Volume 1 — A LETTER TO THE REV. E. B. PUSEY, D.D. BY HENRY EDWARD MANNING, D.D.

MY DEAR FRIEND,—I do not know why twelve years of silence should forbid my calling you still by the name we used both to give and to accept of old. Aristotle says indeed— but he did not know the basis and the affections of a Christian friendship such as that to which—though I acknowledge in myself no claim to it—you were so kind as to admit me. Silence and suspension of communications cannot prevail against the kindliness and confidence which springs from such years and such events as once united us. Contentions and variances might indeed more seriously try and strain such a friendship. But, though we have been both parted and opposed, there has been between us neither variance nor contention. We have both been in the field indeed where a warfare has been waging, but, happily, we have not met in contest. Sometimes we have been very near to each other, and have even felt the opposition of each other's will and hand; but I believe on neither side has there ever been a word or an act which has left a needless wound. That I should have grieved and displeased you is inevitable. The simple fact of my submitting to the Catholic Church must have done so, much more the duties which bind me as a pastor. If, in the discharge of that office, I have given you or any one either pain or wound by personal faults in the manner of its discharge, I should be open to just censure. If the displeasure arise only from the substance of my duties, "necessity is laid upon me," and you would be the last to blame me.

You will perhaps be surprised at my beginning thus to write to you. I will at once tell you why I do so. Yesterday I saw, for the first time, your pamphlet on the legal force of the Judgment of the Privy Council, and I found my name often in its pages. I have nothing to complain of in the way you use it. And I trust that in this reply you will feel that I have not forgotten your example. But your mention of me, and of old days, kindled in me a strong desire to pour out many things which have been for years rising in my mind. I have long wished for the occasion to do so, but I {290} have always felt that it is more fitting to take than to make such an occasion: and as your kindness has made it, I will take it.

But before I enter upon the subject of this letter I wish to say a few words of yourself, and of some others whom I am wont to class with you.

Among the many challenges to controversy and public disputation which it has been my fortune to receive, and, I may add, my happiness to refuse, in the last twelve or thirteen years, one was sent me last autumn at Bath. It was the only one to which, for a moment, I was tempted to write a reply. The challenger paid me compliments on my honesty in leaving the Church of England, denouncing those who, holding my principles, still eat its bread. I was almost induced to write a few words to say that my old friends and I are parted because we hold principles which are irreconcileable; that I once held what they hold now, and was then united with them; that they have never held what I hold now, and therefore we are separated; that they are as honest in the Church of England now as I was once; and that our separation was my own act in abandoning as untenable the Anglican Church and its rule of faith, Scripture and antiquity, which you and they hold still, and in submitting to the voice of the Catholic and Roman Church at this hour, which I believe to be the sole authoritative interpreter of Scripture and of antiquity. This principle no friend known to me in the Church of England has ever accepted. In all these years, both in England and in foreign countries, and on occasions both private and public, and with persons of every condition, I have borne this witness for you and for others.

I felt no little indignation at what seemed to me the insincerity of my correspondent, but on reflection I felt that silence was the best answer.

I will now turn to your pamphlet, and to the subject of this letter.

You speak at the outset of "the jubilee of triumph among half-believers" on the occasion of the late Judgment of the Crown in Council; and you add, "A class of believers joined in the triumph. And while I know that a very earnest body of Roman Catholics rejoice in all the workings of God the Holy Ghost in the Church of England (whatever they think of her), and are saddened in what weakens her who is, in God's hands, the great bulwark against infidelity in this land, others seemed to be in an ecstasy of triumph at this victory of Satan." [Footnote 55] Now, I will not ask where you intended to class me. But as an anonymous critic of a pamphlet lately published by me accused me of rejoicing in your troubles, and another more recently—with a want of candor visible in every line of the attack— accused me of being "merry" over these miseries of the Church of England, I think the time is made for me to declare how I regard the Church of England, and events like these; and I know no one to whom I would rather address what I Have to say than to yourself.

I will, then, say at once:

1. That I rejoice with all my heart in all the workings of the Holy Ghost in the Church of England.

2. That I lament whensoever what remains of truth in it gives way before unbelief.

3. That I rejoice whensoever what is imperfect in it is unfolded into a more perfect truth.

4. But that I cannot regard the Church of England as "the great bulwark against infidelity in this land," for reasons which I will give in their place.

1. First, then, I will say what I believe of the Church of England, and why I rejoice in every working of the Holy Spirit in it. And I do this the more gladly because I have been sometimes grieved at hearing, and once at even seeing in a handwriting which I reverence with affection, the {291} statement that Catholics—or at least the worst of Catholics called converts—deny the validity of Anglican baptism, regard our own past spiritual life as a mockery, look upon our departed parents as heathen, and deny the operations of the Holy Spirit in those who are out of the Church. I do not believe that those who say such things have ever read the Condemned Propositions, or are aware that a Catholic who so spoke would come under the weight of at least two pontifical censures, and the decrees of at least two general councils.

I need not, however, do more than remind you that, according to the faith and theology of the Catholic Church, the operations of the Holy Spirit of God have been from the beginning of the world co-extensive with the whole human race. [Footnote 56]

Believing, then, in the operations of the Holy Spirit, even among the nations of the world who have neither the revelation of the faith nor the sacraments, how much more must we believe his presence and grace in those who are regenerate by water and the Holy Ghost? It would be impertinent for me to say to you—whose name first became celebrated for a tract on baptism, which, notwithstanding certain imperfections inseparable from a work written when and where you wrote it, is in substance deep, true, and elevating—that baptism, if rightly administered with the due form and matter, is always 'valid by whatsoever hand it may be given. [Footnote 57]

Let me, then, say at once

1. That in denying the Church of England to be the Catholic Church, or any part of it, or in any divine and true sense a church at all, and in denying the validity of its absolutions and its orders, no Catholic ever denies the workings of the Spirit of God or the operations of grace in it.

2. That in affirming the workings of grace in the Church of England, no Catholic ever thereby affirms that it possesses the character of a church.

