Page:Early Reminiscences.djvu/315

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i8S7 259 After some preliminary conversation on the weather, on the on to the topic of the English Church ; its distracted condition, its lack of Authority, its loss of Mission, and so on. But presently flushed up and said in somewhat harsh tones : "I beg your pardon, but you do not answer my questions. You do not seem to hear what I say." " The fact is," replied B-, " I am not a controversialist. I am perfectly happy where I am, and so I have been reciting the Nicene Creed whilst you talked," and he crossed himself. " Get out of rAy room ! " screamed Manning, leaping from his seat and turning dark in his face, as he pointed to the door. B- bowed, and said : " I did not want to intrude, Doctor ! I was in a manner thrust in, against my wishes." The same F-who had introduced B--had been at the mission in St. George's-in-the-East when it started. There were several young fellows there, and they were not afforded enough to eat during Lent. So they gave each other " Wines " occasionally in their private rooms. These " Wines " consisted in doses of cod-liver oil. When F- was received into the Roman Church, the priest who admitted him brought him up into his room, and sitting down at his piano sang at the top of his voice, " Will you walk into my parlour, said the spider to the fly." F- himself told me this. What became of him eventually I never heard. A good many of those who seceded, in place of becoming more spiritual, lapsed into something worse than world-liness, and got, as they termed it, periodical " whitewashings." Whilst I was at S. Barnabas, I saw the initiation of a new stage in the Tractarian movement. When I say that I was at S. Barnabas, I do not restrict myself to the period when I lived in the clergy-house after that I had taken my degree, but I include in it the vacation times at Christmas and Easter, when I took lodgings in Ebury Street, and was much about the church and college. Hitherto the Catholic movement had appealed, except in Leeds, to the cultured upper classes alone, and had shown little tendency towards spreading downwards. You do not boil water by applying a sheet of red-hot iron to the surface but to the bottom. That was the way in which Christianity spread at the beginning. university and college where B had been, Manning glided Manning observed that B was not attending to him. He