Grounds of Faith

The Grounds of Faith by Henry Cardinal Manning, 90 pages

A set of lectures originally published in 1852, shortly after Manning's conversion to Catholicism, The Grounds of Faith is neither fish nor fowl.  Fundamentally an apologetical work maintaining the Catholic Church as the only living source of authority capable of supporting the truths of Christianity, the lectures themselves were delivered, not to the Anglican side of the controversy, but to an audience of Catholics.  As a result of this preaching to the choir, the essays possess a triumphalist tone which is likely to be jarring even to modern Catholics, and thoroughly unpalatable to non-Catholics.  As a brief manual of apologetics this book is certainly passable, and the passage of time has not rendered Cardinal Manning's arguments obsolete, but the substance has been better presented in a number of other works.