If, therefore, Dr. Pusey cannot answer Dr. Manning's charge except by attributing to the Church of England the ordinary and regular teaching, as against infidelity, of doctrines which she practically disclaims—even if it be allowed that she does not formally proscribe them—it is clear that he thinks little better of that ordinary and regular teaching as it is in fact than Dr. Manning himself. His book is in reality more a long excuse of himself and others for remaining in her than anything else. This is quite a different question. She may tolerate Catholic opinions in her ministers, and Catholic interpretations of her articles. Her defenders have then to give an account of what sort of church it is which can compromise truth by purposely ambiguous formularies, and allow side by side in her pulpits men who must consider each other as heretics. But Dr. Manning's question relates to her actual teaching as a "bulwark against infidelity;" and Dr. Pusey knows very well that for every clergyman who teaches more sacraments than two, or the eucharistic sacrifice, there are twenty who deny them.
Perhaps the most elaborate part of Dr. Pusey's volume is that in which he endeavors to prove that the unity of the visible church need not be visible, and that it is sufficiently secured by orders and sacraments, "through its union with Christ, as head, by the sacraments, and the indwelling of God the Holy Ghost." He naively asks, How can we be said to deny the indissoluble unity of the Church when we cannot approach communion without repeating the Nicene Creed? Certainly, few people could ever be convicted of false doctrine if the repetition of the creed in public service was enough to absolve them. In this part of the work, however, Dr. Pusey more than ever leaves out of sight the real nature of the charge which he has undertaken to answer—the charge of having denied the indissoluble unity of the Church, its visible head, and its perpetual voice. The question is, whether these truths can be considered as a part of the system which the Church of England teaches and defends. Here, of course, there is more divergence as to the doctrine between the two controversialists; and Dr. Pusey answers only by a theory of his own. But in fact, even if he fairly represents Anglicanism, he cannot escape the charge, as to the unity of the Church, any more than that as to its infallibility. He really maintains that for all practical purposes the Church was infallible up to the division of East and West—we meet in his pages that phrase of which his friends are so fond, the "Holy Undivided Church." Now it is difficult to find what infallible teacher Dr. Pusey acknowledges; to what he would submit a conclusion, we will say, as to the Immaculate Conception, which he has drawn by his own reason from his study of Scripture or the fathers. His position may be understood from the following passage:
"This, I understand, is a favorite formula with Dr. Manning—'By whom does God the Holy Ghost speak? By the Roman Church? or by the Eastern? or by the Anglican?' I have been wont to say, by all concurrently, in so far as they teach the same faith which was from the beginning, which is the great body of all their teaching; and, if need require, they could at this day declare concurrently any truth, if it should appear that it had not as yet been sufficiently defined, against some fresh heresy which should emerge" (p. 84).
The faith of Christians is therefore proposed to them by an authority on which they are bound to receive it; but that authority has in the first place to be tested by Christians themselves, who must decide by their own reason—for they can have no other guide—whether in any particular point the three churches teach the same faith which was from the beginning. [{539}] Further this authority cannot speak at all precisely on those points as to which Christians must most desire its guidance—those points on which these three churches differ. Dr. Pusey speaks of his reciting the Nicene Creed. On what authority does he believe that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son? He may think that the Eastern faith comes to much the same thing as the Western; but that is a conclusion of his own reason. And we must leave to our readers to make out for themselves the way in which he tries to show that the churches could still act concurrently, if the occasion were to arise; especially in the very obvious and, according to the Anglican teaching, perfectly possible case, that one of these three churches themselves should be the victim of the new heresy, which, according to him, would constitute the occasion for a new definition. [Footnote 75]
[Footnote 75: We are not, of course, answering Dr. Pusey's book; but we cannot help quoting a single passage from the treatise "On the Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost," lately published by his grace the Archbishop of Westminster, which simply destroys the whole theory on which Dr. Pusey reasons. Few things of the kind can be more refreshing than to turn from the pages of Dr. Pusey to the clear, bright, simple, and precise statements of Dr. Manning. It is like breathing pure country air after groping about in a London fog; and the fanciful and unsubstantial images that bewilder the readers of the Eirenicon vanish like so much mist and vapor as the majestic outlines of the Church, as sketched by the archbishop, take possession of the mind. No one who reads this book will need any other answer to that of Dr. Pusey. On the point before us the archbishop says: "There are some who appeal from the voice