content with nothing short of a bishop for the christening of his
children. Little Henry, like the rest, had his bishop; but he was
obliged to wait for him--for as long as eighteen months. In those
days, and even a generation later, as Keble bears witness, there
was great laxity in regard to the early baptism of children. The
delay has been noted by Manning's biographer as the first
stumbling-block in the spiritual life of the future Cardinal; but
he surmounted it with success.

His father was more careful in other ways. 'His refinement and
delicacy of mind were such,' wrote Manning long afterwards, 'that
I never heard out of his mouth a word which might not have been
spoken in the presence of the most pure and sensitive--except,'
he adds, 'on one occasion. He was then forced by others to repeat
a negro story which, though free from all evil de sexu, was
indelicate. He did it with great resistance. His example gave me
a hatred of all such talk.'

The family lived in an atmosphere of Evangelical piety. One day
the little boy came in from the farmyard, and his mother asked
him whether he had seen the peacock. 'I said yes, and the nurse
said no, and my mother made me kneel down and beg God to forgive
me for not speaking the truth.' At the age of four the child was
told by a cousin of the age of six that 'God had a book in which
He wrote down everything we did wrong. This so terrified me for
days that I remember being found by my mother sitting under a
kind of writing-table in great fear. I never forgot this at any
time in my life,' the Cardinal tells us, 'and it has been a great
grace to me.' When he was nine years old he 'devoured the
Apocalypse; and I never all through my life forgot the "lake that