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Edward Bouverie Pusey

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Edward Bouverie Pusey

Edward Bouverie Pusey (22 August 1800 – 16 September 1882) was an English churchman and Regius Professor of Hebrew at Christ Church, Oxford.

Quotes

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  • Learn to commend thy daily acts to God, so shall the dry every-day duties of common life be steps to Heaven, and lift thy heart thither.
    • Sermon XXI: "Heaven the Christian's Home", in Sermons during the Season from Advent to Whitsuntide (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1848), p. 340.
  • In all adversity, what God takes away He may give us back with increase.
    • Letter to Charles Dodgson (January 1851) following the death of Dodgson's wife, quoted in Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1898) p. 51.
  • The Book of Daniel is especially fitted to be a battle-field between faith and unbelief. It admits of no half-way measures. It is either Divine or an imposture. To write any book under the name of another, and to give it out to be his, is, in any case, a forgery, dishonest in itself, and destructive of all trustworthiness. But the case as to the Book of Daniel, if it were not his, would go far beyond even this. The writer, were he not Daniel, must have lied on a most frightful scale.
    • Daniel the Prophet (Oxford: John Henry and James Parker, 1864), Lecture I, p. 1.
  • Human praise and human blame are mostly valueless, because men know not the whole which they praise or blame.
    • Sermon I: "False Peace", in Parochial and Cathedral Sermons (Oxford: Parker & Co., 1882), p. 2.

Parochial Sermons, Vol. II (1853)

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Parochial Sermons (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1853), Vol. II
  • Never dwell on the morrow. Remember that it is God's, not thine.
    • Sermon IX: "Victory over the Besetting Sin", p. 158.
  • Take steadily some one sin, which seems to stand out before thee, to root it out, by God's grace, and every fibre of it. Purpose strongly, by the grace and strength of God, wholly to sacrifice this sin or sinful inclination to the love of God, to spare it not, until thou leave of it none remaining, neither root nor branch.
    • Sermon IX: "Victory over the Besetting Sin", p. 160.
  • Fix, by God's help, not only to root out this sin, but to set thyself to gain, by that same help, the opposite grace. If thou art tempted to be angry, try hard, by God's grace, to be very meek; if to be proud, seek to be very humble.
    • Sermon IX: "Victory over the Besetting Sin", p. 161.
  • Practice in life whatever thou prayest for, and God will give it thee more abundantly.
    • Sermon X: "Prayer Heard the More, through Delay", p. 179.
  • God does not take away trials, or carry us over them, but strengthens us through them.
    • Sermon XI: "Re-creation of the Penitent", p. 182.

Private Prayers (1883)

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Private Prayers, ed. H. P. Liddon (London: Rivingtons, 1883)
  • Lord, without Thee I can do nothing; with Thee I can do all. Accept, Good Lord, this my desire; help me by Thy grace, that I fall not; help me by Thy strength, to resist mightily the very first beginnings of evil, before it takes hold of me; help me to cast myself at once at Thy sacred Feet, and lie still there, until the storm be overpast; and, if I lose sight of Thee, bring me back quickly to Thee, and grant me to love Thee better, for Thy tender mercy's sake.
    • "Morning Prayers", pp. 19–20.
  • Let me not seek out of Thee what I can find only in Thee, peace and rest and joy and bliss, which abide only in Thy abiding joy. Lift up my soul above the weary round of harassing thoughts to Thy eternal Presence. Lift up my soul to the pure, bright, clear, serene, radiant atmosphere of Thy Presence, that there I may breathe freely, there repose in Thy love, there be at rest from myself, and from all things which weary me; thence return, arrayed with Thy peace, to do and bear what shall please Thee. Amen.
    • "Evening Prayers", p. 38.

