The 19th Century Catholic Revival in the Anglican Communion began in the universities, particularly at Oxford, and within a few generations its influence had spread throughout the Anglican Communion. It was not without its limitations. One instinctively worries about a movement when one of its leaders (Pusey) wonders if it is ever permissible for a priest to smile, except, perhaps, at a child. There was a lot of gloomy puritan piety about it.
And it lingered on for a long time. I can remember leaving the sacristy of the Church of S. Mary the Virgin, New York, in the mid 1960's and walking through the empty church with a couple of other acolytes after Evensong and Benediction, full of the joy of life, laughing at some joke or other, when a little figure dressed all in black , with a black shawl over her head, popped out from behind a pillar, planted herself in our path, and hissed, "Hush! Churches are for piety!" I was sure it was the ghost of Dr. Pusey in drag, but it later turned out to be one of St. Mary's regulars, a dear old soul who lived in a nearby rooming house, where she lured pigeons into her room and slit their throats. (St. Mary's was an inclusive parish, even then.)
It was F. D. Maurice who put his finger on one of the Oxford Movement's more serious weaknesses: "Their error, I think, consists in opposing to the 'spirit of the age' the spirit of a former age, instead of the ever-living and acting Spirit of God." There has been a large (and generally well-off) section of Anglo-Catholicism which has persisted in doing exactly this, right down to the squirrelly little Anglo-Catholic sects of our own age, both inside and outside the Episcopal Church.
Gilbert Binyon in his The Christian Socialist Movement in England sees a source of this weakness in what he terms "Latin Theology" - - the whole "law and order" mentality which dominated the mediaeval Western Church and formed the inherited mindset of Reformation Protestants and Counter-Reformation Catholics alike. He writes:
The Latin Theology likes to put everything in its proper place and keep it there. It touches nothing that it does not petrify. It is forever distinguishing, isolating, antagonizing what are really complementary. It must have things fixed and settled for good - - else it feels that all is confusion and uncertainty. It holds to Tradition - - which is the Inspiration of the past, handed on - - in such a way that it cannot recognize Inspiration in the present. Growth is alien to its spirit; every change seems a disturbance; every movement of new life an evil wrecking of a comfortable and settled balance, or an intrusion of a hostile force. Hence the conservatism of all those, Catholic or Protestant, who are under its influence.But the conservative, even reactionary, Oxford leaders were, like all of us, products of their time, and they were not the only ones to look fondly on an earlier age in their disgust with the crass commercial and industrial spirit of the 19th Century. What is significant is that many writers, poets, and artists of the time were to find that their revival of "medievalism" led them inexorably to a critique of contemporary capitalist society and a search for something more just, more humane, and, yes, more beautiful, to replace it. It happened to Ruskin, it happened spectacularly to William Morris (at one time a fiery young Anglo-Catholic himself), and it happened to a good many clergy and lay men and women who were practising Anglo-Catholics as well. One thinks of people like Arthur Stanton, curate of St. Alban's, Holborn, and Mother Kate (Warburton) who within a few years of the Oxford revival were moving toward a new political and economic expression of their Catholic Faith, and of people like Charles Gore and the authors of Lux Mundi who a generation later began the task of moving Catholic thought beyond the impoverished certainties of the accepted "Latin theology".
Ted M.
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Observations on the Oxford Movement
from: Social Ideals in English Letters, by Vida Dutton Scudder. Boston, Houghton Miffflin, 1898.
To trace the social awakening of the modern Church is to read one of the most interesting chapters of religious experience.
The spiritual depths were stirred first. For the social impulse in the Church is always effect and not cause of her deepest life. It has sometimes appeared logical and desirable to try to initiate a quickening of her stagnant powers by a purely humanitarian enthusiasm, but the attempt has never succeeded; for some reason, that is not the way her experience works. The Oxford Movement, which men of all schools and parties now recognize as the turn of the tide in the religious life of modern England, was wholly bent on other than social aims. Its eyes were fixed on the primitive and medieval Church rather than on the world of its own day. It was in many respects like the Puritans of whom it so strongly disapproved, so bent on saving soul, and on formulating theology, that no energy was left it for consideration of the collective life which surrounded it; and indeed, it was too much afraid of the world to scrutinize her ways.
