Pugin, A(ugustus) Welby
An earnest address on the establishment of the hierarchy.
London, Charles Dolman 1851.
Full Description
8vo. (2) + 32pp, with printed advertisement leaf tipped-in at end. Recent cloth.
A fascinating and well-argued pamphlet by the younger Pugin in which he recants his previous opinion that it was Protestantism that was responsible for the damage to churches, plunder of treasuries and destruction of shrines at the time of the English Reformation. He interprets these events instead as “a fearful and terrible example of a Catholic nation betrayed by a corrupted Catholic hierarchy”, under the intimidation of the power of the state, and he even admits that “there is much [about the Church of England] that is deserving of our respect” and that “I cannot bring myself to believe that the Church of England … is a mere imposture and sham”. Such sentiments are unlikely to have been viewed with favour by Cardinal Wiseman and the Roman Catholic hierarchy of the early 1850s, and the pamphlet is understandably scarce today. Belcher A56.