The Sovereign Will of God - Manning's Earliest Pastoral Directives

Already in his earliest sermons in 1842 Manning initiated a discussion of the human will,²³ and on the first page of that collection he strikes the keynote of his position: the will is passive, and even its activity is the result of its passive nature. Sin “listens at our heart, floats through all our thoughts, draws our will under its sway, and ourselves under its dominion.” (S1, 1) Certainly the will chooses, but in a fallen human creature it is sin that is dominant, and its dominance is spoken of as the human will itself,²⁴ just as before the Fall the will “wielded an absolute power over [the individual’s] own nature … [s]o long as he was subject to the Divine will.” (S1, 4)

The love of God, thus, invariably comes first in time and place according to Manning. Divine will works in a person before that person wills and obeys. Manning knows this in his own life: “I have been almost passive, while He has been working out His will in me: He has chosen, and gone before me, and guided me by the rod of His chastisement…. I have learned obedience by the things which I have suffered.” (S1, 299) Properly understood, the new will in a fallen creature is the result of loving divine election acting through the sacraments, initially in baptismal regeneration:

[W]e are made new creatures by a present change working in our moral nature; that is to say, through our regeneration in holy baptism. By the love of God electing us to a new birth of the Spirit, and by the Holy Ghost working through that visible sacrament, we are translated from wrath to grace. (S1, 20)

Our moral nature, Manning goes on to insist, is singular and can be referred to as either the heart, the conscience, or the will. (S1, 24) Considered in this light, the will is not a faculty. As it is coextensive with heart and conscience,²⁵ so is it with spirit,²⁶ and consciousness and the individual’s choices are one with the individual’s growth in holiness or lack thereof. “As the will chooses, so the man is. Our will is ourself; and as it takes up into itself, and, as it were, incorporates with itself, the powers and the bias of good or ill-such we become.” (SI, 53) Wills that incorporate within themselves the “bias” of the good, Manning wrote in language that appropriates mystical vocabulary for ecclesiological and eschatological ends, “walk with God, and God dwells in them with a growing nearness day by day; they are ever more and more one with Him, and partake more fully of the Divine nature, and are filled with the will of God: they abide in God, and God in them.” (S1, 53)

On such a basis Manning works out his soteriology. “The spiritual life is perpetually replenished by the “powers of the world to come,” he tells his readers, (S1, 74) powers that are intended for all human beings, (S1, 77) as “they … absolutely submit their will to be changed and subdued to His will.” (S1, 80) Submission of will is not an action of will but a denial of self-will, “the absolute condition of His service,” (S1, 90)²⁷ a condition fulfilled, however, by the divine itself: “There must pass on each a deep and searching change. And this change, though it be wrought in us of God, is wrought through our striving.” (S1, 84)

To emphasize the centrality of the divine action, Manning more regularly turns to ecclesiological themes and highlights the role of the church: “Christ is in the midst of His Church. His eye and His hand have been upon us from the hour of our baptism. He is ever drawing us by His unseen virtues: we are all around Him, some nearer, some further off; some approaching, some receding from Him.” (S1, 276) In the regenerate there is an active function of the will, enacting self-denial, that is, a denial of self-will without which “there can be no real cleaving of the moral nature to the will of God.” This use of the term “real,” Manning proceeds to point out, is intended “to distinguish between the passive and seeming attachment of most baptized men, and the conscious, energetic grasp of will by which Christ’s true disciples cleave to their Master’s service,” (S1, 96)²⁸ the end of which is “release from the causes of our disquiet, or rest for the deep cravings of an immortal being.” (S1, 111) Full satisfaction of such cravings shall be made manifest at the end of time but is present already in the church, “the root of the new creation, which shall be raised in its fullness at the last day.” (S1, 379) With this resurrection will come “the restoration of the whole man, in spirit, and soul, and body; a restoration of all in which consists the integrity of our nature and the identity of our person,” (S1, 367) and as such, full union between the will of the human person and that of the divine.

Obedience to the will of God is a work of direct and simple consciousness. It is to be wrought in us by its own self-confirming power. It is by doing the will of God; by recognising it in all the changes of life; by reading the expression of the Divine mind in the course of this troubled world; by bowing ourselves down before it, under whatsoever guise it may reveal itself; by yielding ourselves in gladness of mind both to do and suffer it, counting it a holy discipline and a loving correction of our own wilfulness, and by praying Him never to stay His hand till the power and will of self be abolished from our regenerate being;—by these means it is that we are changed from the shadows of a fleeting life to the abiding realities of the eternal world, being made partakers of the will of God. (S1, 140-41)