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Eminent Victorians

by Lytton Strachey · English · Gutenberg #2447 · 595,183 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Eminent Victorians

Author: Lytton Strachey


        
Release date: December 1, 2000 [eBook #2447]
                Most recently updated: March 9, 2025

Language: English

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EMINENT VICTORIANS

by Lytton Strachey




Preface

THE history of the Victorian Age will never be written; we know too much
about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian--ignorance,
which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid
perfection unattainable by the highest art. Concerning the Age which has
just passed, our fathers and our grandfathers have poured forth and
accumulated so vast a quantity of information that the industry of a
Ranke would be submerged by it, and the perspicacity of a Gibbon would
quail before it. It is not by the direct method of a scrupulous
narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular
epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack
his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the
rear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure
recesses, hitherto undivined. He will row out over that great ocean of
material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which
will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from
those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity. Guided by
these considerations, I have written the ensuing studies. I have
attempted, through the medium of biography, to present some Victorian
visions to the modern eye. They are, in one sense, haphazard
visions--that is to say, my choice of subjects has been determined by no
desire to construct a system or to prove a theory, but by simple motives
of convenience and of art. It has been my purpose to illustrate rather
than to explain. It would have been futile to hope to tell even a precis
of the truth about the Victorian age, for the shortest precis must fill
innumerable volumes. But, in the lives of an ecclesiastic, an
educational authority, a woman of action, and a man of adventure, I have
sought to examine and elucidate certain fragments of the truth which
took my fancy and lay to my hand.

I hope, however, that the following pages may prove to be of interest
from the strictly biographical, no less than from the historical point
of view. Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms
of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal
processes--which is eternal, and must be felt for its own sake. The art
of biography seems to have fallen on evil times in England. We have had,
it is true, a few masterpieces, but we have never had, like the French,
a great biographical tradition; we have had no Fontenelles and
Condorcets, with their incomparable eloges, compressing into a few
shining pages the manifold existences of men. With us, the most delicate
and humane of all the branches of the art of writing has been relegated
to the journeymen of letters; we do not reflect that it is perhaps as
difficult to write a good life as to live one. Those two fat volumes,
with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead--who does not know
them, with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style,
their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of
detachment, of design? They are as familiar as the cortege of the
undertaker, and wear the same air of slow, funereal barbarism. One is
tempted to suppose, of some of them, that they were composed by that
functionary as the final item of his job. The studies in this book are
indebted, in more ways than one, to such works--works which certainly
deserve the name of Standard Biographies. For they have provided me not
only with much indispensable information, but with something even more
precious--an example. How many lessons are to be learned from them! But
it is hardly necessary to particularise. To preserve, for instance, a
becoming brevity--a brevity which excludes everything that is redundant
and nothing that is significant--that, surely, is the first duty of the
biographer. The second, no less surely, is to maintain his own freedom
of spirit. It is not his business to be complimentary; it is his
business to lay bare the facts of the case, as he understands them. That
is what I have aimed at in this book--to lay bare the facts of some
cases, as I understand them, dispassionately, impartially, and without
ulterior intentions. To quote the words of a Master--'Je n'impose rien;
je ne propose rien: j'expose.'

L.S.

A list of the principal sources from which I have drawn is appended to
each Biography. I would indicate, as an honourable exception to the
current commodity, Sir Edward Cook's excellent Life of Florence
Nightingale, without which my own study, though composed on a very
different scale and from a decidedly different angle, could not have
been written.



Cardinal Manning


HENRY EDWARD MANNING was born in 1807 and died in 1892. His life was
extraordinary in many ways, but its interest for the modern inquirer
depends mainly upon two considerations--the light which his career
throws upon the spirit of his age, and the psychological problems
suggested by his inner history. He belonged to that class of eminent
ecclesiastics--and it is by no means a small class--who have been
distinguished less for saintliness and learning than for practical
ability. Had he lived in the Middle Ages he would certainly have been
neither a Francis nor an Aquinas, but he might have been an Innocent. As
it was, born in the England of the nineteenth century, growing up in the
very seed-time of modern progress, coming to maturity with the first
onrush of Liberalism, and living long enough to witness the victories of
Science and Democracy, he yet, by a strange concatenation of
circumstances, seemed almost to revive in his own person that long line
of diplomatic and administrative clerics which, one would have thought,
had come to an end for ever with Cardinal Wolsey.

In Manning, so it appeared, the Middle Ages lived again. The tall gaunt
figure, with the face of smiling asceticism, the robes, and the biretta,
as it passed in triumph from High Mass at the Oratory to philanthropic
gatherings at Exeter Hall, from Strike Committees at the Docks to
Mayfair drawing-rooms where fashionable ladies knelt to the Prince of
the Church, certainly bore witness to a singular condition of affairs.
What had happened? Had a dominating character imposed itself upon a
hostile environment? Or was the nineteenth century, after all, not so
hostile? Was there something in it, scientific and progressive as it
was, which went out to welcome the representative of ancient tradition
and uncompromising faith? Had it, perhaps, a place in its heart for such
as Manning--a soft place, one might almost say? Or, on the other hand,
was it he who had been supple and yielding? He who had won by art what
he would never have won by force, and who had managed, so to speak, to
be one of the leaders of the procession less through merit than through
a superior faculty for gliding adroitly to the front rank? And, in any
case, by what odd chances, what shifts and struggles, what combinations
of circumstance and character, had this old man come to be where he was?
Such questions are easier to ask than to answer; but it may be
instructive, and even amusing, to look a little more closely into the
complexities of so curious a story.


I

UNDOUBTEDLY, what is most obviously striking in the history of Manning's
career is the persistent strength of his innate characteristics. Through
all the changes of his fortunes the powerful spirit of the man worked on
undismayed. It was as if the Fates had laid a wager that they would
daunt him; and in the end they lost their bet.

His father was a rich West Indian merchant, a governor of the Bank of
England, a Member of Parliament, who drove into town every day from his
country seat in a coach and four, and was content with nothing short of
a bishop for the christening of his children. Little Henry, like the
rest, had his bishop; but he was obliged to wait for him--for as long as
eighteen months. In those days, and even a generation later, as Keble
bears witness, there was great laxity in regard to the early baptism of
children. The delay has been noted by Manning's biographer as the first
stumbling-block in the spiritual life of the future Cardinal; but he
surmounted it with success.

His father was more careful in other ways.

'His refinement and delicacy of mind were such,' wrote Manning long
afterwards, 'that I never heard out of his mouth a word which might not
have been spoken in the presence of the most pure and sensitive--except,'
he adds, 'on one occasion. He was then forced by others to repeat a
negro story which, though free from all evil de sexu, was indelicate. He
did it with great resistance. His example gave me a hatred of all such
talk.'

The family lived in an atmosphere of Evangelical piety. One day the
little boy came in from the farmyard, and his mother asked him whether
he had seen the peacock. 'I said yes, and the nurse said no, and my
mother made me kneel down and beg God to forgive me for not speaking the
truth.' At the age of four the child was told by a cousin of the age of
six that 'God had a book in which He wrote down everything we did wrong.
This so terrified me for days that I remember being found by my mother
sitting under a kind of writing-table in great fear. I never forgot this
at any time in my life,' the Cardinal tells us, 'and it has been a great
grace to me.' When he was nine years old he 'devoured the Apocalypse;
and I never all through my life forgot the "lake that burneth with fire
and brimstone". That verse has kept me like an audible voice through all
my life, and through worlds of danger in my youth.'

