Bernard Lord Manning Was A Great Dissenter

Auckland Star, Volume LXXV, Issue 154, 1 July 1944, Page 4

Bernard Lord Manning Was A Great Dissenter

T HAVE just read a short life of Bernard, Lord Manning. He was an ardent Congregationalist and a proud Dissenter, but withal one of the most tolerant Christians imaginable. He was as much at home with a Roman Missal as he was with a Methodist Hymn Book, and, as for the Book of Common Prayer, he gloried in it. He was a son of the Rev. George Manning, a Congregational Minister who had started off as a Methodist, but who, when he became convinced that the Congregational doctrine of the ministry was the true one, offered himself as a candidate for the ministry of that Church, and eventually was ordained. His first charge was that of Ravenstonedale "High Chapel," which was built in 1726. So much for Bernard's father.

By Rev. C. W. Chandler

Young Bernard was a delicate lad, but his constitutional weakness did. not obtrude itself. He covered it with a bright and cheery disposition, an appetite for work, and considerable success.in scholarship.' In 1912 he went into residence at Jesus College, Cambridge, and to the end of his life, in 1941, he remained in closest association with this college, being successively undergraduate, bursar, senior tutor and Fellow. Cambridge Friends Arthur Christopher Benson, Foakes-Jackson, Sir Arthur QuillerCouch and Alexander Nairne were among his closest friends. Writing of two of these friends, Manning said: "Foakes-Jackson is a very 18th century character, while Nairne is a 21st century one." Nairne, like Zaccheus, was short of stature, bony and fleshless. He felt the cold of Cambridge winters intensely, nor did his frugal fare help matters much, for his breakfast invariably was a cup of coffee and a stale bun. His lunch also consisted of a cup of coffee and a stale bun. At four o'clock he had two cups of tea and a piece of cake, while his evening meal in the Hall consisted of vegetables sprinkled with red pepper, a small helping of sweet topped off with another cup of coffee, a Turkish cigarette and a pinch of snuff. Then he would retire to his study, don his cassock, put his feet in a muff, and read some English, Latin, Greek, French, Italian or Spanish 'author until bedtime. His "Faith of the Old Testament," which is on most clerical bookshelves, has increased in value considerably for me since reading something of the man.

These were the men who influenced young Manning, and who, despite their own rigid Anglicanism, did not shake his own rigid Nonconformity. By the way, he greatly disliked the term "Nonconformist," and, as for "Free Churchmen," he thought that that was just the genteel synonym for "Dissenters." "We are not Dissenters," said he, "from the doctrines of the Prayer Book, but from the doctrines of all modern civilisation; from those heresies which have contaminated the Church and ruined the world; from the belief that Christianity is,simply the top stone of culture; from that short-sighted view which assumes that happiness comes by making the best of the world, instead of renouncing it and all its methods; from that blind optimism which trusts in some magical law of progress, which sits down to watch shellfish develop into men by way of sea monsters, and then hopes that men will develop into angels by way of social reformers. From all such nonsense we, utterly dissent." A True Catholic What most appeals to me about Manning is his amazing tolerance and broad catholicity. On one occasion he visited the tomb of Hugh Benson, over' which a beautiful chapel is built. In that chapel, he said, he knew the power and reality of religion as he had not known it for years. "There is in Roman Catholicism at its best a simplicity of faith that makes most of us seem very sophisticated men of goodwill."

"You need not think," he added, "that the scarlet woman has blandishments to attract a Puritan like me. I only like the fundamentally Christian parts of Rome, and those I must be free to adore wherever I find them."

In his book, "The People's Faith in the Time of Wycliff," he says: "The Church in the Reformation was attempting in a slightly new way to discharge its unchanging task, the task of obeying the command, 'Feed my sheep.' . . . Protestantism is not ;the opposite of medieval catholicism; it is simply an improved kind of catholicism. Protestantism is not a negative thing. It is a positive restatement of Catholic truth." How much more enlightened and kindly' is that than the statement I found in a recent "Catholic Digest," in an article about a certain "Catholic" village in England, wherein the author says there is "neither begger, pub nor Protestant." Thank goodness that is not typical of 20th century Roman Catholicism.

On December 7, 1941, Manning died at the' age of 49, and by the side of the bed whereon be breathed his last was a Bible, a Prayer Book, a copy of "Hymns for the Use of People Called Methodists," a book on the Latin Vulgate, and a copy of "Redgauntlet."

Following his death and burial in a Ravenstonedale churchyard alongside his mother and father, requiems were said for him at Anglo-Catholic and Roman Catholic altars, a most striking tribute to the character of one who lived and died an uncompromising Dissenter "and gloried in the name of Calvinist."