http://anglicanhistory.org/bios/ebpusey.html
Dr. Pusey died at the age of eighty-two at Ascot, where he had a small house adjacent to the Priory of the Devonport Sisters. The cause which he loved so well, and for which he had fought so gallantly for nearly fifty years, occupied his thoughts and energies to the end. Almost his last public act, less than a month before his death, was to write to The Times an appeal on behalf of Mr. Green, who was suffering imprisonment under the Public Worship Regulation Act. Dr. Liddon, in his Life of Pusey, records his conviction that this brave effort of chivalrous sympathy precipitated the end. He was buried in the nave of Christ Church on St. Matthew's Day, September 21, 1882, among those assembling to do him honour being William Ewart Gladstone, then Prime Minister.
Of all the original leaders of the Movement Pusey had to bear the cruellest abuse and the longest and most persistent attacks. The charge of disloyalty to the English Church, which has been brought against the Catholic Revival ever since Newman's secession, was directed with concentrated force against its acknowledged leader. In 1850 Bishop Wilberforce of Oxford had forbidden him to officiate in the diocese, except at Pusey, 'where his ministry would be innocent' on the ground of the alleged Romanizing tendency of his writings and influence. Great pressure was brought on the Bishop from very influential quarters to reconsider his decision, and in 1852 the prohibition was withdrawn. His loyalty was not again publicly challenged by ecclesiastical authority, but to the end he had to face prejudice, suspicion, and distrust. He bore the misrepresentations and popular odium with unbroken humility and patience, and though they proved a heavy cross to him, he never allowed them to sour him or make him bitter. His personal life was ascetic and saintly to a high degree. He laid stripes on himself; he wore hair-cloth next his skin; he ate by preference unpleasant food. He never 'looked at nature without inward confession of unworthiness.' He made 'mental acts of being inferior to everyone he saw, especially the poor and the neglected, or the very degraded, or children.' He made acts of internal humiliation when undergraduates or college servants touched their hats to him. It was part of his rule of life 'always to lie down in bed, confessing that I am unworthy to lie down except in Hell, but, so praying, to lie down in the Everlasting Arms.' For many years he said Mass every day, generally at four o'clock in the morning.
As a preacher he had no pretensions to oratorical skill. He read every word in a low, deep, rather monotonous voice, which in his later years was husky and thick, and seldom lifted his eyes from his manuscript. His sermons were immensely long, packed with patristic learning, and he had a habit, probably acquired during his studies in Germany, of inventing new words, so that his style was often strange and difficult to follow. But the words, whether strange or familiar, were of little account compared with the spiritual fire behind them. 'Men old and young,' says Liddon, 'listened to him for an hour and a half in breathless attention: because his moral power was such as to enable him to dispense with the lower elements of oratorical attraction; or it would have rendered their presence an intrusion on higher and holier ground. . . . Each sentence was instinct with his whole intense purpose of love, as he struggled to bring others into communion with the truth and Person of him who purified his own soul; and this attribute of profound reality which characterized his discourse from first to last, as it fell on the superficial and somewhat cynical thought of ordinary academical society, at once fascinated and awed the minds of men, and--whether they yielded their convictions to the preacher or not--at least exacted from them the homage of a sustained and hushed attention.'
Pusey took but little part in the Ceremonial Revival. He had by nature no inclination to pomp or ceremony; but he realized the value of beauty as an expression of the Divine Nature, and he foresaw from very early days that the revival of Eucharistic doctrine must issue in a revival of ceremonial. As years went on, and the development which he foresaw took place, he gradually adapted his own practice to changed conditions. But he dreaded the introduction of ceremonial which a congregation was unwilling to accept. In a letter to Father Prynne of Plymouth, written in 1849, he says: 'Certainly one should be glad that greater reverence could be restored: but I have long felt that we must first win the hearts of the people, and then the fruits of reverence will show themselves. To begin with outward things seems like gathering flowers, and putting them in the earth to grow. If we win their hearts, all the rest would follow. I have never had the responsibility of a parish, but while I could not but feel sympathy with those who held themselves bound by every rubric, I could not but think myself that since the Church of England had virtually let them go into disuse, we were bound to use wisdom in restoring them, so as not, in restoring them, to risk losing what is of far more moment, the hearts of the people.'
Pusey's influence on the Catholic Revival was profound, unique, and lasting. He did not possess the intellectual brilliance of Newman, or the winning charm of Keble, but he had a rock-like stability and power of self-forgetfulness which Newman lacked, and a capacity for leadership to which Keble could make no claim. To him more than to any other man, we owe the position which Anglo-Catholicism holds today. His life, to quote Mr. G. W. E. Russell, 'combined all the elements of moral grandeur--an absolute and calculated devotion to a sacred cause; a child-like simplicity; and a courage which grew more buoyant as the battle thickened. Its results are written in the Book of Record which lies before the Throne of God.'
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