of the living Church to antiquity, professing to believe that while the Church was united was infallible; that when it became divided it ceased to speak infallibly; and that the only certain rule or faith is to believe that which the Church held and taught while yet it was united, and therefore infallible. Such reasoners fail to observe that since the supposed division and cessation of the infallible voice there remains no divine certainty as to what was then infallibly taught. To affirm that this or that doctrine was taught then where it is now disputed, is to beg the question. The infallible Church of the first six centuries—that is, before the division—was infallible to those who lived in those ages, but is not infallible to us. It spoke to them; to us it is silent. The infallibility does not reach to us; for the Church of the last twelve hundred years is by the hypothesis fallible, and may therefore err in delivering to us what was taught before the division. And it is certain that either the East or the West, as it is called, must err in this, for they contradict each other as to the faith before the division. I do not speak of the protests of later separations, because no one can invest them with an infallibility which they not only disclaim for themselves, but deny anywhere to exists" (pp. 74, 75).]
It is clear that, according to Dr. Pusey, we must ascertain what the "Undivided Church" taught for ourselves, and then receive it on her authority. Far more than this in reality; for we are to find out for ourselves negative conclusions as well as positive. There is what he speaks of as a vast practical system in the Catholic Church, the honor paid to our Blessed Lady, and other things of that kind, which penetrate the daily life and the ordinary thoughts of the great mass of her children. On this Dr. Pusey sits in judgment, and declares it to be alien to the teaching of the "Undivided Church," because he does not find it himself in the fathers. We do not see that he places his objections to it on the authority of his own Church. This leads us to our question, what, to him, is Anglicanism? Is he content to be its dutiful child, to catch its genuine spirit, to echo without further question its definitions, to "rest and be thankful" with whatever it may give him? We believe that no one who has ever known anything about the subject has suspected Dr. Pusey of any intention to secede from the Anglican Church: this makes it all the more strange that he should give it so wavering and niggardly an allegiance. Other people openly avow that they simply put up with it as a convenient lodging-place for men of no particular opinions; it exacts little, leaves them pretty much alone, and yet furnishes them handsomely with the outward paraphernalia of a church. Like the Roman Senate in the old story about Tiberius, it admits the gods of all nations easily into its Pantheon. One set of opinions alone it objects to, because they are so exclusive! Except in that case, its courts always shield the persecuted. Mr. Gorham is attacked for a heresy, and they shield him; Mr. Denison for a truth, and they absolve him; even the "Essays and Reviews" do not deprive their authors of this comprehensive protection. Its toleration gives, as a statesman expressed it, "general [{540}] satisfaction." Who can refuse to be loyal, when the yoke is so light?
"Quod si nec nomen, nec me tua forma teneret,
Posset servitiam mite tenere tuum;"
and so Dr. Pusey himself seems to feel, save in those moods of rebelliousness which now and then come over him. We have seen how he once almost pledged himself to secede if the Gorham judgment was not disavowed. He was too old then to be excused on the plea of youthful impetuosity; at all events, the fit passed away: the baptismal service contents him. We have seen the threats he threw out more than a year ago about a free church if the court of appeal were not modified: that mood too has passed away. His present book speaks in the most contented manner: "Essay and Reviewism a passing storm," is the title that runs along the top of one of his pages; and he speaks of "the bright promise of the year of ingathering which the Lord has blessed!" He has forgotten his despair of last year, and boldly proposes to the Catholic Church terms on which reunion may be made,—terms, we venture to say, which would be rejected at once by every authority of the Church of England itself. Still, with all this, we do not see in his book any indication that, except as to the validity of Anglican orders, he really thinks much better of Anglicanism than Dr. Manning or Dr. Newman. Its authority is nothing to him; and they, on the other hand, do not deny that, though a mere human institution, it teaches many truths which might otherwise be untaught. He is ready to leave it if it "accepts heresy;" but it seems that what is heresy, and what is its acceptance, must be left to himself to decide. This is the language of one party in a contract or a compromise to another; not that of a pupil to a teacher, a child to a parent—above all, not that of a Catholic to his Church. He does not aver that "the Church of England is the best possible bulwark against infidelity," but only "as a matter of fact, that it is at this moment, under God's providence, a real and chief bulwark against it." He complains of Dr. Manning's statement that she "rejects much Christian truth" in a way that looks very much as if he thought she rejected some and he only defends her even then by putting an entirely strange face upon her. He hoists a false flag, and fights for her under it.