They who most inflexibly deny to it the character of a church affirm most explicitly the presence and the operations of grace among its people, and that for the following reasons:

In the judgment of the Catholic Church, a baptized people is no longer in the state of nature, but is admitted to a state of supernatural grace. And though I believe the number of those who have never been baptized to be very great in England, and to be increasing every year, nevertheless I believe the English people, as a mass, to be a Baptized people. I say the number of the unbaptized is great, because there are many causes which contribute to produce this result. First, the imperfect, and therefore invalid, administration of baptism through the carelessness of the administrators. You, perhaps, think that this is exaggerated, through an erroneous belief of Catholics as to the extent of such carelessness among the Protestant ministers, both in and out of the Church of England. It is, however, undeniable, as I know from the evidence of eye-witnesses, that such carelessness has, in times past, been great and frequent. This I consider the least, but a sufficient, reason for believing that many have never been baptized. Add to this, negligence caused by the formal disbelief of baptismal regeneration in a large number of Protestant ministers. There are, however, two other reasons far more direct. The one is the studied rejection, as a point of religious profession, of the practice of infant baptism. Many therefore grow up without baptism who in adult life, for various causes, never seek it. {292} The other, the sinful unbelief and neglect of parents in every class of the English people, who often leave whole families of children to grow up without baptism. Of the fact that many have never been baptized, I, or any Catholic priest actively employed in England, can bear witness. There are few among us who have not had to baptize grown people of every condition, poor and rich; and, of children, often whole families together. There has indeed been, in the last thirty years, a revival of care in the administration of baptism on the part of the Anglican ministers, and of attention on the part of parents in bringing their children to be baptized; but this reaction is by no means proportionate to the neglect, which on the other side has been extending. My fear is that, after all, the number of persons unbaptized in England is greater at this moment than at any previous time.

Still the English people as a body are baptized, and therefore elevated to the order of supernatural grace. Every infant, and also every adult baptized, having the necessary dispositions, is thereby placed in a state of justification; and, if they die without committing any mortal sin, would certainly be saved. They are also, in the sight of the Church, Catholics. St. Augustine says, "Ecclesia etiam inter eos qui foris sunt per baptismum generat suos." A mortal sin of any kind, including prava voluntatis electio, the perverse election of the will, by which in riper years such persons chose for themselves, notwithstanding sufficient light, heresy instead of the true faith, and schism instead of the unity of the Church, would indeed deprive them of their state of grace. But before such act of self-privation all such people are regarded by the Catholic Church as in the way of eternal life. With perfect confidence of faith, we extend the shelter of this truth over the millions of infants and young children who every year pass to their Heavenly Father. We extend it also in hope to many more who grow up in their baptismal grace. Catholic missionaries in this country have often assured me of a fact, attested also by my own experience, that they have received into the Church persons grown to adult life, in whom their baptismal grace was still preserved. Now how can we then be supposed to regard such persons as no better than heathens? To ascribe the good lives of such persons to the power of nature would be Pelagianism. To deny their goodness, would be Jansenism. And, with such a consciousness, how could any one regard his past spiritual life in the Church of England as a mockery? I have no deeper conviction than that the grace of the Holy Spirit was with me from my earliest consciousness. Though at the time, perhaps, I knew it not as I know it now, yet I can clearly perceive the order and chain of grace by which God mercifully led me onward from childhood to the age of twenty years. From that time the interior workings of his light and grace, which continued through all my life, till the hour in which that light and grace had its perfect work, to which all its operations had been converging, in submission to the fulness of truth of the Spirit of the Church of God, is a reality as profoundly certain, intimate, and sensible to me now as that I live. Never have I by the lightest word breathed a doubt of this fact in the divine order of grace. Never have I allowed any one who has come to me for guidance or instruction to harbor a doubt of the past workings of grace in them. It would be not only a sin of ingratitude, but a sin against truth. The working of the Holy Spirit in individual souls is, as I have said, as old as the fall of man, and as wide as the human race. It is not we who ever breathe or harbor a doubt of this. It is rather they who accuse us of it. Because, to believe such an error possible in others shows how little consciousness there must be of the true doctrine of grace in themselves. And such, I am forced {293} to add, is my belief, because I know by experience how inadequately I understood the doctrine of grace until I learned it of the Catholic Church. And I trace the same inadequate conception of the workings of grace in almost every Anglican writer I know, not excepting even those who are nearest to the truth.

But, further, our theologians teach, not only that the state of baptismal innocence exists, and may be preserved out of the Church, but that they who in good faith are out of it, if they shall correspond with the grace they have already received, will receive an increase or augmentation of grace. [Footnote 58] I do not for a moment doubt that there are to be found among the English people individuals who practise in a high degree the four cardinal virtues, and in no small degree, though with the limits and blemishes inseparable from their state, the three theological virtues of faith, [Footnote 59] hope, and charity, infused into them in their baptism. I do not think, my dear friend, in all that I have said or written in the last fourteen years, that you can find a word implying so much as a doubt of the workings of the Holy Spirit among all the baptized who are separated from the Catholic Church.

