay, in Baptism He gives them more than they know of or believe. With the Church of England, it would, according to Dr. Manning’s statement, be the very contrary of all this. We believe, when we confess our sins, that, coming in repentance and in faith, “our Lord Jesus Christ, Who hath left power to His Church to absolve all sinners who truly repent and believe in Him, of His great Mercy forgives” us our “offences;” and that it is “by His authority committed to” His servants, that we are “absolved from all our sins in the Name” of the All-Holy Trinity. We believe that in Holy Communion we, coming with the right dispositions, “verily and indeed take and receive the Body and Blood of Christ;” that “we so eat the Flesh of Christ, and drink His Blood, that our sinful bodies are made clean by His Body, and our souls are washed by His most precious Blood.” “According to thy faith,” our gracious Lord said, “be it unto thee.” I do not believe that God maintains the faith, where there is not the reality. The Lutherans set out with a belief of the Real

Presence, clearly expressed, except that Luther degraded the Sacrament, by making it a mere sign to faith. But since they had no Orders, the belief died out. No other body, which is not admitted to have the true Sacrament, claims to have it. Aquinas says, in the name of the Western Church, “A priest consecrates validly, in heresy or schism, although he sins in so doing.” Heretics, who are really cut off from the Body of Christ, receive the Sacrament, though not the grace of the Sacrament. We have the witness that we have really the true Body and Blood of Christ and the grace of the Sacrament: 1) from the knowledge of those who receive it. God would not allow His own to be deluded in such a matter as this. 2) In the supernatural lives of grace, led by persons, the life of whose souls is Christ in the Holy Eucharist. I do not mean any disparagement to any pious Presbyterians, but, believing the Holy Eucharist to be what we, in common with the whole Ancient Church, know It to be, we cannot but know that they who receive It worthily, have a much greater closeness of union with our Lord, than they who do not. Presbyterians have what they believe; we, what we believe. But they who have observed pious Presbyterians and pious English Catholics, have discerned among our people a spiritual life, of a kind which was not among theirs; in a word, a sacramental life. Dr. Manning denies the validity of our absolutions. God, the Author of truth, has set His seal upon them. This enlarged use of confession, which originated in men’s stirred consciences, often grew, in consequence of its visible fruits, on the lives of those who had already used it. People were wont to ask, “What has so changed you?” They sought the remedy, which God had made so effectual to others. We, the English Clergy, have seen the death-beds of those, whose first confessions we had heard, and we could no longer recognize, in the ripened, humble saint, the person whom we had first known, although, then too, earnestly seeking God.

3) You remember how our dear friend J. H. Newman was impressed by God’s visible and very awful judgment upon a sacrilegious Communion. It was no insulated instance. Our Lord bore witness to His own Presence, by judging the sacrilegious communicant, and leaving him in the power of Satan, who drove him to self-murder in the precincts of the Church, where he had profaned the Body and Blood of Christ. Prejudiced as juries are, the jury, awed by the case, pronounced “felo-de-se.” On the other hand, the effects of devout communion have passed over to the body too. I have known too the evil fruit of sacrilegious confessions, very different from those of an ordinary lie.

4) It is in accordance with the truth of the Sacrament, that the enlarged life among us, has especially taken the form of increased Sacraments. The Wesleyan bodies would increase their prayer-meetings, which some of them have spoken of to me as their

“means of grace.” Protestant bodies have their revivals; the Church of England multiplied the celebration of its Sacraments.

But those who have pointed to “life” as a great note in the English Church, did not mean the life of grace in individuals. They have meant the organic operation of God the Holy Ghost upon the Church as a whole. It is the mark given by our Lord Himself. By a wonderful analogy between nature and grace, the branch, which had been severed from the True Vine, carried out with it for a time the life of the tree; but, the life-giving sap being cut off, after a time it withered. Contrariwise, as our friend observed, the Church of England has had a tough, vigorous life. Its life has been tried in every way in which it could be tried. “It has been practised upon by theorists, browbeaten by sophists, intimidated by princes, betrayed by false sons, laid waste by tyranny, corrupted by wealth, torn by schism, and persecuted by fanaticism. Revolutions have come upon it sharply and suddenly to and fro, hot and cold, as if to try what it was made of. It has been a sort of battlefield, on which opposite principles have been tried. No opinion, however extreme any way, but may be found, as the Romanists are not slow to reproach us, among its bishops and divines. Yet what has been its career upon the whole? “Which way has it been moving through three hundred years? Where does it find itself at the end? Lutherans have tended to Rationalism; Calvinists have become Socinians; but what has it become?”