We are unwilling to speak personally of an amiable and excellent man; but Dr. Pusey, if there are few exactly like him, is still in his way a representative man; and his work shows thus the position of many others beside himself. It is obvious that he is really in the Church of England because he has nowhere else to go. He is loyal to her, not because he loves and admires her, but because he thinks he can find no other resting-place. Deeply versed in the Scriptures, especially of the Old Testament, and with a large acquaintance with some of the fathers, he has studied them under that fatal disadvantage which consists in the entire ignorance of the living system in which the authors whom he has read lived and breathed. The fathers especially, if they are studied without a knowledge of the ever-living Church, are certain to be misunderstood and to convey inadequate ideas of their own practice and belief. The Church alone explains and completes their testimony. It is exactly the everyday life, the things and customs and ideas that are too familiar to be chronicled, that must ever be unknown to those who have a merely literary knowledge of any system or any set of men. The strange thing is that any reasonable man should suppose it to be otherwise. Dr. Pusey, if we may judge from the opening of his postscript, really seems to think that if St. Augustine were to arrive to-morrow in London, he would go to worship in St. Paul's or Westminster Abbey, rather than at Moorfields or Warwick Street—St. Augustine, who, in a well-known passage, [{541}] has pointed out the unfailing mark which the common sense of mankind has fixed upon the true Church by the simple popular use of the name Catholic!
The result of Dr. Pusey's thought and study may be summed up in two simple heads. The first is an attitude of mind utterly and entirely alien from that which is the first condition of the relation of a Catholic to the Church. He has never been taught by a church, guided by a church, moulded by a church; he is self-educated and self-reliant; he has made his own teacher for himself, and has never sat at the feet of any other, except of the author of a book of which he was himself the interpreter. Speaking of the possibility of "secession" in his own case, he tells us, "I have always felt that I could have gone in on no other way than that of closing my eyes and accepting whatever was put before me" (p. 98). What a revolution that would be! This attitude of simple, uncriticising, ungrudging docility and obedience, is a thing which to him is a perfect novelty. It is one thing to take our faith from an abstraction of our own brain; quite another to receive it from a living reality, outside and independent of ourselves. This is the first thing that strikes us in men like Dr. Pusey, as their minds are reflected in books such as that before us. The second is an amount of misconception, misunderstanding, and positive ignorance of the Catholic system, which would be simply unintelligible did we not consider the great disadvantages under which any one in his position must have studied it. He is not one of the more rabid school of Anglican controversialists; his character and habits of mind are quite alien from wilful misrepresentation and conscious unfairness. And yet there is hardly a fair statement in his book on matters which belong to Catholicism; and there are many most provoking misstatements, as well as many most ludicrous and childish blunders. The book presents an easy victory to any moderately-informed Catholic theologian who may take the trouble to refute it. This has not been our purpose at present. We have been content with pointing out that his defence of Anglicanism really condemns it, because it implies that he cannot defend it without misrepresenting it. In a future article we may deal with him as a controversialist, and point out, by way of specimen, some few of the mistakes into which he has fallen in his attack on the Catholic Church.