At Harrow the worlds of danger were already around him; but yet he
listened to the audible voice. 'At school and college I never failed to
say my prayers, so far as memory serves me, even for a day.' And he
underwent another religious experience: he read Paley's Evidences. 'I
took in the whole argument,' wrote Manning, when he was over seventy,
'and I thank God that nothing has ever shaken it.' Yet on the whole he
led the unspiritual life of an ordinary schoolboy. We have glimpses of
him as a handsome lad, playing cricket, or strutting about in tasselled
Hessian top-boots. And on one occasion at least he gave proof of a
certain dexterity of conduct which deserved to be remembered. He went
out of bounds, and a master, riding by and seeing him on the other side
of a field, tied his horse to a gate, and ran after him. The astute
youth outran the master, fetched a circle, reached the gate, jumped on
to the horse's back and rode off. For this he was very properly
chastised; but, of what use was chastisement? No whipping, however
severe, could have eradicated from little Henry's mind a quality at
least as firmly planted in it as his fear of Hell and his belief in the
arguments of Paley.

It had been his father's wish that Manning should go into the Church;
but the thought disgusted him; and when he reached Oxford, his tastes,
his ambitions, his successes at the Union, all seemed to mark him out
for a political career. He was a year junior to Samuel Wilberforce, and
a year senior to Gladstone. In those days the Union was the
recruiting-ground for young politicians; Ministers came down from London
to listen to the debates; and a few years later the Duke of Newcastle
gave Gladstone a pocket borough on the strength of his speech at the
Union against the Reform Bill. To those three young men, indeed, the
whole world lay open. Were they not rich, well-connected, and endowed
with an infinite capacity for making speeches? The event justified the
highest expectations of their friends; for the least distinguished of
the three died a bishop. The only danger lay in another direction.

'Watch, my dear Samuel,' wrote the elder Wilberforce to his son, 'watch
with jealousy whether you find yourself unduly solicitous about
acquitting yourself; whether you are too much chagrined when you fail,
or are puffed up by your success. Undue solicitude about popular
estimation is a weakness against which all real Christians must guard
with the utmost jealous watchfulness. The more you can retain the
impression of your being surrounded by a cloud of witnesses of the
invisible world, to use the scripture phrase, the more you will be armed
against this besetting sin.'

But suddenly it seemed as if such a warning could, after all, have very
little relevance to Manning; for, on his leaving Oxford, the brimming
cup was dashed from his lips. He was already beginning to dream of
himself in the House of Commons, the solitary advocate of some great
cause whose triumph was to be eventually brought about by his
extraordinary efforts, when his father was declared a bankrupt, and all
his hopes of a political career came to an end forever.

It was at this time that Manning became intimate with a pious lady, the
sister of one of his College friends, whom he used to describe as his
Spiritual Mother. He made her his confidante; and one day, as they
walked together in the shrubbery, he revealed the bitterness of the
disappointment into which his father's failure had plunged him. She
tried to cheer him, and then she added that there were higher aims open
to him which he had not considered. 'What do you mean?' he asked. 'The
kingdom of Heaven,' she answered; 'heavenly ambitions are not closed
against you.' The young man listened, was silent, and said at last that
he did not know but she was right. She suggested reading the Bible
together; and they accordingly did so during the whole of that Vacation,
every morning after breakfast. Yet, in spite of these devotional
exercises, and in spite of a voluminous correspondence on religious
subjects with his Spiritual Mother, Manning still continued to indulge
in secular hopes. He entered the Colonial Office as a supernumerary
clerk, and it was only when the offer of a Merton Fellowship seemed to
depend upon his taking orders that his heavenly ambitions began to
assume a definite shape. Just then he fell in love with Miss Deffell,
whose father would have nothing to say to a young man without prospects,
and forbade him the house. It was only too true; what WERE the prospects
of a supernumerary clerk in the Colonial Office? Manning went to Oxford
and took orders. He was elected to the Merton Fellowship, and obtained
through the influence of the Wilberforces a curacy in Sussex. At the
last moment he almost drew back. 'I think the whole step has been too
precipitate,' he wrote to his brother-in-law. 'I have rather allowed the
instance of my friends, and the allurements of an agreeable curacy in
many respects, to get the better of my sober judgment.' His vast
ambitions, his dreams of public service, of honours, and of power, was
all this to end in a little country curacy 'agreeable in many respects'?
But there was nothing for it; the deed was done; and the Fates had
apparently succeeded very effectively in getting rid of Manning. All he
could do was to make the best of a bad business.

Accordingly, in the first place, he decided that he had received a call
from God 'ad veritatem et ad seipsum'; and, in the second, forgetting
Miss Deffell, he married his rector's daughter. Within a few months the
rector died, and Manning stepped into his shoes; and at least it could
be said that the shoes were not uncomfortable. For the next seven years
he fulfilled the functions of a country clergyman. He was energetic and
devout; he was polite and handsome; his fame grew in the diocese. At
last he began to be spoken of as the probable successor to the old
Archdeacon of Chichester. When Mrs. Manning prematurely died, he was at
first inconsolable, but he found relief in the distraction of redoubled
work. How could he have guessed that one day he would come to number
that loss among 'God's special mercies? Yet so it was to be. In after
years, the memory of his wife seemed to be blotted from his mind; he
never spoke of her; every letter, every record, of his married life he
destroyed; and when word was sent to him that her grave was falling into
ruin: 'It is best so,' the Cardinal answered, 'let it be. Time effaces
all things.' But, when the grave was yet fresh, the young Rector would
sit beside it, day after day, writing his sermons.


II

IN the meantime, a series of events was taking place in another part of
England, which was to have a no less profound effect upon Manning's
history than the merciful removal of his wife. In the same year in which
he took up his Sussex curacy, the Tracts for the Times had begun to
appear at Oxford. The 'Oxford Movement', in fact, had started on its
course. The phrase is still familiar; but its meaning has become
somewhat obscured both by the lapse of time and the intrinsic ambiguity
of the subjects connected with it. Let us borrow for a moment the wings
of Historic Imagination, and, hovering lightly over the Oxford of the
thirties, take a rapid bird's-eye view.

For many generations the Church of England had slept the sleep of the
...comfortable. The sullen murmurings of dissent, the loud battle-cry of
Revolution, had hardly disturbed her slumbers. Portly divines subscribed
with a sigh or a smile to the Thirty-nine Articles, sank quietly into
easy living, rode gaily to hounds of a morning as gentlemen should, and,
as gentlemen should, carried their two bottles of an evening. To be in
the Church was in fact simply to pursue one of those professions which
Nature and Society had decided were proper to gentlemen and gentlemen
alone. The fervours of piety, the zeal of Apostolic charity, the
enthusiasm of self-renunciation--these things were all very well in
their way and in their place; but their place was certainly not the
Church of England. Gentlemen were neither fervid nor zealous, and above
all they were not enthusiastic. There were, it was true, occasionally to
be found within the Church some strait-laced parsons of the high Tory
school who looked back with regret to the days of Laud or talked of the
Apostolical Succession; and there were groups of square-toed
Evangelicals who were earnest over the Atonement, confessed to a
personal love of Jesus Christ, and seemed to have arranged the whole of
their lives, down to the minutest details of act and speech, with
reference to Eternity. But such extremes were the rare exceptions. The
great bulk of the clergy walked calmly along the smooth road of ordinary
duty. They kept an eye on the poor of the parish, and they conducted the
Sunday Services in a becoming manner; for the rest, they differed
neither outwardly nor inwardly from the great bulk of the laity, to whom
the Church was a useful organisation for the maintenance of Religion, as
by law established.

The awakening came at last, however, and it was a rude one. The liberal
principles of the French Revolution, checked at first in the terrors of
reaction, began to make their way into England. Rationalists lifted up
their heads; Bentham and the Mills propounded Utilitarianism; the Reform
Bill was passed; and there were rumours abroad of disestablishment. Even
Churchmen seemed to have caught the infection. Dr. Whately was so bold
as to assert that, in the interpretation of Scripture, different
opinions might be permitted upon matters of doubt; and, Dr. Arnold drew
up a disquieting scheme for allowing Dissenters into the Church, though
it is true that he did not go quite so far as to contemplate the
admission of Unitarians.