I will go further still. The doctrine, "Extra ecclesiam nulla salus" is to be interpreted both by dogmatic and by moral theology. As a dogma, theologians teach that many belong to the Church who are out of its visible unity; [Footnote 60] as a moral truth, that to be out of the Church is no personal sin, except to those who sin in being out of it. That is, they will be lost, not because they are geographically out of it, but because they are culpably out of it. And they who are culpably out of it are those who know—or might, and therefore ought to, know—that it is their duty to submit to it. The Church teaches that men may be inculpably out of its pale. Now they are inculpably out of it who are and have always been either physically or morally unable to see their obligation to submit to it. And they only are culpably out of it who are both physically and morally able to know that it is God's will they should submit to the Church; and either knowing it will not obey that knowledge, or, not knowing it, are culpable for that ignorance. I will say then at once, that we apply this benign law of our Divine Master as far as possible to the English people. First, it is applicable in the letter to the whole multitude of those baptized persons who are under the age of reason. Secondly, to all who are in good faith, of whatsoever age they be: such as a great many of the poor and unlettered, to whom it is often physically, and very often morally, impossible to judge which is the true revelation or Church of God. I say physically, because in these three hundred years the Catholic Church has been so swept off the face of England that nine or ten generations of men have lived and died without the faith being so much as proposed to them, or the Church ever visible to them; and I say morally, because the great majority of the poor, from lifelong prejudice, are often incapable of judging in a question so far removed from the primary truths of conscience and Christianity. Of such simple persons it may be said that, infantibus aequiparantur, they are to be classed morally with infants. Again, to these may be added the unlearned in all classes, among whom many have no contact with the Catholic Church, or with Catholic books. Under this head will come a great number of wives and daughters, whose freedom of religious inquiry and religious thought is unjustly {294} limited or suspended by the authority of parents and husbands. Add, lastly, the large class who have been studiously brought up, with all the dominant authority of the English tradition of three hundred years, to believe sincerely, and without a doubt, that the Catholic Church is corrupt, has changed the doctrines of the faith, and that the author of the Reformation is the Spirit of holiness and truth. It may seem incredible to some that such an illusion exists. But it is credible to me, because for nearly forty years of my life I was fully possessed by this erroneous belief. To all such persons it is morally difficult in no small degree to discover the falsehood of this illusion. All the better parts of their nature are engaged in its support: dutifulness, self-mistrust, submission, respect for others older, better, more learned than themselves, all combine to form a false conscience of the duty to refuse to hear anything against "the religion of their fathers," "the church of their baptism," or to read anything which could unsettle them. Such people are told that it is their duty to extinguish a doubt against the Church of England, as they would extinguish a temptation against their virtue. A conscience so subdued and held in subjection exercises true virtues upon a false object, and renders to a human authority the submissive trust which is due only to the divine voice of the Church of God.

One last point I will add. I believe that the people of England were not all guilty of the first acts of heresy and schism by which they were separated from the Catholic unity and faith. They were robbed of it. In many places they rose in arms for it. The children, the poor, the unlearned at that time, were certainly innocent: much more the next generation. They were born into a state of privation. They knew no better. No choice was before them. They made no perverse act of the will in remaining where they were born. Every successive generation was still less culpable, in proportion as they were born into a greater privation, and under the dominion of a tradition of error already grown strong. For three centuries they have been born further and further out of the truth, and their culpability is perpetually diminishing; and as they were passively borne onward in the course of the English separation, the moral responsibility for the past is proportionately less.

The divine law is peremptory—"to him who knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin." [Footnote 61] Every divine truth, as it shines in upon us, lays its obligation on our conscience to believe and to obey it. When the divine authority of the Church manifests itself to our intellect, it lays its jurisdiction upon our conscience to submit to it. To refuse is an act of infidelity, and the least act of infidelity in its measure expels faith; one mortal act of it will expel the habit of faith altogether. [Footnote 62] Every such act of infidelity grieves the Holy Ghost by a direct opposition to his divine voice speaking through the Church; the habit of such opposition is one of the six sins against the Holy Ghost defined as "impugning the known truth." All that I have said above in no way modifies the absolute and vital necessity of submitting to the Catholic Church as the only way of salvation to those who know it, by the revelation of God, to be such. But I must not attempt now to treat of this point.

Nevertheless for the reasons above given we make the largest allowance for all who are in invincible ignorance; always supposing that there is a preparation of heart to embrace the truth when they see it, at any cost, a desire to know it, and a faithful use of the means of knowing it, such as study, docility, prayer, and the like. But I do not now enter into the case of the educated or the learned, or of those who have liberty of mind and means of inquiry. I cannot class them under {295} the above enumeration of those who are inculpably out of the truth. I leave them, therefore, to the only Judge of all men.

Lastly, I will not here attempt to estimate how far all I have said is being modified by the liberation and expansion of the Catholic Church in England during the last thirty years. It is certain that the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy, with the universal tumult which published it to the whole world, still more by its steady, wide-spread, and penetrating action throughout England, is taking away every year the plea of invincible ignorance.

It is certain, however, that to those who, being in invincible ignorance, faithfully co-operate with the grace they have received, an augmentation of grace is given; and this at once places the English people, so far as they come within the limits of these conditions, in a state of supernatural grace, even though they be out of the visible unity of the Church. I do not now enter into the question of the state of those who fall from baptismal grace by mortal sin, or of the great difficulty and uncertainty of their restoration. This would lead me too far; and it lies beyond the limits of this letter.

It must not, however, be forgotten, for a moment, that this applies to the whole English people, of all forms of Christianity, or, as it is called, of all denominations. What I have said does not recognize the grace of the Church of England as such. The working of grace in the Church of England is a truth we joyfully hold and always teach. But we as joyfully recognize the working of the Holy Spirit among Dissenters of every kind. Indeed, I must say that I am far more able to assure myself of the invincible ignorance of Dissenters as a mass than of Anglicans as a mass. They are far more deprived of what survived of Catholic truth; far more distant from the idea of a Church; far more traditionally opposed to it by the prejudice of education; I must add, for the most part, far more simple in their belief in the person and passion of our Divine Lord. Their piety is more like the personal service of disciples to a personal Master than the Anglican piety, which has always been more dim and distant from this central light of souls. Witness Jeremy Taylor's works, much as I have loved them, compared with Baxter's, or even those of Andrews compared with Leighton's, who was formed by the Kirk of Scotland.

I do not here forget all you have done to provide ascetical and devotional books for the use of the Church of England, both by your own writings, and, may I not say it, from your neighbor's vineyard?

