"If you refer to any other act either on your part or mine I am not conscious of it, and would desire to know what it may be.
"My act in 1851 may have overcast your friendship for me. It did not overcast my friendship for you, as I think the last years have shown.
"You will not, I hope, think me over-sensitive in asking for this explanation. Believe me, yours affectionately,
"My dear Archbishop Manning," Mr. Gladstone answered, "it did, I confess, seem to me an astonishing error to state in public that a friendship had not been overcast for forty-five years until now, which your letter declares has been suspended as to all action for twelve. …
"I wonder, too, at your forgetting that during the forty-five years I had been charged by you with doing the work of Antichrist in regard to the Temporal Power of the Pope. …
"Our differences, my dear Archbishop, are indeed profound. We refer them, I suppose, in humble silence to a Higher Power. … You assured me once of your prayers at all and at the most solemn time. I received that assurance with gratitude and still cherish it. As and when they move upwards, there is a meeting-point for those whom a chasm separates below. I remain always, affectionately yours,
Speaking of this correspondence in after years, Cardinal Manning said—"From the way in which Mr. Gladstone alluded to the overcasting of our friendship, people might have thought that I had picked his pocket."
