always your faithful, grateful and affectionate daughter,

'EMMA RYLE.

'P.S. I wish I could see you once more so very much.'

How was Manning, a director of souls, and a clergyman of the
Church of England, to reply that in sober truth there was very
little to choose between the state of mind of Sister Emma, or
even of Sister Harriet, and his own? The dilemma was a grievous
one: when a soldier finds himself fighting for a cause in which
he has lost faith, it is treachery to stop, and it is treachery
to go on.

At last, in the seclusion of his library, Manning turned in
agony to those old writings which had provided Newman with so
much instruction and assistance; perhaps the Fathers would do
something for him as well. He ransacked the pages of St. Cyprian
and St. Cyril; he went through the complete works of St. Optatus
and St. Leo; he explored the vast treatises of Tertullian and
Justin Martyr. He had a lamp put into his phaeton, so that he
might lose no time during his long winter drives. There he sat,
searching St. Chrysostom for some mitigation of his anguish,
while he sped along between the hedges to distant sufferers, to
whom he duly administered the sacraments according to the rites
of the English Church. He hurried back to commit to his Diary the
analysis of his reflections, and to describe, under the mystic
formula of secrecy, the intricate workings of his conscience to
Robert Wilberforce. But, alas! he was no Newman; and even the
fourteen folios of St. Augustine himself, strange to say, gave