The New Zealand Times (PUBLISHED DAILY). MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 1882.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIX, Issue 6689, 25 September 1882, Page 2

The New Zealand Times (PUBLISHED DAILY). MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 1882.

The electric cable tells us that;Dr. Pusey is dead, and one of the most eminent of contemporary English churchmen has gone to his rest at the mature age of 82.. To most young people of the.present day the name of Pusey is one of only shadowy greatness. Yet perhaps in the last fifty years there has not been any name in England which has so cjften appeared in the Press, either as a red rag to one party in the Church or as a gloricfus standard of expected victory to another. The biography of the late Dr. Pusey is that of one ;who led an almost monastic life, and pnly for a very short time was mixed up in theological controversy. Indeed, at the outset of his career in public life he seemed likely rather to join; the ranks of the Broad Church party i and his earliest published work—that on the history of German theology from the time of Luther to the nineteenth century —from its moderadon ' and perfect fairness, might have come from the pen of Abnold or Stanley. But his views of Church-matters soon hardened and crystallized, and he very shortly became the acknowledged leader of what may be called, in ho invidious sense, but in its strict, classical meaning, the retrogressive party in the Church. With his peculiar cast of mind it could not well be otherwise. To him and his associates in the University of Oxford—the present . Cardinal N ewman, the late. Rev. John Keble, Mr Sewell, and others—the times were altogether out of joint. The Tory, fox-hunting, , worldly-minded, High Church parson, and the shallow, weak, unlearned. Low Church priest, were anything rather than the types of clergymen suited for. the times, or useful servants of the Church., The little knot of friends met together, talked and wrote, and soon became famous all over Great Britain. In opposition to the sensational philosophy of Locke and the utilitarian morals of Palet and Bentham, they appealed to the higher law of the Deity as given to an external, infallible Church. Instead of regarding the Roman Catholic Church as hopelessly corrupt, or of glorying in the name of Protestants, or of looking forward with exultation to the results of modern mental enlightenment, they regarded the early traditions of the Christian Church and the writings of the Bathers of the first four centuries of the Christian era as almost infallible . guides. Protestantism they looked upon as a' calamity which should, il possible, be rectified by re-union with the Roman Catholic Church. Modern mental enlightenment seemed,to them a mere will-o’-the-wisp, only leading the thoughtless into a morass. * These views ihey advocated in the once celebrated ninety, “ Tracts .. for the Times,” with so much religious earnestness, with such extensive learning, and such subtle logic, that the Puseyite movement soon spread far and wide, and the English Church itself was virtually divided into two mutually hostile camps. It seems only calculated to excite a smile now, bilt it was regarded only forty years ago, and in the great City of London, as a solemnly important Church question, which divided religious people into two parties opposing one another as hotly as the advocates of “ homos ” and “ hoinoios," in Alexandria fourteen Hundred years ago, whether an English clergyman should preach in a white surplice or in a black gown! Had any man advocated the view which would probably have taken by the Apostle Paul, that it was quite permissible to preach in a brown surplice, or in a blue gown—like an ancient Druid—or in none at all, he would have been certainly set down as a most profane scoffer by Die Overwhelming majority of the j religious world. It is only due to Dr. Pusey and his immediate friends to mention that they troubled themselves little about such follies on the part of their weaker followers. They were as thoroughly earnest in reforming the Church from their standpoint as the Wesleys and Whitfield had been from iheirs a century before, and the Puseyite movement was in many respects of a very similar kind, and d'd similar good service in rousing the Church from its apathy. The results in the latter case were the more brilliant; those in the former will probably, be more lasting. Wesley and his friends ’ addressed .themselves to depraved Eingawood colliers and rough Cornish miners, who gathered in thousands below the rocks of Gwennap to listen to the new preachers of righteousness. The Puseyites.attracted Oxford dons, benefited clergymen, noblemen, and ladies of rank. Blit already, as. we can see from clear signs, what once seemed a mighty stieam is dwindling away. The mountain torrent ,of sacramentarianism has become ; the weak and , muddy brook of; Ritualism, Church millinery, and artificial genuflections. The Puseyites themselves have become divided. Some, like John Heney Newman, Dr. Manning, and others, have carried out

their principles to what long' ago seemed to most people their legitimate consequences, and have joined the Church of Borne; some, like Keble, have died in the odor of sanctity; and some, like Francis Wo-etam Newman and Jon v Alfred Froddr, have adopted individual heresies utterly at variance, in tendency with the views towards which they were at first most strongly inclined. Of the old leaders Or. Puset was one of the last and most renowned. Others, indeed, in the meridian of Puseyism commanded practically a wider influence than he. The eloquent and subtle oratory of John Henrt Newman chained the scholars and men of intellectual culture, and the exquisite poetry and profound spiritual insight of the author of the “ Christian It ear” attracted good men and women, so that the whole tone of sentiment and conversation in England forty years ago was more religious than it had been since the middle of the seventeenth century, or has been lately for a generation past. But the theologv, the definite thought of the Puseyite movement, was that of Dr. Puset himself. He saw he had a course I o fulfil, and he fulfilled it well. Unquestionably an able and good man : pious, conscientious, charitable, learned, and thoughtful; abu-h-class Beholar;agentlernan,ancl a Christian personally of the best kind—those who have felt most inclined to quarrel with his views will probably, now that he is dead, ex animo endorse, with regard to him, the sympathetic sentiment expressed in the quaint, inelegant Latin of Hildebebt's epitaph on Beuengabies—

“ Post mortem vivam secum, tecum requiea cam, Nec fiat mea sore, melior sorte tua.”