At this time, there was living in a country parish, a young clergyman of
the name of John Keble. He had gone to Oxford at the age of fifteen,
where, after a successful academic career, he had been made a Fellow of
Oriel. He had then returned to his father's parish and taken up the
duties of a curate. He had a thorough knowledge of the contents of the
Prayer-book, the ways of a Common Room, the conjugations of the Greek
Irregular Verbs, and the small jests of a country parsonage; and the
defects of his experience in other directions were replaced by a zeal
and a piety which were soon to prove themselves equal, and more than
equal, to whatever calls might be made upon them. The superabundance of
his piety overflowed into verse; and the holy simplicity of the
Christian Year carried his name into the remotest lodging-houses of
England.

As for his zeal, however, it needed another outlet. Looking forth upon
the doings of his fellow-men through his rectory windows in
Gloucestershire, Keble felt his whole soul shaken with loathing, anger,
and dread. Infidelity was stalking through the land; authority was
laughed at; the hideous doctrines of Democracy were being openly
preached. Worse still, if possible, the Church herself was ignorant and
lukewarm; she had forgotten the mysteries of the sacraments, she had
lost faith in the Apostolical Succession; she was no longer interested
in the Early Fathers; and she submitted herself to the control of a
secular legislature, the members of which were not even bound to profess
belief in the Atonement. In the face of such enormities what could Keble
do? He was ready to do anything, but he was a simple and an unambitious
man, and his wrath would in all probability have consumed itself
unappeased within him had he not chanced to come into contact, at the
critical moment, with a spirit more excitable and daring than his own.

Hurrell Froude, one of Keble's pupils, was a clever young man to whom
had fallen a rather larger share of self-assurance and intolerance than
even clever young men usually possess. What was singular about him,
however, was not so much his temper as his tastes. The sort of ardour
which impels more normal youths to haunt Music Halls and fall in love
with actresses took the form, in Froude's case, of a romantic devotion
to the Deity and an intense interest in the state of his own soul. He
was obsessed by the ideals of saintliness, and convinced of the supreme
importance of not eating too much. He kept a diary in which he recorded
his delinquencies, and they were many. 'I cannot say much for myself
today,' he writes on September 29th, 1826 (he was twenty-three years
old). 'I did not read the Psalms and Second Lesson after breakfast,
which I had neglected to do before, though I had plenty of time on my
hands. Would have liked to be thought adventurous for a scramble I had
at the Devil's Bridge. Looked with greediness to see if there was a
goose on the table for dinner; and though what I ate was of the plainest
sort, and I took no variety, yet even this was partly the effect of
accident, and I certainly rather exceeded in quantity, as I was fuzzy
and sleepy after dinner.' 'I allowed myself to be disgusted, with--'s
pomposity,' he writes a little later, 'also smiled at an allusion in the
Lessons to abstemiousness in eating. I hope not from pride or vanity,
but mistrust; it certainly was unintentional.' And again, 'As to my
meals, I can say that I was always careful to see that no one else would
take a thing before I served myself; and I believe as to the kind of my
food, a bit of cold endings of a dab at breakfast, and a scrap of
mackerel at dinner, are the only things that diverged from the strict
rule of simplicity.' 'I am obliged to confess,' he notes, 'that in my
intercourse with the Supreme Being, I am be come more and more
sluggish.' And then he exclaims: 'Thine eye trieth my inward parts, and
knoweth my thoughts ... Oh that my ways were made so direct that I might
keep Thy statutes. I will walk in Thy Commandments when Thou hast set my
heart at liberty.'

Such were the preoccupations of this young man. Perhaps they would have
been different, if he had had a little less of what Newman describes as
his 'high severe idea of the intrinsic excellence of Virginity'; but it
is useless to speculate.

Naturally enough the fierce and burning zeal of Keble had a profound
effect upon his mind. The two became intimate friends, and Froude,
eagerly seizing upon the doctrines of the elder man, saw to it that they
had as full a measure of controversial notoriety as an Oxford common
room could afford. He plunged the metaphysical mysteries of the Holy
Catholic Church into the atmosphere of party politics. Surprised Doctors
of Divinity found themselves suddenly faced with strange questions which
had never entered their heads before. Was the Church of England, or was
it not, a part of the Church Catholic? If it was, were not the Reformers
of the sixteenth century renegades? Was not the participation of the
Body and Blood of Christ essential to the maintenance of Christian life
and hope in each individual? Were Timothy and Titus Bishops? Or were
they not? If they were, did it not follow that the power of
administering the Holy Eucharist was the attribute of a sacred order
founded by Christ Himself? Did not the Fathers refer to the tradition of
the Church as to something independent of the written word, and
sufficient to refute heresy, even alone? Was it not, therefore, God's
unwritten word? And did it not demand the same reverence from us as the
Scriptures, and for exactly the same reason--BECAUSE IT WAS HIS WORD?
The Doctors of Divinity were aghast at such questions, which seemed to
lead they hardly knew whither; and they found it difficult to think of
very apposite answers. But Hurrell Froude supplied the answers himself
readily enough. All Oxford, all England, should know the truth. The time
was out of joint, and he was only too delighted to have been born to set
it right.

But, after all, something more was needed than even the excitement of
Froude combined with the conviction of Keble to ruffle seriously the
vast calm waters of Christian thought; and it so happened that that
thing was not wanting: it was the genius of John Henry Newman. If Newman
had never lived, or if his father, when the gig came round on the fatal
morning, still undecided between the two Universities, had chanced to
turn the horse's head in the direction of Cambridge, who can doubt that
the Oxford Movement would have flickered out its little flame unobserved
in the Common Room of Oriel? And how different, too, would have been the
fate of Newman himself! He was a child of the Romantic Revival, a
creature of emotion and of memory, a dreamer whose secret spirit dwelt
apart in delectable mountains, an artist whose subtle senses caught,
like a shower in the sunshine, the impalpable rainbow of the immaterial
world. In other times, under other skies, his days would have been more
fortunate. He might have helped to weave the garland of Meleager, or to
mix the lapis lazuli of Fra Angelico, or to chase the delicate truth in
the shade of an Athenian palaestra, or his hands might have fashioned
those ethereal faces that smile in the niches of Chartres. Even in his
own age he might, at Cambridge, whose cloisters have ever been
consecrated to poetry and common sense, have followed quietly in Gray's
footsteps and brought into flower those seeds of inspiration which now
lie embedded amid the faded devotion of the Lyra Apostolica.

At Oxford, he was doomed. He could not withstand the last enchantment of
the Middle Age. It was in vain that he plunged into the pages of Gibbon
or communed for long hours with Beethoven over his beloved violin. The
air was thick with clerical sanctity, heavy with the odours of tradition
and the soft warmth of spiritual authority; his friendship with Hurrell
Froude did the rest. All that was weakest in him hurried him onward, and
all that was strongest in him too. His curious and vaulting imagination
began to construct vast philosophical fabrics out of the writings of
ancient monks, and to dally with visions of angelic visitations and the
efficacy of the oil of St Walburga; his emotional nature became absorbed
in the partisan passions of a University clique; and his subtle
intellect concerned itself more and more exclusively with the
dialectical splitting of dogmatical hairs. His future course was marked
out for him all too clearly; and yet by a singular chance the true
nature of the man was to emerge triumphant in the end. If Newman had
died at the age of sixty, today he would have been already forgotten,
save by a few ecclesiastical historians; but he lived to write his
Apologia, and to reach immortality, neither as a thinker nor as a
theologian, but as an artist who has embalmed the poignant history of an
intensely human spirit in the magical spices of words.

