The Call to Unity: The Bedell Lectures for 1919 Delivered at Kenyon College, May 24th and 25th, 1920
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William T. Manning was a bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Diocese of New York.
Background
William Thomas Manning was born on May 12, 1866 in Northampton, England, the second son of John Manning and Matilda (Robinson) Manning; there were also two younger sisters and a younger brother. William testified that his early life was shaped by the piety of his father, an Anglican layman identified with the Oxford movement, and implied that this influence was responsible, in part, for his decision, at the age of ten, to enter the ministry. In 1882 the family moved to the United States; John Manning farmed for four years in Nebraska and then in California, where he also practiced law. He and William were active in St. Paul's Church, San Diego, as Sunday School superintendent and assistant.
Education
William was educated at Northampton Grammar School and for two years at Moulsoe School in Buckinghamshire. In 1888 William entered the theological department of the University of the South at Sewanee, Tenn. There he studied under William P. DuBose, the philosopher, theologian, and mystic, and lived for a time in his household, aiding in the writing and publication of DuBose's Soteriology of the New Testament (1892). From DuBose he gained his firm conviction that the Anglican faith in the Incarnation of God in Christ and its extension in the church and Sacraments was consistent with the ongoing development of scientific and historical thought. In December 1889, Manning was ordained deacon at Sewanee and served for a time as curate at Calvary Church, Memphis, while continuing his studies with DuBose, and briefly, in 1891, at the General Theological Seminary in New York.
Career
On December 12, 1891, he was ordained to the priesthood by the bishop of Los Angeles and shortly after became rector of Trinity Church, Redlands, Calif. DuBose was anxious to bring him back to Sewanee, and in 1893 Manning returned to take his B. D. and was appointed professor of systematic (later dogmatic) theology, without salary. Feeling that his permanent vocation lay in parish work, he left in 1894 for Trinity Mission in Cincinnati. Two brief rector ships followed, at the Church of St. John the Evangelist, Lansdowne, Pa. (1896 - 1898), and Christ Church, Nashville, Tenn. , in each of which he made important contributions in unifying divided congregations and encouraging their participation in the larger work of the church. His election in 1901 as deputy to the General Convention of the Episcopal Church at San Francisco indicated his growing prominence within the church. In 1903, when he was called to be vicar of St. Agnes' Chapel, one of the associated congregations of Trinity Parish, New York, Manning's significant lifework began. Trinity Church, on Broadway at Wall Street, was then the center of a highly organized ministry, along the lines of the English parishes inspired by the ideals of the Oxford movement. There he developed a warm relationship with the aging rector, Morgan Dix.
In 1904 the Trinity vestry elected him assistant rector, and after Dix's death on Apr. 29, 1908, they elected him rector on May 4 and, by Trinity's unusual privilege, the senior warden inducted him on the following day. Serious problems immediately faced the new rector, particularly the much-publicized condition of the tenement houses owned by Trinity parish. Long under attack by the press as an unconscionably wealthy church exploiting the poor, Trinity was cleared of the worst charges in an investigation conducted by the New York Charity Organization Society at Manning's behest. He then instituted a number of reforms aimed at ameliorating unsanitary and hazardous conditions, while finding other sources of income. The closing of St. John's Chapel, Varick Street, because of dwindling attendance was another of the long series of controversies in which Manning was to be involved over the years. In 1917-1918 he served with vigor and generosity as volunteer chaplain at Camp Upton on Long Island. His high standing in the church made him a natural candidate for the episcopate, and on January 26, 1921, he was elected bishop of the Diocese of New York, having previously declined election as bishop of Western New York and bishop of Harrisburg. He was consecrated on May 11. Manning started building of the nave of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine on Morningside Heightsbegun in 1892, but it was still unfinished in 1921. In 1924-1925 an elaborate drive raised over $13, 000, 000 and the work was resumed. It was carried on slowly through the difficulties of the depression until the nave was complete in 1939. Services were then held there while the choir was reconstructed to fit Ralph Adams Cram's French Gothic design, which replaced the ponderous Romanesque Byzantine style of Heins and LaFarge originally planned. The whole length of the cathedral was opened with a series of special services in December 1941. Manning maintained that the cathedral project did not conflict with but rather stimulated support of the church's mission and its social outreach, expressed by its use for such special functions as a meeting to protest racial and religious persecution in 1933 and an exhibition on behalf of housing reform in 1937. In 1927 Bishop Manning was a member of the Episcopal delegation to the first World Conference on Faith and Order at Lausanne, but took no further active part in the movement (now part of the World Council of Churches) of which he was one of the founders. In later years Bishop Manning was less active outside his diocese, but retained the office since the 1943 canon requiring retirement at the age of seventy-two was not retroactive. Still vigorous and effective, he planned to continue as bishop for several more years but the onset of cancer necessitated his retirement in 1946. He moved to the house in Washington Mews that had been occupied by Bishop Gilbert, his suffragan and now successor. Here he took an active interest in local civic affairs and continued to enjoy personal contacts. His final effort was a statement of his principles in a hopeful article, "The Turning of the Tide. " On October 30, 1949, he celebrated the Holy Communion for the last time in his oratory, and a few days later was taken to St. Luke's, where he died on November 18. His ashes are fittingly interred under a simple monument in the nave of the cathedral.