With truth, then, I can say that I rejoice in all the operations of the Holy Spirit out of the Catholic Church, whether in the Anglican or other Protestant bodies; not that those communions are thereby invested with any supernatural character, but because more souls, I trust, are saved. If I have a greater joy over these workings of grace in the Church of England, it is only because more that are dear to me are in it, for whom every day I never fail to pray. These graces to individuals were given before the Church was founded, and are given still out of its unity. They are no more tokens of an ecclesiastical character, or a sacramental power in the Church of England, than in the Kirk of Scotland, or in the Wesleyan connexion; they prove only the manifold grace of God, which, after all the sins of men, and in the midst of all the ruins he has made, still works in the souls for whom Christ died. Such, then, is our estimate of the Church of England in regard to the grace that works not by it, nor through it, but in it and among those who, without faults of their own, are detained by it from the true Church of their baptism.

And here it is necessary to guard against a possible misuse of what I have said. Let no one imagine that he may still continue in the Church of England because God has hitherto mercifully bestowed his grace upon {296} him. As I have shown, this is no evidence that salvation is to be had by the Church of England. It is an axiom that to those who do all they can God never refuses his grace. He bestows it that he may lead them on from grace to grace, and from truth to truth, until they enter the full and perfect light of faith in his only true fold. The grace they have received, therefore, was given, not to detain them in the Church of England, but to call them out of it. The grace of their past life lays on them the obligation of seeking and submitting to the perfect truth. God would "have all men to be saved, and to come to the knowledge of the truth." [Footnote 63] But his Church is an eminent doctrine, and member of that truth; and all grace given out of the Church is given in order to bring men into the Church, wheresoever the Church is present to them. If they refuse to submit to the Church they resist the divine intention of the graces they have hitherto received, and are thereby in grave danger of losing them, as we see too often in men who once were on the threshold of the Church, and now are in rationalism, or in states of which I desire to say no more.

2. Let me next speak of the truths which the Church of England still retains. I have no pleasure in its present trials; and the anonymous writer who describes me as being "positively merry" over its disasters little knows me. If I am to speak plainly, he seems to me to be guilty of one of the greatest offences—a rash accusation against one whom he evidently does not know. I will further say that I lament with all my heart whensoever what remains of truth in the Anglican system gives way before unbelief.

I do not, indeed, regard the Church of England as a teacher of truth, for that would imply that it teaches the truth in all its circumference, and in all its divine certainty. Now this is precisely what the Church of England does not, and, as I will show presently, has destroyed in itself the power of doing. I am willing to call it a teacher of truths, because many fragmentary truths, shattered, disjointed from the perfect unity of the Christian revelation, still survive the Reformation, and, with much variation and in the midst of much contradiction, are still taught in it. I have been wont always to say, and to say with joy, that the Reformation, which has done its work with such a terrible completeness in Germany, was arrested in England; that here much of the Christian belief and Christian order has survived. Until lately I have been in the habit of saying that there are three things which missionaries may take for granted in England: first, the existence of a supernatural world; secondly, the revelation of Christianity; and thirdly, the inspiration of Scripture. The Church of England has also preserved other doctrines with more or less of exactness, such as the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, the incarnation, baptism, and the like. I will not now enter into the question as to what other doctrines are retained by it, because a few more or a few less would make little difference in the final estimate a Catholic must make of it. A teacher of Christian truths I gladly admit it to be. A teacher of Christian truth—no, because it rejects much of that truth, and also the divine principle of its perpetuity in the world. Nevertheless, I rejoice in every fragment of doctrine which remains in it; and I should lament the enfeebling or diminution of any particle of that truth. I have ever regarded with regret the so-called Low-Church and Latitudinarian schools in the Anglican Church, because I believe their action and effect is to diminish what remains of truth in it. I have always regarded with joy, and I have never ceased to regard with sympathy, notwithstanding much which I cannot either like or respect, the labors of the High-Church or Anglo-Catholic party, because I believe that their action and effect are "to strengthen the things which remain, which were ready {297} to die." For myself, I am conscious how little I have ever done in my life; but as it is now drawing toward its end, I have at least this consolation, that I cannot remember at any time, by word or act, to have undermined a revealed truth; but that, according to my power, little enough as I know, I have endeavored to build up what truth I knew, truth upon truth, if only as one grain of sand upon another, and to bind it together by the only bond and principle of cohesion which holds in unity the perfect revelation of God. A very dear friend, whose friendship has been to me one of the most instructive, and the loss of which was to me one of the hardest sacrifices I had to make, has often objected to me, with the subtlety which marks his mind, that my act in leaving the Church of England has helped forward the unbelief which is now invading it. No doubt he meant to say that the tendency of such an act helped to shake the confidence of others in the Church of England as a teacher of truth. This objection was, like his mind, ingenious and refined. But a moment's thought unravelled it, and I answered it much in these words:

I do not believe that by submitting to the Catholic Church any one can weaken the witness of the Church of England for the truth which it retains. So far as it holds the truth, it is in conformity to the Catholic Church. In submitting to the Catholic Church, I all the more strongly give testimony to the same truths which the Church of England still retains. If I give testimony against the Church of England, it is in those points in which, being at variance with the truth, the Church of England is itself undermining the faith of Christianity.

It was for this reason I always lamented the legalizing of the sacramentarian errors of the Low-Church party by the Gorham Judgment; and that I lament now the legalizing of the heresies of the "Essays and Reviews," and the spreading unbelief of Dr. Colenso. I believe that anything which undermines the Christianity of England is drawing it further and further from us. In proportion as men believe more of Christianity, they are nearer to the perfect truth. The mission of the Church in the world is to fill up the truth. Our Divine Lord said, "I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil;" and St. Paul did not overthrow the altar of the Unknown God, but gave to it an object of divine worship and a true adoration. For this cause I regard the present downward course of the Church of England and the Christianity of England with great sorrow and fear. And I am all the more alarmed because of those who are involved in it so many not only refuse to acknowledge the fact, but treat us who give warning of the danger as enemies and accusers.

