to murder Queen Elizabeth, can have been rendered a much more dangerous engine of disloyalty by the Definition of 1870. But such considerations failed to reassure Mr. Gladstone; the British Public was of a like mind; and 145,000 copies of the pamphlet were sold within two months. Various replies appeared, and Manning was not behindhand. His share in the controversy led to a curious personal encounter.
His conversion had come as a great shock to Mr. Gladstone. Manning had breathed no word of its approach to his old and intimate friend, and when the news reached him, it seemed almost an act of personal injury. "I felt," Mr. Gladstone said, "as if Manning had murdered my mother by mistake." For twelve years the two men did not meet, after which they occasionally saw each other and renewed their correspondence. This was the condition of affairs when Mr. Gladstone published his pamphlet. As soon as it appeared Manning wrote a letter to the New York Herald, contradicting its conclusions, and declaring that its publication was "the first event that has overcast a friendship of forty-five years." Mr. Gladstone replied to this letter in a second pamphlet. At the close of his theological arguments, he added the following passage:—"I feel it necessary, in concluding this answer, to state that Archbishop Manning has fallen into most serious inaccuracy in his letter of November 10th, where he describes my Expostulation as the first event which has overcast a friendship of forty-five years. I allude to the subject with regret; and without entering into details." Manning replied in a private letter.
"My dear Gladstone," he wrote, "you say that I am in error in stating that your former pamphlet is the first act which has overcast our friendship.
"If you refer to my act in 1851 in submitting to the Catholic Church, by which we were separated for some twelve years, I can understand it.