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Religion
He was insistent that reunion should include Catholic and Orthodox as well as Protestant traditions and therefore opposed proposals which seemed to push the Episcopal church decisively into the Protestant camp, such as, conspicuously, the plans for reunion with Presbyterians put forward in 1937-1946. However, he welcomed Protestant preachers (and Jewish speakers) on special occasions at the cathedral, supported Trinity Parish in making redundant buildings available for Russian and Serbian congregations, and enjoyed the friendship of the Greek Archbishop Athenagoras, since 1949 patriarch of Constantinople.
Views
At the 1910 General Convention, he proposed the initiation of a faith and order conference; two years later he took part in a delegation to the British Isles in the interest of the movement. However, he felt obliged to oppose Episcopal participation in the Panama Missionary Conference of 1916 in view of its anti-Catholic slant; as a result he was not elected in that year to the General Convention, to which New York had normally sent the rector of Trinity. As bishop, Manning adopted the watchword of his predecessor of a century before, John Henry Hobart, "Evangelical Faith and Apostolic Order, " a standard he defended through many controversies. His insistence on doctrinal purity and strict church order quickly brought him into conflict with the liberals and mavericks among the parish clergy, but he retained the esteem and support of most of the clergy and laity, despite the storm raised in 1923 over the call for loyalty to the creed in the Dallas Pastoral of the House of Bishops, which Manning helped to draft. He was likewise a vigorous supporter of strict church laws to protect the sanctity of marriage, specifically by forbidding the remarriage of divorced persons whose former spouses were still living. However, after a new Marriage Canon was passed in 1931, he was willing to grant permission for remarriage in church when there had been a civil decree of nullity and for readmission to Communion where a similar presumption was possible and the circumstances of remarriage were not scandalous.
From early in his ministry he fought against racial segregation; at Nashville in 1900 he successfully urged the abolition of segregated opening services for the Diocesan Convention; and in New York as bishop, he used his authority to acquire church buildings in Harlem for Negro congregations, on one dramatic occasion in 1932 breaking the locks on a church whose white vestry had shut out the rector when he integrated the services.
Quotations:
"Religion without mystery ceases to be religion. "
Membership
member of the Episcopal delegation to the first World Conference on Faith and Order at Lausanne
Personality
Like his great predecessor Henry Codman Potter, Manning put his influence on the side of reform movements in New York City government, which won him the esteem and friendship of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia. Nor did he hesitate to express opinions that were not so widely shared in the church; some felt he went too far in attacking President Roosevelt's "court-packing" proposal in an Ash Wednesday sermon in 1937, and in giving perhaps unnecessarily vigorous support to the Allied cause in 1939-1941.
He was an able administrator who greatly enriched and unified parish life before being elevated to the episcopate. Although he appeared stern and austere in public, he was good-humored and charitable in his private relations. He was in some ways a voice from an older and more confident age of the Church, which some found puzzling and others, refreshing. Early identified as a high churchman, Manning nevertheless was more concerned with the wholeness of evangelical Christianity than with forms and observances.
Connections
On April 23, 1895, he married Florence van Antwerp of Avondale, Ohio. They had two daughters: Frances van Antwerp and Elizabeth Alice van Antwerp.