One of my critics has imagined, that I propose to myself and others the alternative of Catholicism or atheism. I have never attempted to bring any one to the perfect truth by destroying or by threatening the imperfect faith they might still possess. I do not believe that the alternative before us is Catholicism or atheism. There are lights of the natural order, divine witnesses of himself inscribed by the Creator on his works, characters engraven upon the conscience, and testimonies of mankind in all the ages of the world, which prove the existence and perfections of God, the moral nature and responsibility of man anterior to Catholicism, and independently of revelation. If a man, through any intellectual or moral aberration, should reject Christianity, that is Catholicism, the belief of God and of his perfections stands immutably upon the foundations of nature. Catholicism, or deism, is indeed the only ultimately logical and consistent alternative, though, happily, few men in rejecting Catholicism are logically consistent enough to reject Christianity. Atheism is an aberration which implies not only an intellectual blindness, but a moral insensibility. The theism {298} of the world has its foundation on the face of the natural world, and on the intellect and the heart of the human race. The old paganism and modern pantheism are reverent, filial, and elevating compared with the atheism of Comte and of our modern secularists. It would be both intellectually and morally impossible to propose to any one the alternative of Catholicism or atheism. Not only then do I lament to see any truth in the Church of England give way before unbelief, but I should regard with sorrow and impatience any attempt to promote the belief of the whole revelation of Christianity by a mode of logic which undermines even the truths of the natural order. The Holy See has authoritatively declared that the existence of God may be proved by reason and the light of nature, [Footnote 64] and Alexander VIII. declared that men who do not know of the existence of God are without excuse. [Footnote 65] Atheism is not the condition of man without revelation. As Viva truly says in his comment on this declaration, atheists are anomalies and exceptions in the intellectual tradition of mankind.

Nay, I will go further. I can conceive a person to reject Catholicism without logically rejecting Christianity. He would indeed reject the divine certainty which guarantees and proposes to us the whole revelation of the day of Pentecost. But, as Catholic theologians teach, the infallible authority of the Church does not of necessity enter into the essence of an act of faith. [Footnote 66] It is, indeed, the divine provision for the perfection and perpetuity of the faith, and in hac providentia, the ordinary means whereby men are illuminated in the revelation of God; but the known and historical evidence of Christianity is enough to convince any prudent man that Christianity is a divine revelation. It is quite true that by this process he cannot attain an explicit faith in all the doctrines of revelation, and that in rejecting Catholicism he reduces himself to human and historical evidence as the maximum of extrinsic certainty for his religion, and that this almost inevitably resolves itself in the long run into rationalism. It is an inclined plane on which, if individuals may stand, generations cannot. Nevertheless, though the alternative in the last analysis of speculation be Catholicism or deism, the practical alternative may be Catholicism and fragmentary Christianity.

I have said this to show how far I am from sympathizing with those, if any there be, and I can truly say I know none such, who regard the giving way of any lingering truth in the Church of England under the action of unbelief with any feeling but that of sorrow. The Psalmist lamented over the dying out of truths. "Diminutae sunt veritates a filiis hominum," and I believe that every one who loves God, and souls, and truth must lament when a single truth, speculative or moral, even of the natural order, is obscured; much more when any revealed truth of the elder or of the Christian revelation is rejected or even doubted. Allow me also to answer, not only for myself, which is of no great moment, but for an eminent personage to whom you have referred in your pamphlet. I can say, with a personal and perfect knowledge, that no other feeling has ever arisen in His Eminence's mind, in contemplating the troubles of the Anglican Church, than a sincere desire that God may use these things to open the eyes of men to see the untenableness of their positions; coupled with a very sincere sorrow at the havoc which the advance of unbelief is making among the truths which yet linger in the Church of England.

3. It is, however, but reason that I {299} should rejoice when whatsoever remains in it of imperfect truth is unfolded into a more perfect faith: and that therefore I desire to see not only the conversion of England, but the conversion of every soul to whom the more perfect truth can be made known. You would not respect me if I did not. Your own zeal for truth and for souls here speaks in my behalf. There are two kinds of proselytism. There are the Jews whom our Lord condemned. There are also the Apostles whom he sent into all the world. If by proselytizing be meant the employing of unlawful and unworthy means, motives, or influences to change a person's religion, I should consider the man who used such means to commit lèse-majesté against truth, and against our Lord who is the truth. But if by proselytizing be meant the using all the means of conviction and persuasion which our divine Master has committed to us to bring any soul who will listen to us into the only faith and fold, then of this I plead guilty with all my heart. I do heartily desire to see the Church of England dissolve and pass away, as the glow of lingering embers in the rise and steady light of a reviving flame. If the Church of England were to perish to-morrow under the action of a higher and more perfect truth, there would be no void left in England. All the truths hitherto taught in fragments and piecemeal would be still more vividly and firmly impressed upon the minds of the English people. All of Christianity which survives in Anglicanism would be perfected by the restoration of the truths which have been lost, and the whole would be fixed and perpetuated by the evidence of divine certainty and the voice of a divine Teacher. No Catholic desires to see the Church of England swept away by an infidel revolution, such as that of 1789 in France. But every Catholic must wish to see it give way year by year, and day by day, under the intellectual and spiritual action of the Catholic Church: and must watch with satisfaction every change, social and political, which weakens its hold on the country, and would faithfully use all his power and influence for its complete removal as speedily as possible.

4. But lastly, I am afraid we have reached a point of divergence. Hitherto I hope we may have been able to agree together; but now I fear every step of advance will carry us more wide of each other. I am unable to consider the Church of England to be "in God's hands the great bulwark against infidelity in this land." And my reasons are these:

1.) First, I must regard the Anglican Reformation, and therefore the Anglican Church, as the true and original source of the present spiritual anarchy of England. Three centuries ago the English people were in faith unius labii: they were in perfect unity. Now they are divided and subdivided by a numberless multiplication of errors. What has generated them? From what source do they descend? Is it not self-evident that the Reformation is responsible for the production of every sect and every error which has sprung up in England in these three hundred years, and of all which cover the face of the land at this day? It is usual to hear Anglicans lament the multiplication of religious error. But what is the productive cause of all? Is it not Anglicanism itself which, by appealing from the voice of the Church throughout the world, has set the example to its own people of appealing from the voice of a local and provincial authority?

