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Bible Encyclopedias
Puseyism
Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature
or is one of the names by which the ritualistic movement of the Church of England and her offspring is sometimes designated, but it is properly descriptive only of the followers of the much-celebrated Oxford professor in theology, the Rev. Dr. E. B. Pusey. Though he was by no means alone in originating the movement to wshich his name has been given, the Puseyites now form a very different class fron that which organizsed and kept alive what is known as the Tractarian movement, and of which we have treated in the art. (See OXFORD TRACTS) (q.v.).
The Tractarians advocated the acceptance by the Church of England of the doctrines of Apostolical Succession, Priestly Absolution, Baptismal Regeneration, the Real Presence, the Authority of the Church, and of Tradition. "Scripture and tradition," says one of the Tractarians, "taken together, are the joint rule of faith" (No. 78, p. 2, English ed.). "Consentient patristical tradition," says Keble in his Sermons, "is the record of that oral teaching of the apostles which the Holy Spirit inspired." By this patristic tradition, which these tractarians extolled as an infallible interpretation of Scripture and test of doctrinal truth, they understood the voice of Catholic antiquity, or the voice of the theologians of the Nicene age, of the 4th century; and vet a majority of them were at one time devoted to the Arian heresy. For example, Froude says, "Your trumpery principles about Scripture being the sole rule in fundamentals, I nauseate the word" (i, 413). Thus, having broken away from the corner-stone of Protestantism, it was easy for them to accept the Romish view of the sacraments (q.v.), restoring also the old Romish number of seven (Tract 90), and affirming with the Church of Rome that "the sacraments, and not preaching, are the sources of divine grace." Says Mr. Dennison, "I understand the Tractarian doctrine of the sacraments to be this:
"I. That man is ‘ made a member of Christ, the child of God, and and inheritor of the kingdom of heaven,' in and by holy baptism.
"II. That man ‘ made a member of Christ, the child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven,' in and by holy baptism, is renewed from time to time in holy conmmunion.
"III. That ‘ a death unto sin and a new birth unto righteousness' are given to every adult and every infant, in and by the outward visible sign or form in baptism, ‘ water in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.'
"IV. That the gift may be received, in the case of adults, worthily or unworthily, but that it is always received.
"V. That the body and blood of Christ are given to every one who receives the sacralmental bread and wine.
"VI. That the gift may be received worthily or unworthily, but that it is always received."
"Antiquity," wrote the author of Tract 90, "continually affirms a change in the sacred elements" (p. 73). Palmer, in his Letter to a Protestant Cctholic, declared that "the bread and wine are changed by the consecration of the priest and the operation of the Holy Ghost, and become the very body and blood of our Lord" (p. 30). "The table is properly an altar," said their organ, the British Critic. "and altars presume a propitiatory sacrifice" (July, 1841, p. 24).* With such views of the sacraments evangelical views on regeneration were impossible for the Tractarians, and there need be no surprise that they stigmatized the grand Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone as a "Lutheran heresy." "Whether any one heresy," says the Critic, "has ever infested the Church so hateful and unchristian as this doctrine [of justification], it is perhaps not necessary to determine: none certainly has ever prevailed so subtle and extensively poisonous. We must plainly express our conviction that a religious heathen, were he really to accept the doctrine which Lutheran language expresses, so far from making any advance, would sustain a heavy loss in exchanging fuindamental truth for fundamental error" (No. 46, p. 391). Again, speaking of the Tractarian party, this open confession is made: "We cannot stand where we are; we must go backward or forward, and it will surely be the latter. As we go on, we must recede more and more from the principles, if any such there be, of the English Reformation" (No. 59, p. 45). "The Reformation," says Froude (i, 433), "was a limb badly set; it must be broken again, in order to be righted." "Utterly reject and anathematize the principle of the Reformation as a heresy, with all its forms, sects, and denominations." says Palmer (Letter to Golightly, p. 9).
The Tractarian movement terminated with Newman's secession to Rome, but its effect remains in several visible results: the revival and strengthening of the High-Church party, which still maintains, to a great extent, the principles advocated in the Tracts; the introduction of various alterations in the mode of performing divine service, such as the use of the surplice instead of the gown, intoning the prayers and singing the responses, the elevation of the communion-table into an altar, the substitution of low, open benches for high pews; a remarkable impulse given to the building and restoration of churches, and the revival of Gothic architecture in all parts of England; the secession of many English clergy and laity, some of them men of considerable ability and distinction, to the Church of Rome; and the establishment of colleges and sisterhoods. and other religious and charitable institutions, under Episcopal auspices.
