Tractarian and bishop - 1838
Edward Bouverie Pusey, a leader of the Oxford Movement.
Introduction
Edward Bouverie Pusey was a leader of the Oxford Movement, which sought to restore the vitality of the church by reinstating some of the doctrines and rituals that had gone out of use during the Protestant Reformation in England. They felt the church had become too plain. Pusey wrote several of the tracts that explained the movement’s objectives and opinions. He was more interested in doctrine than in rituals and wrote about baptism and the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Although he searched for ways to reunite the Church of England with the Roman Catholic Church, he never crossed over to the Catholic church as John Henry Newman and some of his other associates did. Needless to say, his publications roused controversy. The Bishop of Oxford (Richard Bagot) issued a “charge” not unfavorable to the tracts, and intervened tactfully at a time when Pusey’s wife was seriously ill. Pusey wrote him back on this day 30 October 1838:
Quote
“My Dear Lord Bishop,
“I thank your lordship much for all your kindness as on former occasions, so now; for the calls which you were so good as to make; for the interest which you have kindly felt in my present sorrows; and for your wish that we should be set at ease about the use which, it seemed to me, might probably, or not improbably, be made of your lordship’s Charge. . . .
“I am resuming, at what leisure I have, the revision and expansion of my tracts on Baptism, and from my present circumstances I ought to be taught not to anticipate the evils of the morrow, but to go on quietly with my work, thanking Him for my ‘daily bread.’
“With renewed thanks to your lordship, and every earnest wish for every earnest blessing upon yourself and yours. . . .”
For more on the Oxford Movement, see our story about another of its leaders, John Keble.
Liddon, Henry Parry. Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey. London: Longmans, 1894.