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.
[Footnote 68: S. Aug. Op., tom, ii., pp. 119, 120; torn, x., p. 93]
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.