Yet the Catholic reaction held latent factors of high importance in the social revival. We might not appreciate those factors even to-day, if the later history of the reaction were not bringing them out constantly into dramatic relief. But, looking back in the light of the striking social development in its recent phases, we can clearly see that it carried with it social implications of the most radical order. It its own way, it was pervaded from the first by that sense of the organic unity of human life which was struggling all through this period to assert itself against the disintegrating instincts that were dominating popular thought. The organicism of which the Oxford leaders were supremely conscious was indeed not society at large, but the Catholic Church; yet that Church was dear to them only as the ideal expression of the human race, the Fellowship which realized the will of God for all his children. Their belief in a Church visible, a mighty association of men, actuated by unworldly motives, and avowedly indifferent to fleshly good, had a deep social impressiveness . . .
Yet even more striking in its social implication was the personal attitude with which the movement diffused. It brought unworldliness back from a sentiment to a practice. Against luxury, self-indulgence, and ease it set its face like a flint. The beautiful sermons of Newman, so suave, so severe, with their inveterate hatred of the "gentlemanlike", the "comfortable", and the "established," and their marvelous gift of revealing the eternal facts below the temporal, did an incalculable work in restoring to their readers and hearers the sense of the reality underlying convention. He who eagerly yielded his soul to the spirit of the movement soon found himself like his leaders, aware of "two, and two only. absolute and luminously self-evident beings, himself and his Creator." The world and the lust thereof receded into the distance, and consciousness was filled by the austerity of the Christian claim, and the duty of renunciation. This renunciation was, it is true, simply to the end of the attainment of personal holiness. It was inspired by no wish to share earthly goods with others, or to minister to the hungry, but only by the wish to escape the evil world. Yet to introduce in a lusty commercial civilization a motive strong enough to turn throngs of people from comfort and luxury to a life of stern self-denial was assuredly to do a great and salutary thing. The moral sternness of the teaching of the leaders of the Oxford Movement was one of the few bracing influences of the period in which they worked. No one can read such a sermon as that of Newman "On the Danger of Riches," without feeling that the thought there expressed, while very far from that of our own day, yet held our thought in its germ.
Last but greatest of the social influences of the movement was that sacramental conception of life which it sought so solemnly to revive in the Anglican Church. Associated at times in its origin with a dreamy asceticism which shut off its votaries from healthful relations with the world, this conception yet held in its depths an imperative craving for the sanctification of the flesh and of all human life, and fostered an attitude wholly different from that of the Puritan, who would immerse himself in spiritual concerns and allow the visible universe to go as rapidly as possible on its foreordained way of destruction.
The Oxford Movement was, then, full of latent social suggestions. But . . . its stormy history of religious struggle, its impassioned absorption in the attempt to establish a new theological and ecclesiastical attitude in the Anglican Church, obscured for a long time its social implications. . .
Only a little later, the distinctly social conscience of the Church stirred and awoke, and the words Christian Socialism, sounding a combination wholly preposterous to the ears of that generation, were first heard.
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The Christian Compassion of Pusey
From "The Social Aspect of the Catholic Revival", by Ruth Kenyon. In Northern Catholicism, edited by N P Williams and Charles Harris. London, SPCK, 1933.
It would have been a strange thing if men of the intellectual brilliance of Keble, Pusey, Newman, and Hurrell Froude, living in an Oxford that was seething with the thought of Coleridge and Wordsworth, Whateley and Arnold, and in an England undergoing political throes which gave birth to the Reform Bill of 1832, the Poor Law Act of 1834, the Municipal Reform Act of 1835, the Bristol riots of 1831, the agricultural labourers' revolt of the same year, and the industrial horrors disclosed in the campaign for the great Factory Act of 1822, should have noticed none of these things, or noticed them only to dislike the reforming zeal associated with political Liberalism. Capitalism was consolidating its position; Owenite Socialism was at its height; Chartism was in its beginnings. Tractarianism was no calm academic excogitation of a theory of the Church from a city of dreaming spires. It was a reaction to this whole situation, and a reaction which, in the phrase of Newman no less than that of Froude, was to be "fierce" . . .
During this whole period Liberalism was dominant or aggressive in philosophy and politics, and the influence behind it was Benthamite Utilitarianism. It was essentially a cold, middle-class, bourgeois, and contracted outlook. It was the intellectual aspect of the Industrial Revolution. Its reforming zeal did sweep away rotten boroughs, Speenhamland statutes, and Combination Laws. But its constructive ability was limited to the institution of inspectorates and Boards of Health, useful indeed, but palliatives only. For the spiritual aspects of life it had no use . . .
