is still remembered in certain circles, had quickened this affinity in the direction, if not to the point, of what is known as conversion. The fellowship opened the way to a curacy; the curacy to a living; and the living to a wife. By the close of 1833, when he was only twentyfive, Manning had become Rector of Lavington and the husband of one of the beautiful Miss Sargents. Upon the four-years' idyll of the Sussex Wolds that followed, Crabbe, whose life had just closed, might have founded a Tale of the Hall as full of simple charm and pathos as any in his Poems. But the idyll ended with the death of Mrs Manning in 1837; and almost immediately afterwards her husband was sucked into the current of the Oxford Movement.

In this new atmosphere the young clergyman's native talent for statesmanship rapidly developed. As an undergraduate reading the lessons in Balliol Chapel he had found 'the perfection of human character' described in that chapter of the Book of Wisdom where the author celebrates the victories of divine wisdom in a world of human instruments.

'Because of her,' run the verses that especially caught his attention, 'I shall have glory among multitudes, and honour in the sight of elders, though I be young. I shall be found of a quick conceit when I give judgment, and in the presence of princes I shall be admired. When I am silent they shall wait for me; and when I open my lips they shall give heed unto me; and if I continue speaking, they shall lay their hand upon their mouth. Because of her I shall have immortality, and leave behind an eternal memory to them that come after me.'

The desire for wisdom, then, was the inspiration of his early life; and he so far attained the reputation of it by middle age that Fitzjames Stephen declared him to have been the wisest man he ever knew. But, though Manning had at first imperfectly perceived it, wisdom is of two worlds and the choice of wisdom the most searching of spiritual decisions. This choice came to him in the common fashion of that time.

The Church of England was in those days drawing near the hour of her visitation. She had long been comfortable; she was to be comfortable no more. Her

intellectual position and her social achievement were alike to be challenged; and in the times that were coming upon her she had to save herself as well as she might from both ecclesiastical students and social reformers. The intellectual movement, as was natural enough, led the way. In the years which saw Manning promoted to be Archdeacon of Chichester, the Oxford Tracts for the Times' spread across the length and breadth of England, setting men everywhere by the ears-country parsons, chatting over their cups after a hard day's hunting, as well as old dons, sipping port in their common rooms. Manning faced the agitation like the eminently prudent man that he was by nature. He kept at a safe distance from the authors of the Tracts, yet all the while he was moving with the spirit of the times. The brother-in-law of Samuel Wilberforce and the friend of Gladstone, he seemed to find, with much better success than the Oxford leaders, the boasted via media of the English Church. He appealed to Scripture, antiquity, and tradition for the rule of faith; he introduced the practice of more frequent, though still infrequent, celebrations; and he began to receive the confessions of a host of amateur penitents. Yet he did not omit to include Cranmer and Ridley amongst the fathers of the English Church; nor did he fail to take the occasion of a Fifth of November sermon in 1843 to condemn the Papacy and the Church of Rome in language which might have satisfied the principles of the 'Record' or the 'Rock.' It was just when his Protestantism had been most trenchant and pronounced that an incident occurred which was afterwards remembered. Approaching Littlemore, where Newman lay in labour with his thoughts, Manning was one day refused admission by the hands of a young man who is believed to have been James Anthony Froude. In that diplomatic walk of his to try to make his peace, and in Newman's stern repulse of his advances, is to be found in embryo the duel of temperament that lasted all the time they were alive, and was yet so strangely forgotten, or ignored, by the survivor in his moving tribute to the memory of the deceased.

So far the Archdeacon of Chichester had moved along a road which, as his eyes could see as well as every one

else's, led straight to an Anglican bishopric. The wisdom that is from above had melted into the wisdom of this world; and the star of the supernatural had seemed to follow the path of statesmanlike endeavour. Gradually, however, these guides of life began to diverge. It was in the end of 1845 that Manning was offered the post of sub-almoner to the Queen, which Wilberforce had just resigned in favour of a mitre. He hesitated, examined his conscience with the fiercest severity, and refused. He seemed to himself to be too ambitious.