When Froude succeeded in impregnating Newman with the ideas of Keble,
the Oxford Movement began. The original and remarkable characteristic of
these three men was that they took the Christian Religion au pied de la
lettre. This had not been done in England for centuries. When they
declared every Sunday that they believed in the Holy Catholic Church,
they meant it. When they repeated the Athanasian Creed, they meant it.
Even, when they subscribed to the Thirty-nine Articles, they meant it-or
at least they thought they did. Now such a state of mind was
dangerous--more dangerous indeed--than they at first realised. They had
started with the innocent assumption that the Christian Religion was
contained in the doctrines of the Church of England; but, the more they
examined this matter, the more difficult and dubious it became. The
Church of England bore everywhere upon it the signs of human
imperfection; it was the outcome of revolution and of compromise, of the
exigencies of politicians and the caprices of princes, of the prejudices
of theologians and the necessities of the State. How had it happened
that this piece of patchwork had become the receptacle for the august
and infinite mysteries of the Christian Faith? This was the problem with
which Newman and his friends found themselves confronted. Other men
might, and apparently did, see nothing very strange in such a situation;
but other men saw in Christianity itself scarcely more than a convenient
and respectable appendage to existence, by which a sound system of
morals was inculcated, and through which one might hope to attain to
everlasting bliss.

To Newman and Keble it was otherwise. They saw a transcendent
manifestation of Divine power flowing down elaborate and immense through
the ages; a consecrated priesthood, stretching back, through the mystic
symbol of the laying on of hands, to the very Godhead; a whole universe
of spiritual beings brought into communion with the Eternal by means of
wafers; a great mass of metaphysical doctrines, at once incomprehensible
and of incalculable import, laid down with infinite certitude; they saw
the supernatural everywhere and at all times, a living force, floating
invisible in angels, inspiring saints, and investing with miraculous
properties the commonest material things. No wonder that they found such
a spectacle hard to bring into line with the institution which had been
evolved from the divorce of Henry VIII, the intrigues of Elizabethan
parliaments, and the Revolution of 1688. They did, no doubt, soon
satisfy themselves that they had succeeded in this apparently hopeless
task; but, the conclusions which they came to in order to do so were
decidedly startling.

The Church of England, they declared, was indeed the one true Church,
but she had been under an eclipse since the Reformation; in fact, since
she had begun to exist. She had, it is true, escaped the corruptions of
Rome; but she had become enslaved by the secular power, and degraded by
the false doctrines of Protestantism. The Christian Religion was still
preserved intact by the English priesthood, but it was preserved, as it
were, unconsciously--a priceless deposit, handed down blindly from
generation to generation, and subsisting less by the will of man than
through the ordinance of God as expressed in the mysterious virtue of
the Sacraments. Christianity, in short, had become entangled in a series
of unfortunate circumstances from which it was the plain duty of Newman
and his friends to rescue it forthwith. What was curious was that this
task had been reserved, in so marked a manner, for them. Some of the
divines of the seventeenth century had, perhaps, been vouchsafed
glimpses of the truth; but they were glimpses and nothing more. No, the
waters of the true Faith had dived underground at the Reformation, and
they were waiting for the wand of Newman to strike the rock before they
should burst forth once more into the light of day. The whole matter, no
doubt, was Providential--what other explanation could there be?

The first step, it was clear, was to purge the Church of her shames and
her errors. The Reformers must be exposed; the yoke of the secular power
must be thrown off; dogma must be reinstated in its old pre-eminence;
and Christians must be reminded of what they had apparently
forgotten--the presence of the supernatural in daily life. 'It would be
a gain to this country,' Keble observed, 'were it vastly more
superstitious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce in its religion,
than at present it shows itself to be.' 'The only good I know of
Cranmer,' said Hurrell Froude, 'was that he burned well.' Newman
preached, and soon the new views began to spread. Among the earliest of
the converts was Dr Pusey, a man of wealth and learning, a professor, a
canon of Christ Church, who had, it was rumoured, been to Germany. Then
the Tracts for the Times were started under Newman's editorship, and the
Movement was launched upon the world.

The Tracts were written 'with the hope of rousing members of our Church
to comprehend her alarming position ... as a man might give notice of a
fire or inundation, to startle all who heard him'. They may be said to
have succeeded in their objective, for the sensation which they caused
among clergymen throughout the country was extreme. They dealt with a
great variety of questions, but the underlying intention of all of them
was to attack the accepted doctrines and practices of the Church of
England. Dr. Pusey wrote learnedly on Baptismal Regeneration; he also
wrote on Fasting. His treatment of the latter subject met with
considerable disapproval, which surprised the Doctor. 'I was not
prepared,' he said, 'for people questioning, even in the abstract, the
duty of fasting; I thought serious-minded persons at least supposed they
practised fasting in some way or other. I assumed the duty to be
acknowledged and thought it only undervalued.' We live and learn, even
though we have been to Germany.

Other tracts discussed the Holy Catholic Church, the Clergy, and the
Liturgy. One treated of the question 'whether a clergyman of the Church
of England be now bound to have morning and evening prayers daily in his
parish church?' Another pointed out the 'Indications of a superintending
Providence in the preservation of the Prayer-book and in the changes
which it has undergone'. Another consisted of a collection of 'Advent
Sermons on Antichrist'. Keble wrote a long and elaborate tract 'On the
Mysticism attributed to the Early Fathers of the Church', in which he
expressed his opinions upon a large number of curious matters.

'According to men's usual way of talking,' he wrote, 'it would be called
an accidental circumstance that there were five loaves, not more nor
less, in the store of Our Lord and His disciples wherewith to provide
the miraculous feast. But the ancient interpreters treat it as designed
and providential, in this surely not erring: and their conjecture is
that it represents the sacrifice of the whole world of sense, and
especially of the Old Dispensation, which, being outward and visible,
might be called the dispensation of the senses, to the FATHER of our
LORD JESUS CHRIST, to be a pledge and means of communion with Him
according to the terms of the new or evangelical law.

They arrived at this idea by considering the number five, the number of
the senses, as the mystical opponent of the visible and sensible
universe--ta aistheta, as distinguished from ta noita. Origen lays down
the rule in express terms. '"The number five,"' he says, '"frequently,
nay almost always, is taken for the five senses."' In another passage,
Keble deals with an even more recondite question. He quotes the teaching
of St. Barnabas that 'Abraham, who first gave men circumcision, did
thereby perform a spiritual and typical action, looking forward to the
Son'. St. Barnabas's argument is as follows: Abraham circumcised of his
house men to the number of 318. Why 318? Observe first the 18, then the
300. Of the two letters which stand for 18, 10 is represented by 1, 8 by
H. 'Thou hast here,' says St. Barnabas, 'the word of Jesus.' As for the
300, 'the Cross is represented by Tau, and the letter Tau represents
that number'.

Unfortunately, however, St. Barnabas's premise was of doubtful validity,
as the Rev. Mr. Maitland pointed out, in a pamphlet impugning the
conclusions of the Tract. 'The simple fact is,' he wrote, 'that when
Abraham pursued Chedorlaomer "he armed his trained servants, BORN IN HIS
OWN HOUSE, three hundred and eighteen". When, more than thirteen
(according to the common chronology, fifteen) years after, he
circumcised "all the men of his house, BORN IN THE HOUSE, AND BOUGHT
WITH MONEY OF THE STRANGER", and, in fact, every male who was as much as
eight days old, we are not told what the number amounted to. Shall we
suppose (just for the sake of the interpretation) that Abraham's family
had so dwindled in the interval as that now all the males of his
household, trained men, slaves, and children, equalled only and exactly
the number of his warriors fifteen years before?'