With such Liberalism, then, the Movement was always at war. To the "Left" of it in the politico-philosophic world lay much more humane ideas and political movement; e.g. Radicalism such as that of Samuel Bamford in fact or Felix Holt in fiction, which was fired with genuine saeva indignatio against social injustice, genuine passion for democracy, and sympathy with the common man; the beginnings of Chartism, which nailed the democratic hope to the political mast; and the rise of Socialism, which was at once a moral and economic reaction to the economic situation created by the Industrial Revolution. These, however, were all movements in and from the mass of the people, among whom the Church of England had at this time no roots through which it could draw a comprehension of their meaning. Hurrell Froude did indeed make a valiant effort to incorporate the idea of Radicalism with that of Apostolicism; but it is significant that he gained the idea from Catholic France, through Lammenais and L'Avenir; and that Newman's final reason against accepting it was that "the time has not yet come" . . .
Pusey, however, never seems to have been attracted, as Newman was, by Froude's conception of a Church which should definitely and officially side with the new order, seeing itself as the servant of Christ's poor, and its own power "based on a popular power." Keble's influence was too strong for that. He could not translate his principles into the new idiom. Nevertheless, the significant thing is that whether it were Newman's anti-Liberalism, or Keble's High Toryism, or Pusey's idea of Church and State, the Tractarian leaders throughout rejected any departmental conception of religion, and saw it as having the claim to dominate the whole life of man.
Beyond this, moreover, both Newman and Pusey passed judgment, in the name of the Catholic Faith, upon the mammon worship which had been allowed to result from the Industrial Revolution. Newman saw it rather as a thing hideous in itself, as "dreary" and "low"; Pusey chiefly in the light of the misery inflicted on the poor -- "our miles of misery in our large towns." But in neither mind is there any doubt of its passing under the judgment of Christ. One significant passage from Newman's sermons may be quoted ... Slavery to the world, he says, "is, perhaps, the characteristic of this country, and which the prosperity of this country so miserably fosters ... that low ambition which sets everyone on the lookout to succeed, and to rise in life, to amass money, to gain power, to depress his rivals ... this most fearfuly earthy and grovelling spirit is likely, alas! to extend itself more and more among our countrymen -- an intense, sleepless, restless, never-wearied, never satisfied pursuit of Mammon in one shape or another, to the exclusion of all deep, all holy, all calm, all reverent thoughts.
Nor does Newman stop at this general condemnation. In the sermon on "The Danger of Riches" he analyses carefully Christ's teaching on the subject, and applies it to individuals and nations. The mere possession of riches is dangerous, for the reason that, insensibly, it induces trust in them rather than in God. The pursuit of riches is definitely wrong, partly as fixing the mind on a merely this-world end, partly (an acute and original observation) because money-making "is a sort of creation, and gives the acquirer, even more than the possessor, an imagination of his own power." "With this thought before us, it is a very fearful consideration that we belong to a nation which in good measure subsists by making money." "The special political evils of our day," he thinks, have "their root in that principle which St. Paul calls the root of all evil" ...
We said that Pusey's condemnation of the social order of his day was mainly on account of the misery it inflicted on the poor. Or more truly perhaps that is the point from which he starts, the angle at which the evil touches him. He has a passionate pity for their sufferings, and a prophetic wrath at the luxury and indifference which to his mind are the direct cause of the suffering. He also shares with Newman and Manning a hatred of what he calls "our national idol, Mammon," and a perception of its vulgarity and grossness. "Self-interest is the life of our enterprises, the nerve of our commerce, the mainspring of our inventions, the soul of our activity, the idol of our worship; would we may not have to say, the daemon author of our greatness."
"Luxury and self-indulgence have been increasing among us . . . In its turn, luxury is the parent of covetousness; and covetousness of unjust gain, and of the grinding of the poor. We will not limit our self-indulgence; and so in order to obtain it cheaply, we pare down the wages of our artisans. Those who have seen it, know that full often the very clothes we wear are, while they are made, moistened by the tears of the poor. How has the same desire for cheapness, to vie with others, impaired the character of our trade, and made practices common which our forefathers would have counted what they are, dishonesty."
