The Love of Jesus to Penitents by Henry Edward Manning

Henry Edward Manning (1808-1892) was an Oxford-educated Anglican clergyman who converted to Roman Catholicism after the Privy Council ordered the Church of England in 1850 to reinstate an heretical vicar. Manning was ordained a priest in the Roman Catholic Church in 1851, appointed archbishop of Westminster in 1865, and made a cardinal in 1875 by Pope Pius IX.In The Love of Jesus to Penitents, Manning enumerates the many benefits that the Sacrament of Penance affords the penitent: it reveals to the prodigal the tender compassion of Jesus Christ; it bestows the grace of spiritual regeneration upon the spiritually dead soul; it is the means of self-knowledge; it inclines the penitent to have perfect contrition and to make reparation to God and to those neighbors whom he has offended by his sins; and it bestows upon the spiritually reborn the gift of perseverance, enabling him to remain in a state of grace throughout his earthly life unto life everlasting. Manning tells us that Catholics