Now, after above three centuries, it alone has a more vigorous life than ever. It seems like a tree which had been shaken for a while, yet struck its roots deep and is filling the lands. Severed in the United States from the protection of the state—nay, rather trampled in the dust by those who hated it for the loyalty of its members,—it first struck root when it was deprived of all human aid. Independent witnesses have attested some time ago, how, before this fratricidal war, it was regarded by many as the one principle of stability in the United States. It wins from all the bodies who broke off from us, and itself seldom loses to any. Long ago it quadrupled while the population doubled only. Its clergy are very frequently the sons of the ministers of bodies not in communion with it, whom it has won. It has been recently making an impression even upon the inveterate, boastful, intellectual Socianism.

And all this with no human aid, with no power except the Presence of God the Holy Ghost, which has been specially promised to the Church. So also in our other colonies, and in that vast heathen realm of India. If our Episcopate had not been of Divine Institution, then it would have been all one, whether those reputed to be of the second or first order, Priests or Bishops, had been sent out; for, in fact, they would have been alike laymen. On the other hand, our Episcopate being Divine, to send out Priests alone, or with a Bishop over a whole continent, as it were, was, to plant the Gospel as God willed not that it should be planted. The fact has borne witness to the truth of our Episcopate. When the Gospel was preached, even by pious men, without the Episcopate, it languished

after a time; when the Church was planted according to its Divine form, it flourished.

In this restoration in which we live, very remarkable have been the organic workings of God the Holy Ghost in the Church as a whole. The last century was, by a strange harmony everywhere, especially “sæculum tepidum.” In France, the children whom the Church had lost, aided by apostate Bishops and Priests, overthrew her. A marvellous inward decay must have prepared for the time, when the goddess of Reason could be enthroned in a Christian capital. Southern Germany became indevout; Hermesianism has, since, infested her. About thirty years ago I was, myself, asked to write against a German book, put forth in the name of Catholicism against the faith, on the ground that it had a wide, baleful influence among the German Catholics. In Italy, we have probably not yet seen the full fruits of evils long festering there. Much indifference is said to have existed during the last century in Roman Catholic Ireland. In the United States, it is commonly and confidently stated, that the Roman Church loses its hold over large proportions of the Irish immigrants.

And now, in this century, God has been reviving the Church everywhere, simultaneously. Nothing has so impressed itself upon me during all the years in which I have observed the workings of God the Holy Ghost upon the Church of England, as their organic character.

Some have all along been in the habit of looking to certain modes of revival; at the best, to the way in which God blessed the workings of one class of individuals. To these they appealed, as furnishing “tokens of life in the English Church.” For myself, I always turned away, sick at heart, from this feverish watching for tokens of life. It is not in the flush of the cheek or the more brilliant eye alone, in which you would recognize the returning health of the body. These might be fever, not health-tokens. What is concentrated around individuals, even though manifoldly multiplied, is individual still. To us, the workings seemed all along far beyond any efforts of human zeal or energy or faithfulness, even as blessed by God. The dawn lay beyond our memory. Perhaps, if one might fix a time, one should say, from the French revolution, when the Voice of God spoke in such terrible warning as to the fruits of neglectful ways, and sent a coal of fire into the hearts of men. Since then, the progress has been steadily onwards. Often, as in younger years I used to hear the account of things in the generation before us, the words spoken to the Prophet and his answer shot through me, “Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered and said, O Lord God, Thou knowest.” But “the bones had come together, bone to his bone; the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army.”

Increased zeal for spreading the faith of Christ abroad returned into the bosom of

the Church at home; increased zeal for the religious education of the poor won the blessing of Jesus, Whose bequest the poor are; increased efforts to build Churches to the glory of His Name, and for the salvation of souls, were blessed by the increased Presence of Him in Whose honour they were raised. Not in one way, nor in one set of ways, but in all: not in one class of minds, but in some of every class; not in one theological section of the Church, but in all; not through one set of men, but through all; not through those only who had our full belief, but through all who loved Him; not through prosperous circumstances only, but yet more through adverse; not in England only, but throughout the whole body, has God been forming the English Church, for what purpose in His hands, He knoweth!