The question seems difficult to answer, but Keble had, as a matter of
fact, forestalled the argument in the following passage, which had
apparently escaped the notice of the Rev. Mr. Maitland:

'Now whether the facts were really so or not (if it were, it was surely
by special providence), that Abraham's household at the time of the
circumcision was exactly the same number as before; still the argument
of St. Barnabas will stand. As thus: circumcision had from the
beginning, a reference to our SAVIOUR, as in other respects, so in this;
that the mystical number, which is the cipher of Jesus crucified, was
the number of the first circumcised household in the strength of which
Abraham prevailed against the powers of the world. So St. Clement of
Alexandria, as cited by Fell.'

And Keble supports his contention through ten pages of close print, with
references to Aristeas, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, and Dr. Whitby.

Writings of this kind could not fail in their effect. Pious youths in
Oxford were carried away by them, and began to flock around the standard
of Newman. Newman himself became a party chief--encouraging, organising,
persuading. His long black figure, swiftly passing through the streets,
was pointed at with awe; crowds flocked to his sermons; his words were
repeated from mouth to mouth; 'Credo in Newmannum' became a common
catchword. Jokes were made about the Church of England, and practices,
unknown for centuries, began to be revived. Young men fasted and did
penance, recited the hours of the Roman Breviary, and confessed their
sins to Dr. Pusey. Nor was the movement confined to Oxford; it spread in
widening circles through the parishes of England; the dormant devotion
of the country was suddenly aroused. The new strange notion of taking
Christianity literally was delightful to earnest minds; but it was also
alarming. Really to mean every word you said, when you repeated the
Athanasian Creed! How wonderful! And what enticing and mysterious vistas
burst upon the view! But then, those vistas, where were they leading?
Supposing--oh heavens!--supposing after all they were to lead to--!


III

IN due course, the Tracts made their appearance at the remote rectory in
Sussex. Manning was some years younger than Newman, and the two men had
only met occasionally at the University; but now, through common
friends, a closer relationship began to grow up between them. It was
only to be expected that Newman should be anxious to enroll the rising
young Rector among his followers; and, on Manning's side, there were
many causes which impelled him to accept the overtures from Oxford.

He was a man of a serious and vigorous temperament, to whom it was
inevitable that the bold high principles of the Movement should strongly
appeal. There was also an element in his mind that element which had
terrified him in his childhood with Apocalyptic visions, and urged him
in his youth to Bible readings after breakfast--which now brought him
under the spell of the Oxford theories of sacramental mysticism. And
besides, the Movement offered another attraction: it imputed an
extraordinary, transcendent merit to the profession which Manning
himself pursued. The cleric was not as his lay brethren; he was a
creature apart, chosen by Divine will and sanctified by Divine
mysteries. It was a relief to find, when one had supposed that one was
nothing but a clergyman, that one might, after all, be something
else--one might be a priest.

Accordingly, Manning shook off his early Evangelical convictions,
started an active correspondence with Newman, and was soon working for
the new cause. He collected quotations, and began to translate the works
of Optatus for Dr. Pusey. He wrote an article on Justin for the British
Critic, "Newman's Magazine". He published a sermon on Faith, with notes
and appendices, which was condemned by an evangelical bishop, and
fiercely attacked by no less a person than the celebrated Mr. Bowdler.
'The sermon,' said Mr Bowdler, in a book which he devoted to the
subject, 'was bad enough, but the appendix was abominable.' At the same
time he was busy asserting the independence of the Church of England,
opposing secular education, and bringing out pamphlets against the
Ecclesiastical Commission, which had been appointed by Parliament to
report on Church Property. Then we find him in the role of a spiritual
director of souls. Ladies met him by stealth in his church, and made
their confessions. Over one case--that of a lady, who found herself
drifting towards Rome--he consulted Newman. Newman advised him to
'enlarge upon the doctrine of I Cor. vii';

'also, I think you must press on her the prospect of benefiting the poor
Church, through which she has her baptism, by stopping in it. Does she
not care for the souls of all around her, steeped and stifled in
Protestantism? How will she best care for them by indulging her own
feelings in the communion of Rome, or in denying herself, and staying in
sackcloth and ashes to do them good?'

Whether these arguments were successful does not appear.

For several years after his wife's death, Manning was occupied with
these new activities, while his relations with Newman developed into
what was apparently a warm friendship. 'And now vive valeque, my dear
Manning', we find Newman writing in a letter dated 'in festo S. Car.
1838', 'as wishes and prays yours affectionately, John H. Newman'. But,
as time went on, the situation became more complicated. Tractarianism
began to arouse the hostility, not only of the evangelical, but of the
moderate churchmen, who could not help perceiving in the ever-deepening,
'catholicism' of the Oxford party, the dread approaches of Rome. The
"Record" newspaper an influential Evangelical journal--took up the
matter and sniffed Popery in every direction; it spoke of certain
clergymen as 'tainted'; and after that, preferment seemed to pass those
clergymen by. The fact that Manning found it wise to conduct his
confessional ministrations in secret was in itself highly significant.
It was necessary to be careful, and Manning was very careful indeed. The
neighbouring Archdeacon, Mr. Hare, was a low churchman; Manning made
friends with him, as warmly, it seemed, as he had made friends with
Newman. He corresponded with him, asked his advice about the books he
should read, and discussed questions of Theology--'As to Gal. vi 15, we
cannot differ.... With a man who reads and reasons I can have no
controversy; and you do both.' Archdeacon Hare was pleased, but soon a
rumour reached him, which was, to say the least of it, upsetting.
Manning had been removing the high pews from a church in Brighton, and
putting in open benches in their place. Everyone knew what that meant;
everyone knew that a high pew was one of the bulwarks of Protestantism,
and that an open bench had upon it the taint of Rome. But Manning
hastened to explain:

'My dear friend,' he wrote, 'I did not exchange pews for open benches,
but got the pews (the same in number) moved from the nave of the church
to the walls of the side aisles, so that the whole church has a regular
arrangement of open benches, which (irregularly) existed before ... I am
not today quite well, so farewell, with much regard--Yours ever, H. E.
M.'

Archdeacon Hare was reassured.

It was important that he should be, for the Archdeacon of Chichester was
growing very old, and Hare's influence might be exceedingly useful when
a vacancy occurred. So, indeed, it fell out. A new bishop, Dr.
Shuttleworth, was appointed to the See, and the old Archdeacon took the
opportunity of retiring. Manning was obviously marked out as his
successor, but the new bishop happened to be a low churchman, an
aggressive low churchman, who went so far as to parody the Tractarian
fashion of using Saints' days for the dating of letters by writing 'The
Palace, washing-day', at the beginning of his. And--what was equally
serious--his views were shared by Mrs. Shuttleworth, who had already
decided that the pushing young Rector was 'tainted'. But at the critical
moment Archdeacon Hare came to the rescue; he persuaded the Bishop that
Manning was safe; and the appointment was accordingly made--behind Mrs.
Shuttleworth's back. She was furious, but it was too late; Manning was
an Archdeacon. All the lady could do, to indicate her disapprobation,
was to put a copy of Mr. Bowdler's book in a conspicuous position on the
drawing-room table, when he came to pay his respects at the Palace.

Among the letters of congratulation which Manning received, was one from
Mr Gladstone, with whom he had remained on terms of close friendship
since their days together at Oxford.

'I rejoice,' Mr Gladstone wrote, 'on your account personally; but more
for the sake of the Church. All my brothers-in-law are here and scarcely
less delighted than I am. With great glee am I about to write your new
address; but, the occasion really calls for higher sentiments; and sure
am I that you are one of the men to whom it is specially given to
develop the solution of that great problem--how all our minor
distractions are to be either abandoned, absorbed, or harmonised through
the might of the great principle of communion in the body of Christ.'