"Wealth does not give the power to use naked violence, but wealthy covetousness manifestly grinds the poor. When, for instance, wages are paid in necessaries priced exorbitantly, or when artisans are required to buy at their masters' shops, what is it but the union of deceit and oppression? The trading world is full of oppression, scarcely veiled by deceit" . . .
It is no blessed poverty in which the masses live under this "spurious civilization." "In our wealthy nation, this term poverty describes a condition of other days. We have had to coin a new name to designate the misery, offspring of our material prosperity. From our wealthy cities (as from those of Flanders) ascends to heaven against us 'the cry of pauperism, i.e. the cry of distress . . . by an unexpected curse issuing from the very development of wealth. The political economy of unbelief has been crushed by facts on all the theatres of human activity and industry.' Truly we build up Zion with blood when we cheapen luxuries and comforts at the price of souls, use Christian toil like brute strength, tempt men to dishonesty and women to other sin, to eke out the scanty wages which alone our selfish thirst for cheapness allows ... or the commercial prosperity we have made our God ... our commercial greatness is the price of His blood ... anew slaying Christ, and from the selfsame motives as those who crucified Him."
This authentic note of prophetic indignation is present not only throughout the commentary on the Minor Prophets, but also continuously in his sermons. Especially penetrating are those on "Christ's Acts of Love, the Christian Model" -- a plea indeed for almsgiving, but for almsgiving on a scale that is adequate to the need -- and "Why did Dives lose his Soul?" a terrible condemnation of a life of "selfish and vain enjoyment of one's means in the continual round of earthly pleasure, to the destruction of the love of the poor, and so, God says, of the love of God Himself." It is perfectly clear that Pusey knew the world in which he lived very well, and applied to it in every detail the measuring-rod of the demands of Christ. It is strange that this element in his work should have been so far forgotten, and that the tradition about him is so much that of a scholarly, saintly recluse, far removed from the din and struggle of the world. Scholar and saint he was indeed, but also prophet, scourging with stern words the society of his day.
Pusey is the link between the actual Oxford Movement and the next stage of the Catholic Revival. Concerning Mammonism, he simply states "this is wrong" and there leaves it on the conscience of his hearers. For the suffering he has a policy ...
As in the days of Cyprian at Carthage and of Gregory in Rome, so, Pusey contended, there should be organized effort by the Church to help where help was needed ... "The Church herself ought to debate upon remedies, and should not leave to individual effort the work of the whole. We need missions among the poor of our towns; organised bodies of clergy living among them; licensed preachers in the streets and lanes of our cities; brotheroods, or guilds, which should replace socialism [Pusey must surely here be accepting the idea of the Christian Socialists as to co-operative societies, The italics are ours. - Ruth Kenyon]; or sisterhoods of mercy. We need clergy to penetrate our mines, to emigrate with our shifting population, to grapple with our manufacturing system as the Apostles did with the slave-system of the ancient world."
Long before he write these words he had applied himself to pioneer work along these lines [at St. Saviour's, Leeds] ... Inspired by him, a college of priests, with an associate body of lay brethren, went forth from the focus of the parish altar to aacomplish whatever their hands could find to do for the people whom they loved and served. It was not long before cholera epidemic of 1849 tested their charity to the utmost. St. Saviour's, Leeds, was the first of those "Ritualist slum parishes" which are typical of the Revival in its second generation.
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The New Dualism and the Cross
From The Social Implications of the Oxford Movement, by William George Peck. New York, Scribners, 1933.
The great Tractarians, whether or not they may justly be said to have seen or felt the social implications of their work, adopted a position and laid down certain principles which, in view of subsequent developments, must certainly preclude their successors from ignoring the social issue. For within the Church as interpreted and influenced by the Catholic Movement, the faithful receive a dogma of life which is openly ignored or denied by the world in which they are required to work, play, eat, marry, and vote . . .
The unbridged chasm between sacred and secular is intolerable, for its existence means that if religion is to be a genuine and necessary concern of man, the world must be regarded either as a sphere of temptation which the soul must flee at all costs, or else as a purely non-moral environment of religious life, in which natural activities run parallel with the spiritual course, but never merge with it or even touch it . . .
