my joy when, in the last days of 1833, he showed a disposition to make common cause with us. His Tract on Fasting appeared as one of the series with the date of December 21st. He was not, however, I think, fully associated in the movement till 1835 and 1836, when he published his Tract on Baptism and started the Library of the Fathers. He at once gave to us a position and a name. Without him we should have had no chance, especially at the early date of 1834, of making any serious resistance to the Liberal aggression. But Dr. Pusey was a Professor and Canon of Christ Church; he had a vast influence in consequence of his deep religious seriousness, the munificence of his charities, his Professorship, his family connections, and his easy relations with University authorities.

"Such was the benefit which he conferred on the movement externally; nor was the internal advantage at all inferior to it. He was a man of large designs; he had a hopeful, sanguine mind; he had no fear of others; he was haunted by no intellectual perplexities. People are apt to say that he was once nearer to the Catholic Church than he is now; I pray God that he may be one day far nearer to the Catholic Church than he was then; for I believe that, in his reason.

and judgment, all the time that I knew him, he never was near to it at all. When I became a Catholic, I was often asked, 'What of Dr. Pusey? When I said that I did not see symptoms of his doing as I had done, I was sometimes thought uncharitable.

If confidence

in his position is (as it is) a first essential in

the leader of a party, Dr. Pusey had it.

saw that there ought to be more sobriety, more gravity, more careful pains, more sense of responsibility, in the Tracts and in the whole movement. It was through him that the character of the Tracts was changed. When he gave to us his Tract on Fasting he put his initials. to it. In 1835 he published his elaborate. Treatise on Baptism, which was followed by other Tracts from different authors, if not of equal learning, yet of equal power and appositeness. The Catenas of Anglican divines which occur in the series, though projected, I think, by me, were executed with a like aim at greater accuracy and method. In 1836 he advertised his great project for a Translation of the Fathers."

As late as 1835 Pusey was able, in an inaugural Address to his Theological Society, to lay stress on the benefits of the Reformation, and to speak

of the Lutheran and Reformed "Churches." He is still a little afraid of Newman, and tells his wife that he will "scare people." But Newman's influence over him rapidly increased, and the two soon became the Castor and Pollux of the movement.

"Sin

Pusey's first contribution to the Tracts was one on Fasting, signed with his initials, which contains nothing specifically characteristic of Tractarianism. It was in 1835, five years after the publication of the second part of his Inquiry in answer to H. J. Rose, that he gave in a thorough adherence by the unsigned Tract on Baptism. It is not quite clear whether this or the sermon in Christ Church Cathedral on after Baptism" came first; but they taught the same doctrine. The sermon was on Heb. vi. 4-6, where the inspired writer gives as a reason for not spending time in laying again the foundation. principles of Christianity, that it is impossible for those "who were once enlightened . . . if they shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance, seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put Him to an open shame." This obviously refers to apostate Hebrews, who gave up Christianity, and went back to the Law, joining hands with the crucify

ing Jews. Them it was quite hopeless to attempt to convert over again, and therefore it was unnecessary then and there to speak about the elementary principles of Christianity. All whom the writer intended to be addressing must. be supposed to know and to hold them. But Pusey, with calm confidence and uncritical exegesis, takes "enlightened" to mean "baptised," and apostasy or falling away to mean wilful sin after baptism. "As if to bring every baptised Christian on his knees before him, he preached from a well-known startling text in the Epistle to the Hebrews, drawing from it the doctrine, so at least he was understood, that wilful sin after baptism is never wholly forgiven. The burden of the sermon was the word 'irreparable,' pronounced every now and then with the force of a judgment. . . . In his anxiety to bring his hearers to the very verge of the pit of destruction, he seemed to be pushing them into it without a way of escape."

What Pusey was expected immediately to define was the nature of wilful sin after baptism, and the means, if any, of restoring those who had fallen into wilful sin. He himself intended to

1

1 Mozley, "Times" Biography, and Reminiscences.

write a second part to the Tract on Baptism (which he afterwards enlarged into a book called The Doctrine of Holy Baptism). But the second part never appeared. It was in his subsequent ceaseless inculcation of the Roman system of the Confessional, and of the ministry of Reconciliation through Priestly Absolution, that he supplied the deficiency. He himself said in after-years, "From the moment of my completing the Tract on Baptism, I felt that I should have written on Christian repentance, on confession and absolution."

His cramped and mechanical view of Christianity led him into what was practically the teaching of the Council of Trent on Baptism. The Reformers define Baptism as "a sign of Regeneration or New Birth, whereby, as by an instrument, they that receive Baptism RIGHTLY are grafted into the Church; the promises of the forgiveness of sin, and of our adoption to be the sons of God by the Holy Ghost, are visibly signed and sealed; Faith is confirmed, and Grace increased, by virtue of prayer unto God." They teach that of persons to be baptised two things are required: Repentance, whereby they forsake sin; and Faith, whereby they steadfastly believe the promises of God made to them in

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