Manning was an Archdeacon; but he was not yet out of the woods. His
relations with the Tractarians had leaked out, and the Record was
beginning to be suspicious. If Mrs. Shuttleworth's opinion of him were
to become general, it would certainly be a grave matter. Nobody could
wish to live and die a mere Archdeacon. And then, at that very moment,
an event occurred which made it imperative to take a definite step, one
way or the other. That event was the publication of Tract No. 90.

For some time it had been obvious to every impartial onlooker that
Newman was slipping down an inclined plane at the bottom of which lay
one thing, and one thing only--the Roman Catholic Church. What was
surprising was the length of time which he was taking to reach the
inevitable destination. Years passed before he came to realise that his
grandiose edifice of a Church Universal would crumble to pieces if one
of its foundation stones was to be an amatory intrigue of Henry VIII.
But, at last he began to see that terrible monarch glowering at him
wherever he turned his eyes. First he tried to exorcise the spectre with
the rolling periods of the Caroline divines; but it only strutted the
more truculently. Then in despair he plunged into the writings of the
early Fathers, and sought to discover some way out of his difficulties
in the complicated labyrinth of ecclesiastical history. After months
spent in the study of the Monophysite heresy, the alarming conclusion
began to force itself upon him that the Church of England was perhaps in
schism. Eventually he read an article by a Roman Catholic on St.
Augustine and the Donatists, which seemed to put the matter beyond
doubt. St. Augustine, in the fifth century, had pointed out that the
Donatists were heretics because the Bishop of Rome had said so. The
argument was crushing; it rang in Newman's ears for days and nights;
and, though he continued to linger on in agony for six years more, he
never could discover any reply to it. All he could hope to do was to
persuade himself and anyone else who liked to listen to him that the
holding of Anglican orders was not inconsistent with a belief in the
whole cycle of Roman doctrine as laid down at the Council of Trent. In
this way he supposed that he could at once avoid the deadly sin of
heresy and conscientiously remain a clergyman in the Church of England;
and with this end in view, he composed Tract No. 90.

The object of the Tract was to prove that there was nothing in the
Thirty-nine Articles incompatible with the creed of the Roman Church.
Newman pointed out, for instance, that it was generally supposed that
the Articles condemned the doctrine of Purgatory; but they did not; they
merely condemned the Romish doctrine of Purgatory--and Romish, clearly,
was not the same thing as Roman. Hence it followed that believers in the
Roman doctrine of Purgatory might subscribe the Articles with a good
conscience. Similarly, the Articles condemned 'the sacrifices of
masses', but they did not condemn 'the sacrifice of the Mass'. Thus, the
Mass might be lawfully celebrated in English Churches. Newman took the
trouble to examine the Articles in detail from this point of view, and
the conclusion he came to in every case supported his contention in a
singular manner.

The Tract produced an immense sensation, for it seemed to be a deadly
and treacherous blow aimed at the very heart of the Church of England.
Deadly it certainly was, but it was not so treacherous as it appeared at
first sight. The members of the English Church had ingenuously imagined
up to that moment that it was possible to contain, in a frame of words,
the subtle essence of their complicated doctrinal system, involving the
mysteries of the Eternal and the Infinite on the one hand, and the
elaborate adjustments of temporal government on the other. They did not
understand that verbal definitions in such a case will only perform
their functions so long as there is no dispute about the matters which
they are intended to define: that is to say, so long as there is no need
for them. For generations this had been the case with the Thirty-nine
Articles. Their drift was clear enough; and nobody bothered over their
exact meaning. But directly someone found it important to give them a
new and untraditional interpretation, it appeared that they were a mass
of ambiguity, and might be twisted into meaning very nearly anything
that anybody liked. Steady-going churchmen were appalled and outraged
when they saw Newman, in Tract No. 90, performing this operation. But,
after all, he was only taking the Church of England at its word. And
indeed, since Newman showed the way, the operation has become so
exceedingly common that the most steady-going churchman hardly raises an
eyebrow at it now.

At the time, however, Newman's treatment of the Articles seemed to
display not only a perverted supersubtlety of intellect, but a temper of
mind that was fundamentally dishonest. It was then that he first began
to be assailed by those charges of untruthfulness which reached their
culmination more than twenty years later in the celebrated controversy
with Charles Kingsley, which led to the writing of the Apologia. The
controversy was not a very fruitful one, chiefly because Kingsley could
no more understand the nature of Newman's intelligence than a subaltern
in a line regiment can understand a Brahmin of Benares. Kingsley was a
stout Protestant, whose hatred of Popery was, at bottom, simply
ethical--an honest, instinctive horror of the practices of priestcraft
and the habits of superstition; and it was only natural that he should
see in those innumerable delicate distinctions which Newman was
perpetually drawing, and which he himself had not only never thought of,
but could not even grasp, simply another manifestation of the inherent
falsehood of Rome. But, in reality, no one, in one sense of the word,
was more truthful than Newman. The idea of deceit would have been
abhorrent to him; and indeed it was owing to his very desire to explain
what he had in his mind exactly and completely, with all the refinements
of which his subtle brain was capable, that persons such as Kingsley
were puzzled into thinking him dishonest. Unfortunately, however, the
possibilities of truth and falsehood depend upon other things besides
sincerity. A man may be of a scrupulous and impeccable honesty, and yet
his respect for the truth--it cannot be denied--may be insufficient. He
may be, like the lunatic, the lover, and the poet, 'of imagination all
compact'; he may be blessed, or cursed, with one of those 'seething
brains', one of those 'shaping fanatasies' that 'apprehend more than
cool reason ever comprehends'; he may be by nature incapable of sifting
evidence, or by predilection simply indisposed to do so. 'When we were
there,' wrote Newman in a letter to a friend after his conversion,
describing a visit to Naples, and the miraculous circumstances connected
with the liquefaction of St. Januarius's blood,

'the feast of St. Gennaro was coming on, and the Jesuits were eager for
us to stop--they have the utmost confidence in the miracle--and were the
more eager because many Catholics, till they have seen it, doubt it. Our
father director here tells us that before he went to Naples he did not
believe it. That is, they have vague ideas of natural means,
exaggeration, etc., not of course imputing fraud. They say conversions
often take place in consequence. It is exposed for the Octave, and the
miracle continues--it is not simple liquefaction, but sometimes it
swells, sometimes boils, sometimes melts--no one can tell what is going
to take place. They say it is quite overcoming-and people cannot help
crying to see it. I understand that Sir H. Davy attended everyday, and
it was this extreme variety of the phenomenon which convinced him that
nothing physical would account for it. Yet there is this remarkable fact
that liquefactions of blood are common at Naples--and, unless it is
irreverent to the Great Author of Miracles to be obstinate in the
inquiry, the question certainly rises whether there is something in the
air. (Mind, I don't believe there is--and, speaking humbly, and without
having seen it, think it a true miracle--but I am arguing.) We saw the
blood of St Patrizia, half liquid; i.e. liquefying, on her feast day. St
John Baptist's blood sometimes liquefies on the 29th of August, and did
when we were at Naples, but we had not time to go to the church. We saw
the liquid blood of an Oratorian Father; a good man, but not a saint,
who died two centuries ago, I think; and we saw the liquid blood of Da
Ponte, the great and holy Jesuit, who, I suppose, was almost a saint.
But these instances do not account for liquefaction on certain days, if
this is the case. But the most strange phenomenon is what happens at
Ravello, a village or town above Amalfi. There is the blood of St.
Pantaleon. It is in a vessel amid the stonework of the Altar-it is not
touched but on his feast in June it liquefies. And more, there is an
excommunication against those who bring portions of the True Cross into
the Church. Why? Because the blood liquefies, whenever it is brought. A
person I know, not knowing the prohibition, brought in a portion, and
the Priest suddenly said, who showed the blood, "Who has got the Holy
Cross about him?" I tell you what was told me by a grave and religious
man. It is a curious coincidence that in telling this to our Father
Director here, he said, "Why, we have a portion of St. Pantaleon's blood
at the Chiesa Nuova, and it is always liquid."'