Quotes about Edward Bouverie Pusey

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  • While Newman's dialectical explanation allows us to follow this very process, we have to look for the most genuine expression of mystical communion with God, not in him, but in the first instance in Pusey. That he is properly the doctor mysticus in earlier Neo-Anglicanism, has scarcely received sufficient notice from its historians. In his biography the multiplicity of trivial daily affairs has partly concealed this deep and genuine well-spring in the soul. But it seems to me of the greatest importance for comprehending the place of sacramental religion in Neo-Anglicanism.
    • Yngve Brilioth, The Anglican Revival: Studies in the Oxford Movement (1925), p. 296
  • There is complete unity in Pusey's ecclesiastical work. He believed that the true doctrines of the church of England were enshrined in the writings of the fathers and Anglican divines of the seventeenth century, but that the malign influences of whig indifferentism, deism, and ultra-protestantism, had obscured their significance. To spread among churchmen the conviction that on the doctrines of the fathers and early Anglican divines alone could religion be based was Pusey's main purpose. With this aim he set out in company with Newman and Keble. At its inception the movement occasioned secessions to Rome which seriously weakened the English church, and seemed to justify the storm of adverse criticism which the Oxford reformers encountered. Unmoved by obloquy, Pusey, although after the secession of Newman he stood almost alone, never swerved from his original purpose. He possessed no supreme gifts of rhetoric, of literary persuasiveness, or of social strategy. Yet the movement which he in middle life championed almost single-handed proceeded on its original lines with such energy and success as entirely to change the aspect of the Anglican church. This fact constitutes Pusey's claim to commemoration. Of himself he wrote with characteristic self-effacement when reviewing his life: ‘My life has been spent in a succession of insulated efforts, bearing indeed upon one great end—the growth of catholic truth and piety among us.’
  • At that time indeed (from 1823) I had the intimacy of my dear and true friend Dr. Pusey, and could not fail to admire and revere a soul so devoted to the cause of religion, so full of good works, so faithful in his affection.
  • His great learning, his immense diligence, his scholarlike mind, his simple devotion to the cause of religion, overcame me; and great of course was my joy, when in the last days of 1833 he showed a disposition to make common cause with us... He at once gave to us a position and a name. Without him we should have had no chance, especially at the early date of 1834, of making any serious resistance to the Liberal aggression. But Dr. Pusey was a Professor and Canon of Christ Church; he had a vast influence in consequence of his deep religious seriousness, the munificence of his charities, his Professorship, his family connexions, and his easy relations with University authorities. He was to the Movement all that Mr. Rose might have been, with that indispensable addition, which was wanting to Mr. Rose, the intimate friendship and the familiar daily society of the persons who had commenced it. And he had that special claim on their attachment, which lies in the living presence of a faithful and loyal affectionateness. There was henceforth a man who could be the head and centre of the zealous people in every part of the country, who were adopting the new opinions; and not only so, but there was one who furnished the Movement with a front to the world, and gained for it a recognition from other parties in the University... Dr. Pusey was, to use the common expression, a host in himself; he was able to give a name, a form, and a personality to what was without him a sort of mob; and when various parties had to meet together in order to resist the liberal acts of the Government, we of the Movement took our place by right among them.
  • He was a man of large designs; he had a hopeful, sanguine mind; he had no fear of others; he was haunted by no intellectual perplexities.
  • Dr. Pusey's influence was felt at once. He saw that there ought to be more sobriety, more gravity, more careful pains, more sense of responsibility in the Tracts and in the whole Movement. It was through him that the character of the Tracts was changed.
  • Dr. Pusey was the only member of the Tractarian School to whom the Evangelical party had any kind of attraction. His piety was not only most real, but it was of a popular and impressive character. He had also a way peculiarly his own, and entirely consistent with sincerity and simplicity, of rounding off the sharp edges of the strong and offensive statements of others, and thus presenting them under a far less odious aspect to those who disliked them. Hence Dr. Pusey had a definite and most important place in the movement. While it was Mr. Newman's office to stimulate, and his misfortune to startle, to Dr. Pusey, on the other hand, belonged the work of soothing and the ministry of conciliation. He was the St. Barnabas of the movement.
    • Frederick Oakeley, Historical Notes on the Tractarian Movement (A.D. 1833—1845) (1865), p. 49
  • For an hour Pusey would wrestle with the argument and the theology of his subject, bringing all his masses of thought and erudition to bear on the establishment of his doctrine. Then his method and attitude would suddenly change. He would lift his eyes from his manuscript to the Undergraduates' Gallery, and, addressing us as "My sons," would give us a quarter of an hour of directly personal appeal; searching the heart's secrets, urging repentance, and exhorting to a way of life more consistent with our Divine vocation. Then indeed we seemed to be listening to the voice of a god.
  • Intensely and fearfully as I differed from him in many points of unspeakable importance, I could not but love the man. Had known him for sixty years! Was at college with him. We read Aristotle to each other; but while I formed a correct opinion of his diligence, I had not formed, at that time, a correct one of his powers. He has had a prodigious effect on his generation. I greatly admired his talents, fully acknowledged and wondered at his immense learning, and reverenced his profound piety. His work on Daniel exhibits all the three; and surely he was called and supported by our Lord in that illustrious effort of wisdom, labour, and courage.
    • Lord Shaftesbury, diary entry (23 September 1882), quoted in Edwin Hodder, The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, K.G. Vol. III (1886), p. 448
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