Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800-82) 16th September.

Like the notorious Dr Fell, Dr Pusey is easier to admire than to like. In every account of his life, the word that sums him up is 'earnestness.' An aristocrat, educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, he was from 1822 a Fellow of Oriel, Newman's and Keble's college. And for several years he studied in Germany to equip himself to combat the rationalism he feared from the new 'higher criticism.'

In 1828, Pusey became regius professor of Hebrew and canon of Christ Church, positions which he held for the rest of his life. Though lacking all oratorical skill, he quickly won renown as a preacher in demand all over the country, in spite of a two-year ban in Oxford where he was charged with heresy.

After his friend Newman began 'Tracts for the Times,' Pusey joined him and contributed three tracts on baptism. Already well known, his social position and character exaggerated his early prominence in the Oxford movement, but after Newman's conversion to Rome in 1845, he undertook to defend the via media against both Roman Catholics and protestants, and became the acknowledged head of the Ritualist faction. For the rest of his life, Pusey was engaged in controversy on all sides, though he also worked at different times for reunion with catholics, orthodoxy and presbyterians. He was responsible for the introduction of the first Anglican sisterhoods, and for the revival of private confession; and we owe to Pusey more than to anyone else the survival of catholic influence in the church in the face of repeated 19th-century attacks.

Charles Plouviez