Episode 20

But there was another issue, even more fundamental than that of Baptismal Regeneration itself, involved in the Gorham trial. An Act passed in 1833 had constituted the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council the supreme court of appeal for such cases; and this Committee was a body composed entirely of laymen. It was thus obvious that the Royal Supremacy was still a fact, and that a collection of lawyers appointed by the Crown had the legal right to formulate the religious doctrine of the Church of England. In 1850 their judgment was delivered; they reversed the decision of the Court of Arches, and upheld the position of Mr. Gorham. Whether his views were theologically correct or not, they said, was not their business; it was their business to decide whether the opinions under consideration were contrary or repugnant to the doctrine of the Church of England as enjoined upon the clergy by its Articles, Formularies, and Rubrics; and they had come to the conclusion that they were not. The judgement still holds good; and to this day, a clergyman of the Church of England is quite at liberty to believe that Regeneration does not invariably take place when an infant is baptised.

The blow fell upon no one with greater violence than upon Manning. Not only was the supreme efficacy of the sign of the cross upon a baby's forehead one of his favourite doctrines, but up to that moment he had been convinced that the Royal Supremacy was a mere accident--a temporary usurpation which left the spiritual dominion of the Church essentially untouched. But now the horrid reality rose up before him, crowned and triumphant; it was all too clear that an Act of Parliament, passed by Jews, Roman Catholics, and Dissenters, was the ultimate authority which decided upon the momentous niceties of the Anglican faith. Mr. Gladstone also, was deeply perturbed. It was absolutely necessary, he wrote, to 'rescue and defend the conscience of the Church from the present hideous system'. An agitation was set on foot, and several influential Anglicans, with Manning at their head, drew up and signed a formal protest against the Gorham judgment. Mr. Gladstone however, proposed another method of procedure: precipitate action, he declared, must be avoided at all costs, and he elaborated a scheme for securing procrastination, by which a covenant was to bind all those who believed that an article of the creed had been abolished by Act of Parliament to take no steps in any direction, nor to announce their intention of doing so, until a given space of time had elapsed. Mr. Gladstone was hopeful that some good might come of this--though indeed he could not be sure. 'Among others,' he wrote to Manning, 'I have consulted Robert Wilberforce and Wegg-Prosser, and they seemed inclined to favour my proposal. It might, perhaps, have kept back Lord Feilding. But he is like a cork.'

The proposal was certainly not favoured by Manning. Protests and procrastinations, approving Wegg-Prossers and cork-like Lord Feildings--all this was feeding the wind and folly; the time for action had come. 'I can no longer continue,' he wrote to Robert Wilberforce, 'under oath and subscription binding me to the Royal Supremacy in Ecclesiastical causes, being convinced:

(1) That it is a violation of the Divine Office of the Church.

(2) That it has involved the Church of England in a separation from the Universal Church, which separation I cannot clear of the character of schism.

(3) That it has thereby suspended and prevented the functions of the Church of England.'

It was in vain that Robert Wilberforce pleaded, in vain that Mr. Gladstone urged upon his mind the significance of John iii 8.

['The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth; so is everyone that is born of the Spirit.'] 'I admit,'

Mr. Gladstone wrote, 'that the words might in some way be satisfied by supposing our Lord simply to mean "the facts of nature are unintelligible, therefore, be not afraid if revealed truths be likewise beyond the compass of the understanding"; but this seems to me a meagre meaning.' Such considerations could hold him no longer, and Manning executed the resignation of his office and benefice before a public notary. Soon afterwards, in the little Chapel off Buckingham Palace Road, kneeling beside Mr. Gladstone, he worshipped for the last time as an Anglican. Thirty years later the Cardinal told how, just before the Communion service commenced, he turned to his friends with the words: '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.'

On April 6th, 1851, the final step was taken: Manning was received into the Roman Catholic Church. Now at last, after the long struggle, his mind was at rest. 'I know what you mean,' he wrote to Robert Wilberforce, 'by saying that one sometimes feels as if all this might turn out to be only another "Land of Shadows". I have felt it in time past, but not now. The theologia from Nice to St. Thomas Aquinas, and the undivided unity suffused throughout the world, of which the Cathedra Petri is the centre, isnow 1800 years old, and mightier in every power now than ever--in intellect, in science, in separation from the world; and purer too, refined by 300 years of conflict with the modern infidel civilisation--all of this is a fact more solid than the earth.'