Eminent Victorians. Lytton Strachey
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MANNING was now thirty-eight, and it was clear that he was the rising man in the Church of England. He had many powerful connections: he was the brother-in-law of Samuel Wilberforce, who had been lately made a bishop; he was a close friend of Mr. Gladstone, who was a Cabinet Minister; and he was becoming well known in the influential circles of society in London. His talent for affairs was recognised not only in the Church, but in the world at large, and he busied himself with matters of such varied scope as National Education, the administration of the Poor Law, and the Employment of Women. Mr. Gladstone kept up an intimate correspondence with him on these and on other subjects, mingling in his letters the details of practical statesmanship with the speculations of a religious thinker. 'Sir James Graham,' he wrote, in a discussion of the bastardy clauses of the Poor Law, 'is much pleased with the tone of your two communications. He is disposed, without putting an end to the application of the workhouse test against the mother, to make the remedy against the putative father "real and effective" for expenses incurred in the workhouse. I am not enough acquainted to know whether it would be advisable to go further. You have not proposed it; and I am disposed to believe that only with a revived and improved discipline in the Church can we hope for any generally effective check upon lawless lust.' 'I agree with you EMINENTLY,' he writes, in a later letter, 'in your doctrine of FILTRATION. But it sometimes occurs to me, though the question may seem a strange one, how far was the Reformation, but especially the Continental Reformation, designed by God, in the region of final causes, for that purification of the Roman Church which it has actually realised?'
In his archdeaconry, Manning lived to the full the active life of a country clergyman. His slim, athletic figure was seen everywhere in the streets of Chichester, or on the lawns of the neighbouring rectories, or galloping over the downs in breeches and gaiters, or cutting brilliant figures on the ice. He was an excellent judge of horse-flesh, and the pair of greys which drew his hooded phaeton so swiftly through the lanes were the admiration of the county. His features were already beginning to assume their ascetic cast, but the spirit of youth had not yet fled from them, so that he seemed to combine the attractions of dignity and grace. He was a good talker, a sympathetic listener, a man who understood the difficult art of preserving all the vigour of a manly character and yet never giving offence. No wonder that his sermons drew crowds, no wonder that his spiritual advice was sought for eagerly by an ever-growing group of penitents; no wonder that men would say, when his name was mentioned, 'Oh, Manning! No power on earth can keep HIM from a bishopric!'
Such was the fair outward seeming of the Archdeacon's life; but, the inward reality was different. The more active, the more fortunate, the more full of happy promise his existence became, the more persistently was his secret imagination haunted by a dreadful vision—the lake that burneth forever with brimstone and fire. The temptations of the Evil One are many, Manning knew; and he knew also that, for him at least, the most subtle and terrible of all temptations was the temptation of worldly success. He tried to reassure himself, but it was in vain. He committed his thoughts to a diary, weighing scrupulously his every motive, examining with relentless searchings into the depths of his heart. Perhaps, after all, his longings for preferment were merely legitimatehopes for 'an elevation into a sphere of higher usefulness'. But no, there was something more than that. 'I do feel pleasure,' he noted, 'in honour, precedence, elevation, the society of great people, and all this is very shameful and mean.'
After Newman's conversion, he almost convinced himself that his 'visions of an ecclesiastical future' were justified by the role that he would play as a 'healer of the breach in the Church of England'. Mr. Gladstone agreed with him; but there was One higher than Mr. Gladstone, and did He agree?
'I am pierced by anxious thoughts. God knows what my desires have been and are, and why they are crossed. … I am flattering myself with a fancy about depth and reality. … The great question is: Is God enough for you now? And if you are as now even to the end of life, will it suffice you? … Certainly I would rather choose to be stayed on God, than to be in the thrones of the world and the Church. Nothing else will go into Eternity.'
In a moment of ambition, he had applied for the Readership of Lincoln's Inn, but, owing chiefly to the hostile influence of the Record, the appointment had gone elsewhere. A little later, a more important position was offered to him—the office of sub-almoner to the Queen, which had just been vacated by the Archbishop of York, and was almost certain to lead to a mitre. The offer threw Manning into an agony of self-examination. He drew up elaborate tables, after the manner of Robinson Crusoe, with the reasons for and against his acceptance of the post:
FOR AGAINST
1. That it comes unsought. 1. Not therefore to be accepted. Such things are trials as well as leadings.
2. That it is honourable. 2. Being what I am, ought I
not therefore to decline it—
(1) as humiliation;
(2) as revenge on myself
for Lincoln's Inn;
(3) as a testimony?
And so on. He found in the end ten 'negative reasons', with no affirmative ones to balance them, and, after a week's deliberation, he rejected the offer.
But peace of mind was as far off from him as ever. First the bitter thought came to him that 'in all this Satan tells me I am doing it to be thought mortified and holy'; and then he was obsessed by the still bitterer feelings of ineradicable disappointment and regret. He had lost a great opportunity, and it brought him small comfort to consider that 'in the region of counsels, self-chastisement, humiliation, self-discipline, penance, and of the Cross', he had perhaps done right.
The crisis passed, but it was succeeded by a fiercer one. Manning was taken seriously ill, and became convinced that he might die at any moment. The entries in his Diary grew more elaborate than ever; his remorse for the past, his resolutions for the future, his protestations of submission to the will of God, filled page after page of parallel columns, headings and sub-headings, numbered clauses, and analytical tables. 'How do I feel about Death?' he wrote.
'Certainly great fear:
1. Because of the uncertainty of our state before God.
2. Because of the consciousness—
(1) of great sins past,
(2) of great sinfulness,
(3) of most shallow repentance.
What shall I do?'
He decided to mortify himself, to read St. Thomas Aquinas, and to make his 'night prayers forty instead of thirty minutes'. He determined during Lent 'to use no pleasant bread (except on Sundays and feasts) such as cake and sweetmeat'; but he added the proviso 'I do not include plain biscuits'. Opposite this entry appears the word 'KEPT'. And yet his back-slidings were many. Looking back over a single week, he was obliged to register 'petulance twice' and 'complacent visions'. He heard his curate being commended for bringing so many souls to God during Lent, and he 'could not bear it'; but the remorse was terrible: 'I abhorred myself on the spot, and looked upward for help.' He made out list upon list of the Almighty's special mercies towards him, and they included his creation, his regeneration, and (No. 5) 'the preservation of my life six times to my knowledge:
(1) In illness at the age of nine. (2) In the water. (3) By a runaway horse at Oxford. (4) By the same. (5) By falling nearly through the ceiling of a church. (6) Again by a fall of a horse. And I know not how often in shooting, riding, etc.'
At last he became convalescent; but the spiritual experiences of those agitated weeks left an indelible mark upon his mind, and prepared the way for the great change which was to follow.
For he had other doubts besides those which held him in torment as to his own salvation; he was in doubt about the whole framework of his faith. Newman's conversion, he found, had meant something more to him than he had first realised. It had seemed to come as a call to the redoubling of his Anglican activities; but supposing,