Page:Eminent Victorians.djvu/41

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CARDINAL MANNING
19

of the latter subject met with considerable disapproval, which surprised the Doctor. "I was not prepared," he said, "for people questioning, even in the abstract, the duty of fasting; I thought serious-minded persons at least supposed they practised fasting in some way or other. I assumed the duty to be acknowledged and thought it only undervalued." We live and learn, even though we have been to Germany.

Other tracts discussed the Holy Catholic Church, the Clergy, and the Liturgy. One treated of the question "whether a clergyman of the Church of England be now bound to have morning and evening prayers daily in his parish church?" Another pointed out the "Indications of a superintending Providence in the preservation of the Prayer-book and in the changes which it has undergone." Another consisted of a collection of "Advent Sermons on Antichrist." Keble wrote a long and elaborate tract "On the Mysticism attributed to the Early Fathers of the Church," in which he expressed his opinions upon a large number of curious matters. "According to men's usual way of talking," he wrote, "it would be called an accidental circumstance that there were five loaves, not more nor less, in the store of Our Lord and His disciples wherewith to provide the miraculous feast. But the ancient interpreters treat it as designed and providential, in this surely not erring: and their conjecture is that it represents the sacrifice of the whole world of sense, and especially of the Old Dispensation, which, being outward and visible, might be called the dispensation of the senses, to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, to be a pledge and means of communion with Him according to the terms of the new or evangelical law. This idea they arrive at by considering the number five, the number of the senses, as the mystical opponent of the visible and sensible universe: τὰ αἰσθητὰ, as distinguished from τὰ νοητὰ. Origen lays down the rule in express terms. 'The number five,' he says, 'frequently, nay almost always,' is taken for the