I am afraid, then, that the Church of England, so far from, a barrier against infidelity, must be recognized as the mother of all the intellectual and spiritual aberrations which now cover the face of England.

2.) It is true, indeed, that the Church of England retains many truths in it. But it has in two ways weakened the evidence of these very truths which it retains. It has detached them from {300} other truths which by contact gave solidity to all by rendering them coherent and intelligible. It has detached them from the divine voice of the Church, which guarantees to us the truth incorruptible and changeless. The Anglican Reformation destroyed the principle of cohesion, by which all truths are bound together into one. The whole idea of theology, as the science of God and of his revelation, has been broken up. Thirty-nine Articles, heterogeneous, disjointed, and mixed with error, is all that remains instead of the unity and harmony of Catholic truth. Surely this has been among the most prolific causes of error, doubt, and unbelief. So far from the bulwark against it, Anglicanism appears to me to be the cause and spring of its existence. As I have already said, the Reformation placed the English people upon an inclined plane, and they have steadily obeyed the law of their position, by descending gradually from age to age, sometimes with a more rapid, sometimes with a slower motion, but always tending downward. Surely it would be unreasonable to say of a body always descending, that it is the great barrier against reaching the bottom.

I do not, indeed, forget that the Church of England has produced writers who have vindicated many Christian truths. I am not unmindful of the service rendered by Anglican writers to Christianity in general, nor, in particular, of the works of Bull and Waterland in behalf of the Holy Trinity; of Hammond and Pearson in behalf of Episcopacy; of Butler and Warburton in behalf of Revelation, and the like. But whence came the errors and unbeliefs against which they wrote? Were they not generated by the Reformation abroad and in England? This is like the spear which healed the wounds it had made. But it is not the divine office of the Church to make wounds in the faith that it may use its skill in healing. They were quelling the mutiny which Protestantism had raised, and arresting the progress of the Reformation which, like Saturn, devours its own children.

Moreover, to be just I must say that if the Church of England be a barrier against infidelity, the Dissenters must also be admitted to a share in this office and commendation. And in truth I do not know among the Dissenters any works like the Essays and Reviews, or any Biblical criticism like that of Dr. Colenso. They may not be very dogmatic in their teaching, but they bear their witness for Christianity as a divine revelation, for the Scriptures as an inspired book, and, I must add further, for the personal Christianity of conversion and repentance, with an explicitness and consistency which is not less effectual against infidelity than the testimony of the Church of England. I do not think the Wesleyan Conference or the authorities of the three denominations would accept readily this assumed superiority of the Anglican Church as a witness against unbelief. They would not unjustly point to the doctrinal confusions of the Church of England as causes of scepticism, from which they are comparatively free. And I am bound to say that I think they would have an advantage. I well remember that while I was in the Church of England I used to regard Dissenters from it with a certain, I will not say aversion, but distance and recoil. I never remember to have borne animosity against them, or to have attacked or pursued them with unkindness. I always believed many of them to be very earnest and devoted men. I did not like their theology, and I believed them to be in disobedience to the Church of England; but I respected them, and lived at peace with them. Indeed, I may say that some of the best people I have ever known out of the Church were Dissenters or children of Dissenters. Nevertheless, I had a dislike of their system, and of their meeting-houses. They seemed to me to be rivals of the Church of England, and my loyalty to it made me look somewhat impatiently upon them. But I remember, from {301} the hour I submitted to the Catholic Church, all this underwent a sensible change. I saw that the whole revelation was perpetuated in the Church alone, and that all forms of Christianity lying round about it were but fragments more or less mutilated. But with this a sensible increase of kindly feeling grew upon me. The Church of England and the dissenting communions all alike appeared to me to be upon the same level. I rejoiced in all the truth that remains in them, in all the good I could see or hope in them, and all the workings of the Holy Spirit in them. I had no temptation to animosity toward them; for neither they nor the Church of England could be rivals of the imperishable and immutable Church of God. The only sense, then, in which I could regard the Church of England as a barrier against infidelity, I must extend also to the dissenting bodies; and I cannot put this high, for reasons I will give.

3.) If the Church of England be a barrier to infidelity by the truths which yet remain in it, I must submit that it is a source of unbelief by all the denials of other truths which it has rejected. If it sustains a belief in two sacraments, it formally propagates unbelief in five; if it recognizes an undefined presence of Christ in the sacrament, it formally imposes on its people a disbelief in transubstantiation and the sacrifice of the altar; if it teaches that there is a church upon earth, it formally denies its indissoluble unity, its visible head, and its perpetual divine voice.

It is not easy to see how a system can be a barrier against unbelief when by its Thirty-nine Articles it rejects, and binds its teachers to propagate the rejection, of so many revealed truths.

4.) But this is not all. It is not only by the rejection of particular doctrines that the Church of England propagates unbelief. It does so by principle, and in the essence of its whole system. What is the ultimate guarantee of the divine revelation but the divine authority of the Church? Deny this, and we descend at once to human teachers. But it is this that the Church of England formally and expressly denies. The perpetual and ever-present assistance of the Holy Spirit, whereby the Church in every age is not only preserved from error, but enabled at all times to declare the truth, that is the infallibility of the living Church at this hour—this it is that the Anglican Church in terms denies. But this is the formal antagonist of infidelity, because it is the evidence on which God wills that we should believe that which his veracity reveals. Do not be displeased with me. It appears to me that the Anglican system, by this one fact alone, perpetually undoes what it strives to do in behalf of particular doctrines. What are they, one by one, when the divine certainty of all is destroyed? Now, for three hundred years the Anglican clergy have been trained, ordained, and bound by subscriptions to deny not only many Christian truths, but the divine authority of the the living Church of every age. The barrier against infidelity is the divine voice which generates faith. But this the Anglican clergy are bound to deny. And this denial opens a flood-gate in the bulwark, through which the whole stream of unbelief at once finds way. Seventeen or eighteen thousand men, educated with all the advantages of the English schools and universities, endowed with large corporate revenues, and distributed all over England, maintain a perpetual protest, not only against the Catholic Church, but against the belief that there is any divine voice immutably and infallibly guiding the Church at this hour in its declaration of the Christian revelation to mankind. How can this be regarded as "the great bulwark in God's hand against infidelity?"

