Edward Bouverie Pusey - Oxford Movement

Oxford Movement

In the same year (1828) the Prime Minister (the Duke of Wellington) appointed him to the Regius professorship of Hebrew with the attached canonry of Christ Church. The misunderstanding of his position led to the publication in 1830 of a second part of Pusey's Historical Enquiry, in which he denied the charge of rationalism. In the years which immediately followed, his thoughts turned in another direction. The revolt against individualism had begun, and he was attracted to its standard. By the end of 1833 he showed a disposition to make common cause with those who had already begun to issue the Tracts for the Times. "He was not, however, fully associated in the movement till 1835 and 1836, when he published his tract on baptism and started the Library of the Fathers".

He became a close student of the Church Fathers and the Caroline Divines who revived traditions of pre-Reformation teaching. A sermon which he preached before the university in May 1843, The Holy Eucharist, a Comfort to the Penitent, so startled the authorities by the re-statement of doctrines which, though well known to ecclesiastical antiquaries, had faded from the common view, that by the exercise of an authority which, however legitimate, was almost obsolete, he was suspended for two years from preaching. The immediate effect of his suspension was the sale of 18,000 copies of the condemned sermon; its permanent effect was to make Pusey for the next quarter of a century the most influential person in the Anglican Church, for it was one of the causes which led Newman to sever himself from that communion.