It is easy to understand that any religion with a strong ethical sense and a clear sight of the fact of human sin should be liable to conclude that the world is an intrinsically dangerous habitation for the soul, even though such a conclusion may be a misinterpretation of the religion's own presuppositions. Both Catholic asceticism and Protestant puritanism have exhibited traces of such Manichaeism. But if we may believe Troeltsch, Max Weber, Tawney and others, the second of the two forms of dualism proved not a little attractive to later Protestantism, in which there arose the conception that there is a non-moral sphere in which the ordinary business of living proceeds, and wherein the behaviour of Christian and non-Christian alike is necessarily swayed by the same indefeasible laws.
The whole development of English political philosophy in the seventeenth, and of economic theory in the eighteenth century, seems to bear testimony to this. The discipline of a supernatural law was abandoned in government, trade and industry. The Christian principle of neighborly love could not be any longer applied, even in theory, to purely economic operations; and the Christian, observing no more than the secular rules of the market, was quite justified in prospering by using for his own benefit such gifts and advantages as he might possess. Mr. Tawney significantly places before his account of the Puritan movement a text from Tyndale's translation, "And the Lord was with Joseph, and he was a luckie fellowe" . . .
The characteristic dualism afflicting the Church today . . . is that of a parallelism between a natural and secular order, without moral significance, and the world of religious values, in which the laws of either are confined to their own field and never impinge upon the other. The vast modern assumption that the organisation of human society is an operation governed by non-ethical forces and factors . . . [has] implied that if religion be indeed concerned with realities, they are not those which we meet in industry, finance, and government, and that in these provinces a Christian must submit to the control of the operating natural laws. And it is the lamentable fact that too long the Christian Church has refrained from giving to this view the persistent, complete, and direct contradiction which, if the Catholic Faith be the supreme interpretation of reality, it deserves . . .
To admit that man is an ethical agent is to admit that he is wholly an ethical agent whenever he chooses an end and seeks means to realize it. He may, by a concatenation of false choice, have made any further choice a task of heroic proportions, and there is such an aspect in his present economic situation. Nevertheless, it is not usually denied that in the economic sphere men do choose ends and seek means. "Economic law," indeed, so far as it deals with human action, is in large part only the recorded behaviour of masses of men in given circumstances. Scientific economics does not discover the source of that behaviour, and cannot even pretend to do so without exceeding its own province. In so far as the statement of economic law confines itself to what are truly the processes of nature and the certainties of mathematics, it is valid enough. It may also provide trustworthy guidance concerning the probable action of men, so long as a particular assumption of their motive may reasonably be made. But this does not prove that the action is ultimately determined by non-ethical forces. It allows the possibility that human action upon a natural environment may undergo great changes, whereof the source is in worlds beyond the power of economics to discuss.
If this be admitted, it follows that the so-called "natural" field of human endeavor may at any moment be invaded by free action choosing ends altogether beyond the earthly horizon, and thus remoulding the world-order. At all events, however the philosophical verdict may lie, the modern world is convincing proof that neither religion nor the secular process of life is benefited by a divorce which precludes any such supernatural revolution. For while the secular sphere exhibits a confusion in which even the natural powers of man are contradicted and frustrated, religion appears to become unreal, so long as it fails to reveal itself as the source of creative activity within the visible sphere.
[It] is only a religion of redemption that can be at once realistic and reassuring; and it is in the Cross of Atonement that realism and reassurance most convincingly meet. For there is displayed the essential nature of human sin. When God came amongst men, this is what happened to Him. We are such a race that God cannot be seen amongst us, but in self-defence we spit on Him and crown Him with thorns of mockery. Yet He has come and has suffered for the joy that was set before Him; and this is the supreme evidence of the divine valuation of mankind, the final ground of Christian hope. We know well what man has done with himself and his fellows, since we can behold what he has done to his Saviour. But not all the towering sins of the world, not the stupidity and cruelty of the past or the pride and vainglory of the present can destroy in us the belief that the human race is intended to become the sphere of the Kingdom of God. "A thing of price is man, because for him Christ died."