It seems to me that the Church of England, so far from being a bulwark against the flood, has floated before it. Every age has exhibited an advance to a more indefinite and heterogeneous state of religious opinion within its {302} pale. I will not go again over ground I have already traversed. Even in our memory the onward progress of the Church of England is manifest. That I may not seem to draw an unfavorable picture from my own view, I will quote a very unsuspected witness. Dr. Irons, in a recent pamphlet, says: "The religion of the Church has sunk far deeper into conscience now than the surviving men of 1833-1843 are aware of. And all that Churchmen want of their separated brethren is that they accept nothing, and profess nothing, and submit to nothing which has 'no root' in their conscience." [Footnote 67] If this means anything, it means that objective truth has given place to subjective sincerity as the Anglican rule of faith. You will know better than I whether this be the state of men's minds among you. To me it is as strange as it is incoherent, and a sign how far men have drifted. This certainly was not the faith or religion that we held together in the years when I had the happiness of being united in friendship with you. Latitudinarian sincerity was not our basis, and if the men of 1833 and 1843 have arrived at this, it is very unlike the definite, earnest, consistent belief which animated us at that time. You say in your note (page 21) kindly, but a little upbraidingly, that my comment on your letter to the "Record" was not like me in those days: forasmuch as I used then to join with those with whom even then you could not. It was this that made me note your doing so now. It was this which seemed to me to be a drifting backward from old moorings. For myself, it is true, indeed, that I have moved likewise. I have been carried onward to what you then were, and beyond it. What I might have done then, I could not do now. What you do now seems to me what you would not have done then. I did not note this unkindly, but with regret, because, as I rejoice in every truth, and in every true principle retained in the Church of England, it would have given me great joy to see you maintaining with all firmness, not only all the particular truths you held, but also the impossibility of uniting with those who deny both those truths and the principles on which you have rested through your laborious life of the last thirty years.

And now I will add only a few more words of a personal sort, and then make an end. It was not my fate in the Church of England to be regarded as a contentious or controversial spirit, nor as a man of extreme opinions, or of a bitter temper. I remember indeed that I was regarded, and even censured, as slow to advance, somewhat tame, cautious to excess, morbidly moderate, as some one said. I remember that the Catholics used to hold me somewhat cheap, and to think me behindhand, uncatholic, over-English, and the like. But now, is there anything in the extreme opposite of all this which I am not? Ultramontane, violent, unreasoning, bitter, rejoicing in the miseries of my neighbors, destructive, a very Apollyon, and the like. Some who so describe me now are the same who were wont then to describe me as the reverse of all this. They are yet catholicizing the Church of England, without doubt more catholic still than I am. Well, what shall I say? If I should say that I am not conscious of these changes, you would only think me self-deceived. I will therefore only tell you where I believe I am unchanged, and then where I am conscious of a change, which, perhaps, will account for all you have to say of me.

I am unconscious, then, of any change in my love to England in all that relates to the natural order. I am no politician, and I do not set up for a patriot; but I believe, as St. Thomas teaches, that love of country is a part of charity, and assuredly I have ever loved England with a very filial love. My love for England {303} begins with the England of St. Bede. Saxon England, with all its tumults, seems to me saintly and beautiful. Norman England I have always loved less, because, though more majestic, it became continually less Catholic, until the evil spirit of the world broke off the light yoke of faith at the so-called Reformation. Still, I loved the Christian England which survived, and all the lingering outlines of dioceses and parishes, cathedrals and churches, with the names of saints upon them. It is this vision of the past which still hovers over England and makes, it beautiful, and full of memories of the kingdom of God. Nay, I loved the parish church of my childhood, and the college chapel of my youth, and the little church under a green hillside, where the morning and evening prayers, and the music of the English Bible, for seventeen years, became a part of my soul. Nothing is more beautiful in the natural order, and if there were no eternal world I could have made it my home. But these things are not England, they are only its features, and I may say that my love was and is to the England which lives and breathes about me, to my countrymen whether in or out of the Church of England. With all our faults as a race, I recognize in them noble Christian virtues, exalted characters, beautiful examples of domestic life, and of every personal excellence which can be found, where the fulness of grace and truth is not, and much, too, which puts to shame those who are where the fulness of grace and truth abounds. So long as I believed the Church of England to be a part of the Church of God I loved it, how well you know, and honored it with a filial reverence, and labored to serve it, with what fidelity I can affirm, with what, or if with any utility, it is not for me to say. And I love still those who are in it, and I would rather suffer anything than wrong them in word or deed, or pain them without a cause. To all this I must add, lastly, and in a way above all, the love I bear to many personal friends, so dear to me, whose letters I kept by me till two years ago, though more than fifty of them are gone into the world unseen, all these things are sweet to me still beyond all words that I can find to express it.

You will ask me then, perhaps, why I have never manifested this before? It is because when I left you, in the full, calm, deliberate, and undoubting belief that the light of the only truth led me from a fragmentary Christianity into the perfect revelation of the day of Pentecost, I believed it to be my duty to walk alone in the path in which it led me, leaving you all unmolested by any advance on my part. If any old friend has ever written to me, or signified to me his wish to renew our friendship, I believe he will bear witness to the happiness with which I have accepted the kindness offered to me. But I felt that it was my act which had changed our relations, and that I had no warrant to assume that a friendship, founded upon agreement in our old convictions, would be continued when that foundation had been destroyed by myself, or restored upon a foundation altogether new. And I felt, too, a jealousy for truth. It was no human pride which made me feel that I ought not to expose the Catholic Church to be rejected in my person. Therefore I held on my own course, seeking no one, but welcoming every old friend—and they have been many—who came to me. This has caused a suspension of nearly fourteen years in which I have never so much as met or exchanged a line with many who till then were among my nearest friends. This, too, has given room for many misapprehensions. It would hardly surprise me if I heard that my old friends believed me to have become a cannibal.

