more came of its fragmentary displays, might blaze and come to nothing.  There was nothing yet which spoke outwardly of the consistency and weight of a serious attempt to influence opinion and to produce a practical and lasting effect on the generation which was passing.  Cardinal Newman, in the Apologia, has attributed to Dr. Pusey’s unreserved adhesion to the cause which the Tracts represented a great change in regard to the weight and completeness of what was written and done.  “Dr. Pusey,” he writes, “gave us at once 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 the 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."[49]

This is not too much to say of the effect of Dr. Pusey’s adhesion.  It gave the movement a second head, in close sympathy with its original leader, but in many ways very different from him.  Dr. Pusey became, as it were, its official chief in the eyes of the world.  He became also, in a remarkable degree, a guarantee for its stability and steadiness:  a guarantee that its chiefs knew what they were about, and meant nothing but what was for the benefit of the English Church.  “He was,” we read in the Apologia, “a man of large designs; he had a hopeful, sanguine mind; he had no fear of others; he was haunted by no intellectual perplexities....  If confidence in his position is (as it is) a first essential in the leader of a party, Dr. Pusey had it.”  An inflexible patience, a serene composure, a meek, resolute self-possession, was the habit of his mind, and never deserted him in the most trying days.  He never for an instant, as the paragraph witnesses, wavered or doubted about the position of the English Church.