Dr. Pusey himself, in his earlier years, inclined to that Protestant view of Christianity according to which all things and ceremonies acting ont the senses must be removed from the Church (see his Rise and Decline of Rationalism in Germany). But he gradually turned away from that system in iwhich the heart and soul are sustained by the intellectual appreciation of theological truths, and came to accept another which is dependent upon the outward actions of the body — one which abounds in observances, reaching the heart through the medium of the senses, and encouraging a habit of devotion by the use of bodily action. This change in Pusey's ideas is attributed to the influence of his friend, John Henry Newman, and in the year 1833 Pusey accepted the confession of faith and practice drawn up by Newman. The pnlublication of writings called Tractsfor the Times was in 1841 interdicted by the bishop of Oxford, but the ninety that had reached the public gave a clear insight into the new religious tendencies. Newman, Pusey, and their friends wished no fusion with the Roman Church, some of the tenets of which filled them with actual horror; but they tried to introduce into the English Church, the origin of which they did not approve and the decay of wiich they acknowledged, such doctrines as the Romish Church has distinctively preserved. Newvman tried, in consequence, to conciliate the Thirty-nine Anglican Articles with the resolutions of the Council of Trent, in vwhich, of course, he did not succeed, as he could satisfy neither of the parties, Catholics nor Anglicans. Newman was made aware that his position between the two churches was a false and untenable one, and he passed over to Romanism. His example was followed by several ecclesiastics and professors of the High Church, and by men belonging to the first families of the kingdom. Pusey, however, has persevered in his former course. He and his followers have remained to this day in the Anglican Church, the situation of which they do not despair of mending. But they discard the name by which they are genlerally designated as a class. In 1870, Dr. Pusey himself wrote respecting this party-name as follows: "I never was a party leader, I never acted on any system. My name was used first to designate those of us who gave themselves to revive the teaching of forgotten truth and piety, because I first had occasion to write on baptismal regeneration; but it was by opponents, and not by confederates. We should have thought it a note against us to have deserved any party name, or to have been anything but the followers of Jesus, the disciples of the Church, the sons and pupils of the great fathers whom he raised up in her. I never had any temptation to try to form a party, for it was against our principles... Then, personally, I was the more exempt from this temptation, because God has given me neither the peculiar organizing abilities which tempt men to it, nor any office — as that of an archdeacon-which would entitle me directly to counsel thus ... My life, contrary to the character of party leaders, has been spent in a succession of insulated efforts; bearing, indeed, upon one great end — the growth of Catholic truth and piety among us, or, contrariwise, resistance to what might hinder, retard, or obscure it; but still insulated" (Eirenicon, iii, 338).
The Puseyites have adopted from the Romish Church, without assenting in a general way to her dogmas, a number of ritual institutions, and even some poiints of faith. They affix to their churches portable crosses; have burning tapers on their altars; adorn chasubles and Prayer-books with crosses; have a Latin choir; and, what is more than these exterior conformities, they have declared for the Romish doctrine about the situation and power of the Church, and about the sacraments, the number of which they have increased; they also introduced auricular confession. In the doctrine ofjustification, where it was first intended to deviate from the Roman Catholic tenets, the resolutions of the Tridentinum were finally admitted as a base. The Puseyites went even the length of acknowledging in the pope a pre-eminence of spiritual honor and authority; they say that, as patriarch of Rome, not only his spiritual, but also his temporal authority extends over Italy; that the Church of England is bound to recognise it; and that all decrees of the Council of Trent may be authoritatively construed in such a sense as to make them acceptable to the Anglican Church. The Puseyites call themselves Catholics, a branch of the universal Catholic Church: they olbject most decidedly to being called Protestants. They regard the Church as one organic body, and primitive apostolic Christianitv as a mere germ or seminal principle, to be developed and properly matured in the progress of ages. They adopt as such legitimate additions to Biblical Christianity obvious gross corruptions, which gained currency in the Church in different centuries, and were taught by leading fathers or