On his arrival at Lavington in January 1833 H. E. Manning’s theological baggage fitted neatly into a few short sentences. He summed it up in a letter written to Samuel Wilberforce (October 20, 1850): ‘When I came to Lavington in 1833 I believed, as I always did, in Baptismal Regeneration: I had no view on the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ: and no idea of the Church’. In the recollections of his later ‘Journal’ (1878–82) he described his position at that time in greater detail: ‘The state of my religious belief in 1833 was profound faith in the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation, in the Redemption by the Passion of our Lord, and in the work of the Holy Spirit, and the conversion of the soul. I believed in baptismal regeneration, and in a spiritual, but real, receiving of our Lord in Holy Communion. As to the Church, I had no definite conception’. His evangelical background and piety seems still to have filled most of his religious horizon.