Even those deepest losses of all, the loss of those who “laboured most abundantly,” and the suspicion which two or three sought to cast on those who remained, and most of all, the chaos into which some minds were thrown, suspecting Catholic truth, because their guides had become Roman, not English, Catholics,—these things have indeed checked, but they have not hindered the work of God among us.

It seemed, indeed, before these secessions that, with the continuance of God’s gracious operation, nothing but time was needed to Catholicize England. But the waters have risen, not the less decidedly, because noiselessly. Fallow ground was broken thirty years ago; fresh seed was sown; seed time and harvest have gone on together unbroken; the seed which ripened fell again to the earth silently and yielded fresh fruit abundantly. They who wished to pluck it up, only, like the birds of the air, carried it further. Mr. Oakeley, who, when among us, seemed to watch intently the progress made within rather a narrow sphere, has lately repeated that Tractarianism, as a movement, ended with the loss of our dear friend, J. H. Newman. The tracts had been closed before. Had he followed his own bent, I believe that the tracts would have ended in some preceding year. The trumpet had sounded steady, clear, certain; and a very great army had gathered at the call. We do not need the trumpet, when God’s willing people are gathered. What has had to be done since has been to build on. The building arises “without axe or hammer.” Never, I am satisfied, was the work of God among us so wide and so deep as now. Far deeper and wider is it than in those glad, prosperous days, because the leaven which was hidden in the meal, has worked secretly, and has now more centres, from which it is everywhere working.

Dr. Manning says, “The known and historical evidence of Christianity is enough to convince any prudent man that Christianity is a Divine revelation. It is quite

true that by this process he cannot entertain an explicit faith in all the doctrines of revelation, and that in rejecting Catholicism he reduces himself to human and historical evidence as the maximum of extrinsic certainty for his religion, and that this almost inevitably resolves itself in the long run into Rationalism. It is an inclined plane, on which, if individuals may stand, generations cannot.” There is confusion in the statement. But I fully accept as true, the result intended, that rejection of Catholicism ends in the long run in Rationalism, and that it is an inclined plane on which generations cannot stand. We have seen the truth of this in Lut heranism and Calvinism, in the length and breadth of the lands which they occupied, except where faith has been preserved by vicinity to the English Church. Why then has it not been so among us, after 300 years? The answer is plain; on those self-same principles, “because we have” not “rejected Catholicism.” Dr. Manning refers to the downward course of the English people. The question between us is, not about the English people, but about the English Church. The Church of England is no more responsible for those of the English people who have revolted from her, than the Churches of Italy, and France, and Germany, are for those who have revolted from them. We are all responsible for any want of zeal, or faith, or self-sacrifice, or for any spirit of worldliness, which may have prevented others from seeing that “God is in us of a truth.”

But the existence of all the sects in England shows the uncompromisingness of the Church of England in maintaining Catholic truth. Had she been like the Lutheran body, she would have had no Dissenters. People do not split off from that which does not hold firmly together. But, as she is not responsible for Dissenters who nave rejected her authority, her teaching, her communion, neither is she responsible for their course. Nor is she more responsible for such phenomena as Dr. Colenso’s heathenism, or Essay-and-Review scepticism, than the Church of France was for Talleyrand and Sieyes. “Nor are we the only portion of the Catholic Church which is suffering from the attacks of Rationalism. Already in this place, Essay and Reviewism has done its worst, and is hastening to its decay. Its observant adherents own the growth of the Faith. It is but a passing storm which, desolating as it has been to the souls of individuals, yet disinfects the atmosphere. They have already done more to remove misconceptions and prejudices than twenty years of efforts of our own. They have given us a watchword, whereby the

friends of Jesus may recognize one another. We have been all, in our several ways, fighting for Him and in His service, yet some of us, aloof from each other, and our fealty to our common Master suspected. Now those who love Jesus and His Word and His truth will be united, we trust, by the presence of a common foe. Now, like the battle-cry of God’s chosen warrior of old, “The sword of the Lord and of Gideon,” that of the English Church will be “Jesus and victory;” and the “gleaning of the grapes of Ephraim will be more than the vintage of Abiezer.” For the wine-press is trodden in His Name, “Who trod it alone in His bitter Passion; and the juice of the grape is His precious Blood, Which alone has healing, and life and salvation and union with Him.

May He spare you long to His Church and people, that, as in “the Christian Year” you sowed in our youth the first seeds of a rich harvest, you may help in the ingathering, of which there is such bright promise in “the year of His goodness” which God has blessed!

Your very affectionate friend,

E. B. PUSEY.

Christ Church, 1865.