councils — a practice which "throws an uncertainty about the lineaments of Christianity, and opens the door for every species of error that designing men may be inclined to adopt, while it enables the so-called Church Catholic to justify every one of her errors, both doctrinal and ritual" (Schmucker). Another gross appendage sometimes associated with this theory of development is that Christ has placed himself in some kind of physical connection or concorporation with the mass of his disciples, the Church, by which his body nourishes them in some mystical manner through the Eucharist, and furnishes the germ of their resurrection body. Though Newman, still before his perversion, recommended, in the Ninetieth Trcct for the Times, the acceptance of the doctrines of purgatory, of the invocation of saints, and of papal authority, Pusey has persisted in rejecting them. He also rejects the worship of Mary, the use of Latin in the mass, and the communion in one form (comp. Pusey, A Letter to his Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury [Oxf. 1842], and The Holy Eucharist [ibid. 1843]). As Puseyism is in progress among the cultivated classes of England, especially among the clergy, and as it is thought to be only a forerunner of Catholicism, it is combated by the Ennglish bishops with admonitions, speeches, and disciplinary measures. They do not tolerate the rites introduced bv the Puseyite ecclesiastics, and pronounce them a "mixture of Romanism or popery." They ordain no student of divinity if suspected of Puseyistic tendencies. At the University of Oxford, the seminary of the High-Church clergy, the antagonism of Puseyites and anti- Puseyites has broken out so openly that there is a storm of both parties on every vacant professorship. Puseyism has its mepresentatives in the most influential literary papers: the Quarterly Review has published a series of articles in favor of the Puseyite innovations. The chief adversaries of the Puseyites, or Anglo-Catholics, are the Evangelicals, a party which originated in Methodism — the latter being opposed both to the Puseyites and to the Episcopalians. If we compare the judgment of the English papers of different colors on the religious situation of Great Britain, and especially on Puseyism, we find a great diversity of appreciations. The radical press of the Dissenters, averse to Anglicanism, rejoices at its visible decay, and attributes the embarrassment of the Church to the circumstance that, owing to the opposition of the bishops, reformation could not completely achieve its work. It could only produce an imperfect, undecided form, and was smothered in the arms of an exterior political priesthood. The Tory papers originally advocated Puseyism, in which they saw a support for the High-Church; but they soon changed their mind: they agree with the Whig papers on this point that the manner in which philosophy is taught at the University of Oxford is the cause of these religious phenomena. It is thought that the facility with which so many leave the High-Church for Puseyism, and from Puseyism step over to Romanism, is due to the miserable situation of philosophical studies in general, and especially in the latitudinarianism of the Aristotelian logic which is taught at Oxford, and of the Platonic mysticism after the scholastic fashion. Others expect from Puseyism a regeneration of the High-Church and of the whole Anglican religious situation. See Petri, Wurdigung des Wesens und lde? Beceutung des Puseyismus (Gott. 1843); Schleyer, Der Puseyismus nach seinem Ursprung und als Lehrsystem (Freib. 1845); IHurst's Hagenbach, Church Hist. 18th and 19th Centuries, ii, 392 sq.; Schumaker, Elemental Contrast (Gettysb. 1852); Garbett, Pusey and the University of Oxford (1847); Taylor, Ancient Christianity and the Doctrines of the Oxford Triacts for the Times (Lond. 1844, 3 vols.); Fletcher, Lectures on the Principles of the Roman Catholic Church and of Puseyism (Lond. 1846); Boyd, England, Rome, and Oxford (Lond. 1846); Saville, A Letter to Rev. Dr. Pusey on Auricular Confession (Lond. 1878); Dorner, Hist. Prot. Theol. ii, 488 sq., 504 sq.; London Academy, 1873, p. 87; Nov. 14, 1874, p. 529; Ch. of Engl. Quar. Rev. July, 1855, art. vii; Amer. Presb. Rev. Oct. 1861; Rez, Studien u. Kritiken, 1838-47; Brit. and For. Rev. 1844, p. 5; 1846, p. 189; Christian Remembrancer, Jan. 1866, p. 164; Oct. 1868, p. 381.
*This inference is undoubtedly correct, and as Christ is not sacrificed in Protestant churches, the table on which the sacramental elements are placed ought not to be termed an altar, but a table. Altars are not congenial to the spirit of Protestantism; and as the thing was wisely discarded by the Reformers, the name also should be dropped.
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McClintock, John. Strong, James. Entry for 'Puseyism'. Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature. https://www.studylight.org/encyclopedias/eng/tce/p/puseyism.html. Harper & Brothers. New York. 1870.