After leaving Naples, Newman visited Loreto, and inspected the house of
the Holy Family, which, as is known to the faithful, was transported
thither, in three hops, from Palestine.

'I went to Loreto,' he wrote, 'with a simple faith, believing what I
still more believed when I saw it. I have no doubt now. If you ask me
why I believe it, it is because everyone believes it at Rome; cautious
as they are and sceptical about some other things. I have no antecedent
difficulty in the matter. He who floated the Ark on the surges of a
world-wide sea, and enclosed in it all living things, who has hidden the
terrestrial paradise, who said that faith might move mountains, who
sustained thousands for forty years in a sterile wilderness, who
transported Elias and keeps him hidden till the end, could do this
wonder also.'

Here, whatever else there may be, there is certainly no trace of a
desire to deceive. Could a state of mind, in fact, be revealed with more
absolute transparency?

When Newman was a child he 'wished that he could believe the Arabian
Nights were true'. When he came to be a man, his wish seems to have been
granted.

Tract No. 90 was officially condemned by the authorities at Oxford, and
in the hubbub that followed, the contending parties closed their ranks;
henceforward, any compromise between the friends and the enemies of the
Movement was impossible. Archdeacon Manning was in too conspicuous a
position to be able to remain silent; he was obliged to declare himself,
and he did not hesitate. In an archidiaconal charge, delivered within a
few months of his appointment, he firmly repudiated the Tractarians. But
the repudiation was not deemed sufficient, and a year later he repeated
it with greater emphasis. Still, however, the horrid rumours were
afloat. The "Record" began to investigate matters, and its vigilance was
soon rewarded by an alarming discovery: the sacrament had been
administered in Chichester Cathedral on a weekday, and 'Archdeacon
Manning, one of the most noted and determined of the Tractarians, had
acted a conspicuous part on the occasion'. It was clear that the only
way of silencing these malevolent whispers was by some public
demonstration whose import nobody could doubt. The annual sermon
preached on Guy Fawkes Day before the University of Oxford seemed to
offer the very opportunity that Manning required. He seized it; got
himself appointed preacher; and delivered from the pulpit of St. Mary's
a virulently Protestant harangue. This time there could indeed be no
doubt about the matter: Manning had shouted 'No Popery!' in the very
citadel of the Movement, and every one, including Newman, recognised
that he had finally cut himself off from his old friends. Everyone, that
is to say, except the Archdeacon himself. On the day after the sermon,
Manning walked out to the neighbouring village of Littlemore, where
Newman was now living in retirement with a few chosen disciples, in the
hope of being able to give a satisfactory explanation of what he had
done. But he was disappointed; for when, after an awkward interval, one
of the disciples appeared at the door, he was informed that Mr. Newman
was not at home.

With his retirement to Littlemore, Newman had entered upon the final
period of his Anglican career. Even he could no longer help perceiving
that the end was now only a matter of time. His progress was hastened in
an agitating manner by the indiscreet activity of one of his proselytes,
W. G. Ward. a young man who combined an extraordinary aptitude for a
priori reasoning with a passionate devotion to Opera Bouffe. It was
difficult, in fact, to decide whether the inner nature of Ward was more
truly expressing itself when he was firing off some train of scholastic
paradoxes on the Eucharist or when he was trilling the airs of Figaro
and plunging through the hilarious roulades of the Largo al Factotum.
Even Dr. Pusey could not be quite sure, though he was Ward's spiritual
director. On one occasion his young penitent came to him, and confessed
that a vow which he had taken to abstain from music during Lent was
beginning to affect his health. Could Dr. Pusey see his way to releasing
him from the vow? The Doctor decided that a little sacred music would
not be amiss. Ward was all gratitude, and that night a party was
arranged in a friend's rooms. The concert began with the solemn
harmonies of Handel, which were followed by the holy strains of the 'Oh
Salutaris' of Cherubini. Then came the elevation and the pomp of
'Possenti Numi' from the Magic Flute. But, alas! there lies much danger
in Mozart. The page was turned and there was the delicious duet between
Papageno and Papagena. Flesh and blood could not resist that; then song
followed song, the music waxed faster and lighter, until, at last Ward
burst into the intoxicating merriment of the Largo al Factotum. When it
was over, a faint but persistent knocking made itself heard upon the
wall; and it was only then that the company remembered that the rooms
next door were Dr. Pusey's.

The same entrainment which carried Ward away when he sat down to a piano
possessed him whenever he embarked on a religious discussion. 'The thing
that was utterly abhorrent to him,' said one of his friends, 'was to
stop short.' Given the premises, he would follow out their implications
with the mercilessness of a medieval monk, and when he had reached the
last limits of argument, be ready to maintain whatever propositions he
might find there with his dying breath. He had the extreme innocence of
a child and a mathematician. Captivated by the glittering eye of Newman,
he swallowed whole the supernatural conception of the universe which
Newman had evolved, accepted it as a fundamental premise, and 'began at
once to deduce from it whatsoever there might be to be deduced.' His
very first deductions included irrefutable proofs of (I) God's
particular providence for individuals; (2) the real efficacy of
intercessory prayer; (3) the reality of our communion with the saints
departed; (4) the constant presence and assistance of the angels of God.
Later on he explained mathematically the importance of the Ember Days:
'Who can tell,' he added, 'the degree of blessing lost to us in this
land by neglecting, as we alone of Christian Churches do neglect, these
holy days?' He then proceeded to convict the Reformers, not only of
rebellion, but'--for my own part I see not how we can avoid adding--of
perjury.' Every day his arguments became more extreme, more rigorously
exact, and more distressing to his master. Newman was in the position of
a cautious commander-in-chief being hurried into an engagement against
his will by a dashing cavalry officer. Ward forced him forward step by
step towards-no! he could not bear it; he shuddered and drew back. But
it was of no avail. In vain did Keble and Pusey wring their hands and
stretch forth their pleading arms to their now vanishing brother. The
fatal moment was fast approaching. Ward at last published a devastating
book in which he proved conclusively, by a series of syllogisms, that
the only proper course for the Church of England was to repent in
sackcloth and ashes her separation from the Communion of Rome. The
reckless author was deprived of his degree by an outraged University,
and a few weeks later was received into the Catholic Church.

Newman, in a kind of despair, had flung himself into the labours of
historical compilation. His views of history had changed since the days
when, as an undergraduate, he had feasted on the worldly pages of
Gibbon.

'Revealed religion,' he now thought, 'furnishes facts to other sciences,
which those sciences, left to themselves, would never reach. Thus, in
the science of history, the preservation of our race in Noah's Ark is an
historical fact, which history never would arrive at without
revelation.'

With these principles to guide him, he plunged with his disciples into a
prolonged study of the English Saints. Biographies soon appeared of St.
Bega, St. Adamnan, St. Gundleus, St. Guthlake, Brother Drithelm, St.
Amphibalus, St. Wuistan, St. Ebba, St. Neot, St. Ninian, and Cunibert
the Hermit. Their austerities, their virginity, and their miraculous
powers were described in detail. The public learned with astonishment
that St Ninian had turned a staff into a tree; that St. German had
stopped a cock from crowing, and that a child had been raised from the
dead to convert St. Helier. The series has subsequently been continued
by a more modern writer whose relation of the history of the blessed St.
Mael contains, perhaps, even more matter for edification than Newman's
biographies.

