Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 47.djvu/65

 1862, he charged Jowett, before the court of the chancellor of the university, with teaching opinions on the atonement, inspiration, and creeds which were not in accordance with the doctrine of the church of England. In a correspondence in the ‘Times’ he stated that the object of the suit was to ascertain whether the university, in its altered condition, was willing to allow such teaching. On 27 Feb. 1863 the court decided not to hear the case, in terms which Pusey understood to mean that a professor's theological teaching could not be impugned, unless it was given, as Jowett's was not, in his official lectures. Under these circumstances, he himself voted in the following March for the proposal to increase the endowment of the Greek chair out of the funds of the university; and, when this was rejected, he assisted in another arrangement whereby the chapter of Christ Church supplied the requisite sum of money. This suit, in which Pusey's discretion may be blamed, embittered controversy in the university for many years. Jowett's friends could not forget his action any more than those who supported Pusey in the prosecution could understand why he afterwards abandoned his opposition.

While this subject was occupying the university, the prosecution for heresy of two of the writers in ‘Essays and Reviews’ had resulted in a decision of the privy council in favour of their teaching. Such a judgment would, Pusey feared, encourage conversions to Rome, as in the Gorham case. With a view to neutralise the effects of the judgment, he published letters, pamphlets, explanations, appeals to patience, a valuable paper on Genesis (read at the church congress), and his lectures on Daniel; he also began a series of appeals by which he hoped to draw the members of the Roman church to desire reunion with the church of England in the presence of this growing common danger of unbelief. Already the members of the high and low church within the church of England had shown a readiness to unite. But in April 1865 Manning, who at the end of the month was appointed to succeed Wiseman as archbishop of Westminster, asserted that the church of England was the real cause of infidelity by its denial of very much of the truth which the Roman church held; and he further twitted Pusey with forsaking his old position by allying himself with the evangelicals against unbelief. Pusey's first appeal for reunion was in a letter to Keble, which he called ‘The Church of England a Portion of Christ's one holy Catholic Church, and a Means of restoring visible Unity. An Eirenicon’ (1865). He maintained that English churchmen were prevented from union with Rome not so much by the authorised teaching of the Roman church as by the unauthorised (although permitted) practical systems of devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary and of the teaching about purgatory and indulgences. He appealed to the Roman church to disclaim the extreme statements which he quoted, and to allow a hope of reunion on the basis of an explanation of the teaching of the council of Trent. At the same time he reissued, with an historical preface, Newman's ‘Tract No. XC,’ which asserted the true meaning of the articles. Several Roman catholic writers favourably responded to this appeal, and many French bishops, with whom Pusey had interviews, gave him great encouragement, especially Monsignor Darboy, archbishop of Paris. This first ‘Eirenicon’ was formally answered in 1866 by Newman in ‘A Letter to the Rev. E. B. Pusey on his recent “Eirenicon.”’ Newman did not attempt to justify much of the language which Pusey had quoted with regard to the Virgin Mary; but he maintained that, when quoted without the balance of its context of devotion to Christ, it could not be fairly judged. He held out little hope of reunion on any principle that Pusey could accept. As soon as Newman's reply was issued, Pusey set to work on a second ‘Eirenicon.’ This was addressed to Newman himself. He completed it before the end of the year (1866); but its publication was delayed, partly because of the hostile attitude of the Roman catholics, and yet more because of a vehement outburst of hostility to ritualism within the church of England. But early in 1869 the approaching meeting of the Vatican council in 1870 caused Pusey at last to issue it; it dealt almost throughout, in reply to Newman's letter, with the question of the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary, and it was thought possible that this subject would occupy the attention of the council. The argument of this ‘First Letter to the Very Rev. J. H. Newman’ was based on the authorities cited in the elaborate but almost unknown work which Cardinal de Turrecremata compiled at the mandate of the papal legates who presided at the council of Basle in 1437, and an analysis of that work was appended to the volume. A few months later, in July 1869, Pusey published an edition of the Latin original of the cardinal's work, the text of which had been prepared for him by Dr. Stubbs, then regius professor of modern history at Oxford. These books he followed up at once by a third ‘Eirenicon,’ dated 1 Nov. 1869, under the title ‘Is Healthful Reunion Impossible? A Second Letter to the Very Rev. J. H. Newman.’ In this last appeal he discusses all the ordinary difficulties in the way of re-