erted 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.

He was eminently, as his friend justly observes, "a man of large
designs." It is doubtless true, as the _Apologia_ goes on to say, that
it was due to the place which he now took in the movement that great
changes were made in the form and character of the Tracts. To Dr.
Pusey's mind, accustomed to large and exhaustive theological reading,
they wanted fulness, completeness, the importance given by careful
arrangement and abundant knowledge. It was not for nothing that he had
passed an apprenticeship among the divines of Germany, and been the
friend and correspondent of Tholuck, Schleiermacher, Ewald, and Sack. He
knew the meaning of real learning. In controversy it was his
sledge-hammer and battle-mace, and he had the strong and sinewy hand to
use it with effect. He observed that when attention had been roused to
the ancient doctrines of the Church by the startling and peremptory
language of the earlier Tracts, fairness and justice demanded that these
doctrines should be fully and carefully explained and defended against
misrepresentation and mistake. Forgetfulness and ignorance had thrown
these doctrines so completely into the shade that, identified as they
were with the best English divinity, they now wore the air of amazing
novelties; and it was only due to honest inquirers to satisfy them with
solid and adequate proof. "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." At the end of 1835 Dr. Pusey gave an example of what he
meant. In place of the "short and incomplete papers," such as the
earlier Tracts had been, Nos. 67, 68, and 69 formed the three parts of a
closely-printed pamphlet of more than 300 pages.[50] It was a treatise
on Baptism, perhaps the most elaborate that has yet appeared in the
English language. "It is to be regarded," says the advertisement to the
second volume of the Tracts, "not as an inquiry into a single or
isolated doctrine, but as a delineation and serious examination of a
modern system of theology, of extensive popularity and great
speciousness, in its elementary and characteristic principles." The
Tract on Baptism was like the advance of a battery of heavy artillery on
a field where the battle has been hi