' The young man listened, was silent, and said at last that
he did not know but she was right. She suggested reading the
Bible together; and they accordingly did so during the whole of
that Vacation, every morning after breakfast. Yet, in spite of
these devotional exercises, and in spite of a voluminous
correspondence on religious subjects with his Spiritual Mother,
Manning still continued to indulge in secular hopes. He entered
the Colonial Office as a supernumerary clerk, and it was only
when the offer of a Merton Fellowship seemed to depend upon his
taking orders that his heavenly ambitions began to assume a
definite shape. Just then he fell in love with Miss Deffell,
whose father would have nothing to say to a young man without
prospects, and forbade him the house. It was only too true; what
WERE the prospects of a supernumerary clerk in the Colonial
Office? Manning went to Oxford and took orders. He was elected to
the Merton Fellowship, and obtained through the influence of the
Wilberforces a curacy in Sussex. At the last moment he almost
drew back. 'I think the whole step has been too precipitate,' he
wrote to his brother-in-law. 'I have rather allowed the instance
of my friends, and the allurements of an agreeable curacy in many
respects, to get the better of my sober judgment.' His vast
ambitions, his dreams of public service, of honours, and of
power, was all this to end in a little country curacy 'agreeable
in many respects'? But there was nothing for it; the deed was
done; and the Fates had apparently succeeded very effectively in
getting rid of Manning.
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