‘Remember Lot’s Wife’— Manning’s Anglican Sermons

Extract

Between 1845 and 1850 Manning, as Archdeacon of Chichester, published four volumes of collected sermons. They are not his only published sermons as an Anglican, but they are the ones with which this article will be concerned. They were published by the firm of William Pickering, whose list included the liturgical works of the Revd. William Maskell, chaplain to the High Church Henry Phillpotts, Bishop of Exeter, sermons by Manning’S nephew, W. H. Anderdon, and reprints of Bishop Wilson’s Sacra Privata and Lancelot Andrewes’ Preces Privatae, as well as Jeremy Taylor, George Herbert and Henry Vaughan. In 1882 as a Catholic Manning claimed that he had never been concerned that his Anglican sermons should be re-issued. ‘£250 was offered to me for an edition of the four volumes of Sermons. But I always refused. I wished my past, while I was in the twilight, to lie dead to me, and I to it.’ Yet, as Purcell points out, in 1865 he had consulted Dr. Bernard Smith in Rome about their re-issue. Smith’s verdict was negative. ‘These were the works of Dr. Manning, a Protestant. They were the fruits of the Anglican not of the Catholic Church.’ He was, nonetheless, impressed. ‘What I admired most in the perusal of these volumes was not the many strong Catholic truths I met with, but that almost Catholic unction of a St. Francis de Sales, or of a St. Teresa, that breathes through them all.’