Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 36.djvu/70

Manning, Manning published a letter to his bishop (Ashurst Turner Gilbert), entitled 'The Appellate Jurisdiction of the Crown in Matters Spiritual,' London, 1850, 8vo, in which, with more ingenuity than cogency, he argued that no such jurisdiction in fact existed. He also put in circulation a 'declaration' against the jurisdiction, which was signed by eighteen hundred of the clergy during the autumn. The acquiescence of the rest convinced him that the church of England was no branch of the church catholic. At the same time nothing was further from his thoughts than to become the founder of an Anglo-catholic free church. 'Three hundred years ago,' he said, when the suggestion was made, 'we left a good ship for a boat. I am not going to leave the boat for a tub.'

Meanwhile the excitement caused by the so-called papal aggression reached its height, and by the irony of fate Manning's last official act as archdeacon of Chichester was to preside at a 'No Popery' meeting of his clergy summoned (ministerially) by himself. The meeting was held in Chichester Cathedral Library on 22 Nov. 1850. Manning formally presided, but except to express his entire want of sympathy with the object of the meeting took no part in the proceedings. The meeting over, he resigned his archdeaconry and came to London, where, after some months of anxious thought, he was received into the church of Rome with his friend Hope at the residence attached to the Jesuits' Church, Farm Street, Mayfair, on Passion Sunday, 6 April 1851. On the following Sunday he received minor orders from Cardinal Wiseman, by whom he was ordained priest on 14 June. A confessional was at once assigned him in Farm Street Church. By his secession Manning sacrificed a dignified position in a church to which he was attached by the strongest ties of sentiment for a doubtful future in one regarded with intense hostility by all ranks of English society. He had been powerfully influenced by Newman's 'Development of Christian Doctrine,' and had in effect adopted its principles without realising either their practical result or the legal position of the church of England until the Gorham case compelled him to confront both the one and the other. A study of the 'Loci Theologici' of Melchior Canus then completed what Newman had begun. During the period of inward debate he suffered extremely. 'E da martirio venni a questa pace' (And from martyrdom came I to this peace), he wrote when it was over, slightly misquoting the closing words of canto xv. of Dante, 'Paradiso,' in which Cacciaguida describes his translation to heaven.

The winter of 1851 saw Manning established in Rome, where he spent the best part of the next three years in study at the Accademia dei Nobili Ecclesiastici and in the intimate society of Pius IX. The summers he divided between England and Ireland. His first appearance in a Roman catholic pulpit was made in the little chapel in Horseferry Road, Westminster, on 10 June 1852. The same year he published four lectures delivered in Southwark on 'The Grounds of Faith' (London, 8vo, 9th ed. 1888), in which he represented Romanism as the only alternative to rationalism. His first sermon in Rome, preached in the church of S. Andrea della Valle on 13 Jan. 1853, made a profound impression. In England he made several proselytes, among them his elder brother, Charles John Manning, whose wife had already seceded, and whose family followed suit,, Q.C. [q. v.], and Archdeacon [q. v.] In 1854 he received from the pope the degree of D.D., and began regular work in England, retaining his confessional at Farm Street, and throwing himself with great zeal into a movement for establishing reformatories. In 1857 he was made provost of the chapter of Westminster by the pope, who also sanctioned a rule which he had drawn up for a community of secular priests, modelled on that founded at Milan by St. Charles Borromeo in the sixteenth century, and subject to the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Westminster. Installed as superior of this 'Congregation of the Oblates of St. Charles,' as it was called, at the mother-house of St. Mary of the Angels, Westmoreland Road, Bayswater, on Whitsunday, 31 May 1857, Manning occupied himself during the next eight years with its direction, with preaching, the care of education, mission work in the slums of Westminster, and the literary defence of the temporal power of the pope. During this period he was frequently at Rome, where he preached several times at S. Andrea della Valle and other churches, and in 1860 was appointed by the pope his domestic prelate and protonotary apostolic, with episcopal rank and the title of Monsignore, to which the envious added the epithet Ignorante, in reference to his real or supposed want of perfect accomplishment in the refinements of theology and ceremonial etiquette. The honourable reception accorded to Garibaldi on his visit to England in the spring of 1864 drew from Manning a strong protest in the shape of a letter to the Right Hon. E. Cardwell, reprinted in his 'Miscellanies,' vol. i. The same year he published two letters 'To an Anglican Friend,' in which he expatiated on