'
Manning was an Archdeacon; but he was not yet out of the woods.
His relations with the Tractarians had leaked out, and the Record
was beginning to be suspicious. If Mrs. Shuttleworth's opinion of
him were to become general, it would certainly be a grave matter.
Nobody could wish to live and die a mere Archdeacon. And then, at
that very moment, an event occurred which made it imperative to
take a definite step, one way or the other. That event was the
publication of Tract No. 90.
For some time it had been obvious to every impartial onlooker
that Newman was slipping down an inclined plane at the bottom of
which lay one thing, and one thing only--the Roman Catholic
Church. What was surprising was the length of time which he was
taking to reach the inevitable destination. Years passed before
he came to realise that his grandiose edifice of a Church
Universal would crumble to pieces if one of its foundation stones
was to be an amatory intrigue of Henry VIII. But, at last he
began to see that terrible monarch glowering at him wherever he
turned his eyes. First he tried to exorcise the spectre with the
rolling periods of the Caroline divines; but it only strutted the
more truculently. Then in despair he plunged into the writings of
the early Fathers, and sought to discover some way out of his
difficulties in the complicated labyrinth of ecclesiastical
history.
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