ON BEHALF OF
DR. PUSEY’S TRACTS ON HOLY BAPTISM AND OF OTHER TRACTS FOR THE TIMES
(Being No. 82 of the said Tracts.)
1837.
Notice
I SHOULD hesitate for several reasons to include the following Letter among these republications, did it not serve to illustrate the state of the controversy at the time when it was written, and had it not been a step towards the 90th Tract.
In order to understand it aright, passages from publications of the day must first be given, out of which it grew.
1.
Dr. Pusey, in the second Volume of the Tracts for the Times (No. 69, On**Baptism, pp.134-137), writes as follows:—
“The term ‘regeneration’ came to be used for the visible change, or almost for sanctification; and its original sense, as denoting a privilege of the Christian Church, was wholly lost … Undoubtedly, the pious men under the Old Dispensation were sanctified; and, in these days of ordinary attainment, how must we look back with shame and dejection upon the worthies of the elder Covenant, upon those ‘three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job,’ or upon Abraham, the Father of the faithful and the ‘friend of God.’ Greatly were they sanctified. The Spirit of God … purified the breast of the ‘Preacher of righteousness’ … yet was not Noah therefore regenerate … Regeneration is a privilege of the Church of Christ … Sanctification on the contrary includes various degrees.”
2.
And in the Advertisement to the same Volume occurred the following passage:—
“We have almost embraced the doctrine, that God conveys grace only through the instrumentality of the mental energies, that is, through faith, prayer, active spiritual contemplations, or (what is called) communion with God, in contradiction to the primitive view, according to which the Church and her Sacraments are the ordained and direct visible means of conveying to the soul what is in itself supernatural and unseen. For example, would not most men maintain, on the first view of the subject, that to administer the Lord’s Supper to infants, or to the dying and insensible 1, however consistently pious and believing in their past lives, was a superstition? and yet both practices have the sanction of primitive usage. And does not this account for the prevailing indisposition to admit that Baptism conveys regeneration? Indeed, this may even be set down as the essence of Sectarian doctrine (however its mischief may be restrained or compensated, in the case of individuals), to consider faith, and not the Sacraments, as the instrument of justification and other Gospel gifts,” &c.
3.
This was in 1835. Towards the end of the next year, a Protestant Magazine of established reputation was led to animadvert with great severity upon the above passages, and on the line of doctrine advocated in the Oxford Tracts, as follows:—
“In reply to the question which [a correspondent] puts to us, as to ‘what authority’ the doctrine which he quotes from the Oxford Tracts rests upon, we can only say, Upon the authority of the darkest ages of Popery, when men had debased Christianity from a spiritual system, a ‘reasonable service,’ to a system of forms, and ceremonial rites, and opera operata influences; in which, what Bishop Horsley emphatically calls ‘the mysterious intercourse of the soul with its Creator,’ was nearly superseded by an intervention of ‘the Church’—not as a congregation of faithful men, in which the pure word of God is preached, and the sacraments are ‘duly administered according to Christ’s ordinance,’ as the Church of England defines it—but as a sort of ‘mediator between God and man,’ through whom all things relating to spiritual life were to be conveyed. Those who could not understand that ‘God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him, must worship Him in spirit and in truth,’ and those who had neither the reality nor ‘the appearance of spiritual life,’ readily allied themselves to a religion of ceremonials, in which the Church stood in the place of God. And as the Popish priesthood found their gain in encouraging these ritual and non-spiritual views of Christianity, they eventually prevailed throughout Christendom, till the Reformation restored the pure light of Scripture, and taught men to look less to the priest and more to God; less to ‘outward and visible signs,’ and more to ‘inward and spiritual graces;’ and not to infer that, because their name stood upon the register of baptism, it was therefore enrolled in the Lamb’s book of life, when there was no ‘appearance’ of spiritual vitality in their heart or conduct.