But there is even more than this. We see at the Cross, wrought out upon the field of positive history and within the very process of human action, the reversal of that pressure of motive and judgment by which man was enslaved. Here is the Christian sanction for challenging the assumption that established social tendencies must necessarily work themselves out to the assured ends of decadence. Here is the constant basis of our faith that man is not properly the sport of circumstance, even of the concatenated circumstance forged by his own misdirected choice. He need not see his civilization slide slowly into the ruin prepared by its own inner falsity. He may purge, redeem, reshape, sublimate it, for nobler ends, since within his history there has been the great Intervention, certainly on his behalf, but addressed also as a formative principle and inspiration to his creative will. The Cross of Christ lays the foundation of the Kingdom of God amongst men, but our Lord calls men to take up the cross of reversal and revaluation: the cross of revolution. And unless we are prepared to believe that such triumphant uprising against the impersonal tides and tendencies of this world is an open possibility, we must regard the Cross of Christ as an irrelevant and ineffective episode.
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Epilogue: What Would Pusey Do?
Not too long ago I read a post in another group by a "traditionalist" priest who said, "My criteria for making a decision on any question is to ask 'What would Pusey do?'" (I wonder if there is money to be made selling "WWPD" bracelets? But that's another question.)
What this priest has forgotten, I think, is that the Tractarians were starting a *movement*, not delivering a finished, once-and-for-all product. The Church, as well as Society, were in a bloody awful mess, and they set out to do something about it, as quickly as possible. One tack they took was to call upon the Church of England to be true to itself, and their short-hand method was often, "here's what your official formularies say, live up to them!" It was less an appeal to "tradition" than an appeal to "the settled authority of the past" -- and an appropriation of the "spirit of another age" which could, at times, blind them to much that was good in their own.
They had an awful lot more in common, for instance, with the Incarnational theology of Maurice (who early on was identified with the Tractarians) than they did with the narrow outlook of the "Evangelical" party. But this didn't stop Pusey from joining with the Evangelicals in a nasty attack on Maurice over his views on Eternal Torture. (See Pusey and Maurice.)
That the Tractarians had their weaknesses should not come as a surprise to anybody -- they were trying to do so much! But it is precisely the weaknesses of the Tractarians that appeal so much to our present-day "Puseyites", rather than their strengths. The appeal of our "traditionalists" is not so much to tradition as to the authority of a set of propositions laid down in the past (the two are not the same thing!), and the proliferation of separate "continuing" bodies reflects the inevitable inability to agree on precisely what in the past is "authoritative" and what isn't. Put another way, the disputes are over "When did the Holy Spirit die?"
Faithfulness to Tradition is a much livelier and more risky business than an appeal to the "settled" authority of the past. As Ellen Wondra says in "Humanity Has Been a Holy Thing", "Christian tradition" is not a static and univocal corpus, but "a complex and fluid body of material that is constantly subjected to reinterpretation and reconstruction."
And I would urge that this is not a prescription for what tradition "ought to be", but a description of what it actually has been, to one degree or another, throughout most of the Church's history. And it could be argued that the Church changes most when it appears to change the least. A "Summa theologica" written down to assist the Church in carrying out its mission in one historical context becomes something very different from what it was when that context changes. The words may stay the same, but their meaning shifts, and their dynamic relationship with human society as a whole -- including their ability to help us be "leaven" -- changes drastically. And the longer it stays unchanged, the more radically it actually changes. Liturgists know this quite well.
Those among us who take seriously the ongoing business of constant reinterpretation and reconstruction in the light of experience, are, I suspect, the ones who ought to be calling themselves "traditionalists".
But that said, we do need a healthy dose of Tractarian and Laudian "conservatism" to remind us that not every change is for the better, that the "natural evolution of society" is not necessarily the same thing as "progress", at least from a Christian perspective. Archbishop Laud would have agreed with Kropotkin that the development of laissez-faire capitalism out of late feudalism was a step backward and by no means "inevitable" in the Marxist sense. And I have long since lost my facile optimism that socialism will inevitably develop out of monopoly capitalism. As far as I can see, Gustav Landauer was right. The only thing capitalism naturally evolves into is more capitalism. To recognize the hand of God at work in human history is not the same thing as reducing ourselves to a cheering section for whatever pops up next. So to reinterpretation and reconstruction I would also like to add "discernment", a task in which we will need the proverbial wisdom of serpents.
We could do worse than to try to carry on in our own ways the task proposed by the Guild of Saint Matthew: to study social and political questions "in the light of the Incarnation". And perhaps a question we need to ask about any proposal or practice, inside the Church as well as in society at large, is not "What would Pusey do?" or even "What would Jesus do?" but "What will this do to Jesus, Incarnate in the least of these, His sisters and brothers?"
Ted M. (reprinted from Anglican Left.)
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