But perhaps you will say, This does not account for your hard words against us and the Church of England. When I read your late pamphlet I said to myself, Have I ever written such hard words as these? I will not quote them, but truly I do not think {304} that, in anything I have ever written, I have handled at least any person as you, my dear friend, in your zeal, which I respect and honor, have treated certain very exalted personages who are opposed to you. But let this pass. It would not excuse me even if I were to find you in the same condemnation.

One of my anonymous censors writes that "as in times past I had written violently against the Church of Rome, so now I must do the same against the Church of England." Now I wish he would find, in the books I published when out of the Church, the hard sayings he speaks of. It has been my happiness to know that such do not exist. I feel sure that my accuser had nothing before his mind when he risked this controversial trick. I argued, indeed, against the Catholic and Roman Church, but I do not know of any railing accusations. How I was preserved from it I cannot tell, except by the same divine goodness which afterward led me into the perfect light of faith.

But I have written, some say, hard things of the Church of England. Are they hard truths or hard epithets? If they are hard epithets, show them to me, and I will erase them with a prompt and public expression of regret; but if they be hard facts, I cannot change them. It is true, indeed, that I have for the last fourteen years incessantly and unchangingly, by word and by writing, borne my witness to the truths by which God has delivered me from the bondage of a human authority in matters of faith. I have borne my witness to the presence and voice of a divine, and therefore infallible, teacher, guiding the Church with his perpetual assistance, and speaking through it as his organ. I have also borne witness that the Church through which he teaches is that which St. Augustine describes by the two incommunicable notes—that it is "spread throughout the word" and "united to the Chair of Peter." [Footnote 68] I know that the corollaries of these truths are severe, peremptory, and inevitable. If the Catholic faith be the perfect revelation of Christianity, the Anglican Reformation is a cloud of heresies; if the Catholic Church be the organ of the Holy Ghost, the Anglican Church is not only no part of the Church, but no church of divine foundation. It is a human institution, sustained as it was founded by a human authority, without priesthood, without sacraments, without absolution, without the real presence of Jesus upon its altars. I know these truths are hard. It seems heartless, cruel, unfilial, unbrotherly, ungrateful so to speak of all the beautiful fragments of Christianity which mark the face of England, from its thousand towns to its green villages, so dear even to us who believe it to be both in heresy and in schism. You must feel it so. You must turn from me and turn against me for saying it; but if I believe it, must I not say it? And if I say it, can I find words more weighed, measured, and deliberate than those I have used? If you can, show them to me, and so that they are adequate, I will use them always hereafter. God knows I have never written a syllable with the intent to leave a wound. I have erased, I have refrained from writing and speaking, many, lest I should give more pain than duty commanded me to give. I cannot hope that you will allow of all I say. But it is the truth. I have refrained from it, not only because it is a duty, but because I wish to disarm those who divert men from the real point at issue by accusations of bitterness and the like. It has been my lot, more than of most, to be in these late years on the frontier which divides us. And—why I know not—people have come to me with their anxieties and their doubts. What would you have done in my place? That which you have done in your own; which, mutato nomine, has been my duty and my burden.

And now I have done. I have a hope that the day is coming when all {305} in England who believe in the supernatural order, in the revelation of Christianity, in the inspiration of Holy Scripture, in the divine certainty of dogmatic tradition, in the divine obligation of holding no communion with heresy and with schism, will be driven in upon the lines of the only stronghold which God has constituted as "the pillar and ground of the truth." This may not be, perhaps, as yet; but already it is time for those who love the faith of Christianity, and look with sorrow and fear on the havoc which is laying it waste among us, to draw together in mutual kindness and mutual equity of judgment. That I have so ever treated you I can truly say; that I may claim it at your hands I am calmly conscious; but whether you and others accord it to me or not, I must leave it to the Disposer of hearts alone to determine. Though we are parted now, it may not be for ever; and morning by morning, in the holy Sacrifice, I pray that the same light of faith which so profusely fell upon myself, notwithstanding all I am, may in like manner abundantly descend upon you who are in all things so far above me, save only in that one gift which is not mine, but his alone who is the Sovereign Giver of all grace.

Believe me, my dear friend, Always affectionately yours, HENRY EDWARD MANNING. ST. MARY'S, BAYSWATER, Sept. 27, 1864.

P.S.—My attention has just been called to the concluding pages of the last number of the Quarterly Review, in which I am again described by a writer who evidently has abilities to know better, to be in "ecstasies." The writer represents, as the sum or chief argument of my "Second Letter to an Anglican Friend," the passing reference I there made to the Lord Chancellor's speech. I quoted this to prove that the late judgment is a part of the law, both of the land and of the Church of England. But the whole of the letter, excepting this single point, is an argument to show that the vote of the Convocation carries with it no divine certainty, and resolves itself into the private judgment of the majority who passed it. For all this argument the writer has not a word. I cannot be surprised that he fills out his periods with my "ecstasies," "shouts of joy," "wild paeans," a quotation from "Shylock," and other things less fitting. This is not to reason, but to rail. Is it worthy? Is it love of truth? Is it good faith? Is it not simply the fallacy of evasion? I can assure him that this kind of controversy is work that will not stand. We are in days when personalities and flimsy rhetoric will not last long. Neither will it bear to be tried by "the fire," nor will it satisfy, I was about to say, nor will it mislead, men who are in earnest for truth or for salvation. I had hoped that this style of controversy had been cured or suppressed by a greater sincerity and reality of religious thought in these days of anxiety and unbelief. There either is, or is not, a divine Person teaching perpetually through the Church in every age, and therefore now as always, generating faith with divine certainty in the minds of men. This question must be answered; and, as men answer it, we know where to class them, and how to deal with them. All the evasions and half-arguments of such writers are becoming daily more and more intolerable to those of the English people—and they are a multitude—who would give all that they count dear, and life itself, to know and to die in the full and certain light of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. H. E. M.

{306}