Earlier in that same autumn of 1845 Newman had seceded from the Church of England; and the secession opened the way for the central party and the conciliatory policy of which the Archdeacon was as much as any man the apostle. 'Safe as Manning' was the watchword of that brief hour of Anglican ecclesiastical history, just as 'Credo in Newmannum' had been the watchword of the hour that went before. And Manning himself never felt more safe. 'Nothing,' he wrote at this time to Robert Wilberforce, 'can shake my belief of the presence of Christ in our Church and Sacraments. I feel incapable of doubting it.' Newman's conversion, he expressly declares, had thrown him back. Then, unexpectedly, what men, according to the measure of their belief, call chance or Providence or the Hand of God, diverted the career that seemed to run so smoothly. Manning fell gravely ill, was ordered abroad, and went to Rome. It was 1848, the year of Revolution; and he was interested both spiritually and politically in what was going on. He saw much that gave him pleasure and much that gave him food for thought; and he spoke with Newman and Pio Nono, though we know nothing of what was said by either. Then he returned to England, and was soon absorbed in the controversy about church-schools and religious education, to all appearance the same sagacious champion of the middle way that he had been before. To all appearance, but to appearance only! For again a second time that which we have called the star of the supernatural had begun to draw him from the path down which his statesman's instincts would otherwise have led him. Doubts which had long insinuated themselves began to rise to the surface of his mind, stimulated by the elevation of Hampden-a doctor

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of dubious divinity-to the bench of Anglican bishops. For a decade he had been closely studying the questions of ecclesiastical unity and infallibility; and this had produced now familiar results. It cannot be denied,' he wrote from Rome to Robert Wilberforce, 'that we have two contradictory theologies.' And again later: 'I cannot find rest in any fine distinctions or theories unintelligible to the pauperes Christi for whom we exist.. 'The faith of the Holy Trinity and of the Incarnation subdues me into a belief of the indivisible unity and perpetual infallibility of the Body of Christ.' And much more in the same vein!

But, while such were the thoughts within him, the ecclesiastical statesman still carried himself proudly in the sight as well of those who asked his counsel as of the outer world. With the ground quaking under his feet, no man could have conveyed a more confident impression that they were set upon a rock. He spoke with two voices-the one emphatic and official, the other still and small; and the counsel of the Archdeacon of Chichester was no longer the opinion of Henry Edward Manning. It was a problem that troubled Purcell how in a good man such things could be; and nothing dates Mr Leslie's book more certainly than his apparent indifference to the morality or immorality of the two voices.' The Great War has, indeed, almost swept away the sense of scruple about saying one thing in public and another in private. Statesmen have become accustomed to make statements merely with an eye to situations; and the propagandists of the Press consider the tendency, rather than the veracity, of what they say. All things are held to be lawful to one who seeks to hold or improve a political position; and to weaken it by exact fidelity to truth is reckoned a kind of treachery to one's cause or one's country. On such hypotheses, for whatever they may be worth, Manning has as good a right as any one else to be defended for what he did. He was an Anglican statesman, whose archidiaconal charges were studied in ecclesiastical circles with an assiduity no longer to be imagined; and any utterance of his was bound to react upon the faith of a number of Anglican believers. Consequently, like other public characters, when in process of changing their opinions, he kept up

appearances to the end. His character was not one of those which have need of a Littlemore.

The judgment of the Privy Council in the Gorham case, which left the question of baptismal regeneration an open one, decided the debate which the appointment of Hampden had originally quickened. Manning left Lavington in December 1850; in March 1851 he formally resigned his office and his benefice; and on March 23, at that little chapel in Palace Street, which lies now under sentence of death, he attended his last service as an Anglican. There was not wanting a dramatic touch to mark the occasion.

'I was kneeling by the side of Mr Gladstone,' he wrote forty years later. 'Just before the Communion Service commenced, I said to him, "I can no longer take the Communion in the Church of England!" I rose up . . . and laying my hand on Mr Gladstone's shoulder, said, "Come." It was the parting of the ways. Mr Gladstone remained; and I went my way. Mr Gladstone still remains where I left him.'

Thus the rising Archdeacon of Chichester became a layman of the Church of Rome, with over forty years of life behind him and the best of them devoted to the propagation of a theory that he had come to think a fiction. The wisdom that is from above did not appear to have had much in common, after all, with the wisdom of the children of this world. He had lost his friends, wrecked his career, ruined his reputation for good sense. Even his orders-and there was nothing the convert felt more acutely-were reckoned invalid. Wiseman, however, proved kind, and hurried forward his new ordinations. This remarkable prelate, who, as Mr Strachey points out, was 'the very antithesis of that subtle and worldly-wise ecclesiastic' depicted in 'Bishop Blougram's Apology,' had reached, at the time of Manning's conversion, the summit of his career. The restoration of the Catholic episcopate in England was on the point of accomplishment, and with it the restitution of vigour to a body of Christians who, no longer stimulated by persecution, were fast lapsing into lassitude. It was soon evident that Manning-a born administrator, skilled in all the wisdom of the English Universities, and