At the time, indeed, those works caused considerable scandal. Clergymen
denounced them in pamphlets. St. Cuthbert was described by his
biographer as having 'carried the jealousy of women, characteristic of
all the saints, to an extraordinary pitch'. An example was given,
whenever he held a spiritual conversation with St Ebba, he was careful
to spend the ensuing ours of darkness 'in prayer, up to his neck in
water'. 'Persons who invent such tales,' wrote one indignant
commentator, 'cast very grave and just suspicions on the purity of their
own minds. And young persons, who talk and think in this way, are in
extreme danger of falling into sinful habits. As to the volumes before
us, the authors have, in their fanatical panegyrics of virginity, made
use of language downright profane.'

One of the disciples at Littlemore was James Anthony Froude, the younger
brother of Hurrell, and it fell to his lot to be responsible for the
biography of St. Neot. While he was composing it, he began to feel some
qualms. Saints who lighted fires with icicles, changed bandits into
wolves, and floated across the Irish Channel on altar-stones, produced a
disturbing effect on his historical conscience. But he had promised his
services to Newman, and he determined to carry through the work in the
spirit in which he had begun it. He did so; but he thought it proper to
add the following sentence by way of conclusion: 'This is all, and
indeed rather more than all, that is known to men of the blessed St.
Neot; but not more than is known to the angels in heaven.'

Meanwhile, the English Roman Catholics were growing impatient; was the
great conversion never coming, for which they had prayed so fervently
and so long? Dr. Wiseman, at the head of them, was watching and waiting
with special eagerness. His hand was held out under the ripening fruit;
the delicious morsel seemed to be trembling on its stalk; and yet it did
not fall. At last, unable to bear the suspense any longer, he dispatched
to Littlemore Father Smith, an old pupil of Newman's, who had lately
joined the Roman communion, with instructions that he should do his
best, under cover of a simple visit of friendship, to discover how the
land lay. Father Smith was received somewhat coldly, and the
conversation ran entirely on topics which had nothing to do with
religion. When the company separated before dinner, he was beginning to
think that his errand had been useless; but, on their reassembling, he
suddenly noticed that Newman had changed his trousers, and that the
colour of the pair which he was now wearing was grey. At the earliest
moment, the emissary rushed back post-haste to Dr. Wiseman. 'All is
well,' he exclaimed; 'Newman no longer considers that he is in Anglican
orders." Praise be to God!' answered Dr Wiseman. 'But how do you know?'
Father Smith described what he had seen. 'Oh, is that all? My dear
father, how can you be so foolish?' But Father Smith was not to be
shaken. 'I know the man,' he said, and I know what it means. 'Newman will
come, and he will come soon.'

And Father Smith was right. A few weeks later, Newman suddenly slipped
off to a priest, and all was over. Perhaps he would have hesitated
longer still, if he could have foreseen how he was to pass the next
thirty years of his unfortunate existence; but the future was hidden,
and all that was certain was that the past had gone forever, and that
his eyes would rest no more upon the snapdragons of Trinity.

The Oxford Movement was now ended. The University breathed such a sigh
of relief as usually follows the difficult expulsion of a hard piece of
matter from a living organism, and actually began to attend to
education. As for the Church of England, she had tasted blood, and it
was clear that she would never again be content with a vegetable diet.
Her clergy, however, maintained their reputation for judicious
compromise, for they followed Newman up to the very point beyond which
his conclusions were logical, and, while they intoned, confessed, swung
incense, and burned candles with the exhilaration of converts, they yet
managed to do so with a subtle nuance which showed that they had nothing
to do with Rome. Various individuals underwent more violent changes.
Several had preceded Newman into the Roman fold; among others an unhappy
Mr. Sibthorpe, who subsequently changed his mind, and returned to the
Church of his fathers, and then--perhaps it was only natural--changed
his mind again. Many more followed Newman, and Dr. Wiseman was
particularly pleased by the conversion of a Mr. Morris, who, as he said,
was 'the author of the essay, which won the prize on the best method of
proving Christianity to the Hindus'. Hurrell Froude had died before
Newman had read the fatal article on St. Augustine; but his brother,
James Anthony, together with Arthur Clough, the poet, went through an
experience which was more distressing in those days than it has since
become; they lost their faith. With this difference, however, that while
in Froude's case the loss of his faith turned out to be rather like the
loss of a heavy portmanteau, which one afterwards discovers to have been
full of old rags and brickbats, Clough was made so uneasy by the loss of
his that he went on looking for it everywhere as long as he lived; but
somehow he never could find it. On the other hand, Keble and Pusey
continued for the rest of their lives to dance in an exemplary manner
upon the tight-rope of High Anglicanism; in such an exemplary manner,
indeed, that the tight-rope has its dancers still.


IV

MANNING was now thirty-eight, and it was clear that he was the rising
man in the Church of England. He had many powerful connections: he was
the brother-in-law of Samuel Wilberforce, who had been lately made a
bishop; he was a close friend of Mr. Gladstone, who was a Cabinet
Minister; and he was becoming well known in the influential circles of
society in London. His talent for affairs was recognised not only in the
Church, but in the world at large, and he busied himself with matters of
such varied scope as National Education, the administration of the Poor
Law, and the Employment of Women. Mr. Gladstone kept up an intimate
correspondence with him on these and on other subjects, mingling in his
letters the details of practical statesmanship with the speculations of
a religious thinker. 'Sir James Graham,' he wrote, in a discussion of
the bastardy clauses of the Poor Law, 'is much pleased with the tone of
your two communications. He is disposed, without putting an end to the
application of the workhouse test against the mother, to make the remedy
against the putative father "real and effective" for expenses incurred
in the workhouse. I am not enough acquainted to know whether it would be
advisable to go further. You have not proposed it; and I am disposed to
believe that only with a revived and improved discipline in the Church
can we hope for any generally effective check upon lawless lust.' 'I
agree with you EMINENTLY,' he writes, in a later letter, 'in your
doctrine of FILTRATION. But it sometimes occurs to me, though the
question may seem a strange one, how far was the Reformation, but
especially the Continental Reformation, designed by God, in the region
of final causes, for that purification of the Roman Church which it has
actually realised?'

In his archdeaconry, Manning lived to the full the active life of a
country clergyman. His slim, athletic figure was seen everywhere in the
streets of Chichester, or on the lawns of the neighbouring rectories, or
galloping over the downs in breeches and gaiters, or cutting brilliant
figures on the ice. He was an excellent judge of horse-flesh, and the
pair of greys which drew his hooded phaeton so swiftly through the lanes
were the admiration of the county. His features were already beginning
to assume their ascetic cast, but the spirit of youth had not yet fled
from them, so that he seemed to combine the attractions of dignity and
grace. He was a good talker, a sympathetic listener, a man who
understood the difficult art of preserving all the vigour of a manly
character and yet never giving offence. No wonder that his sermons drew
crowds, no wonder that his spiritual advice was sought for eagerly by an
ever-growing group of penitents; no wonder that men would say, when his
name was mentioned, 'Oh, Manning! No power on earth can keep HIM from a
bishopric!'

Such was the fair outward seeming of the Archdeacon's life; but, the
inward reality was different. The more active, the more fortunate, the
more full of happy promise his existence became, the more persistently
was his secret imagination haunted by a dreadful vision--the lake that
burneth forever with brimstone and fire. The temptations of the Evil One
are many, Manning knew; and he knew also that, for him at least, the
most subtle and terrible of all temptations was the temptation of
worldly success. He tried to reassure himself, but it was in vain. He
committed his thoughts to a diary, weighing scrupulously his every
motive, examining with relentless searchings into the depths of his
heart. Perhaps, after all, his longings for preferment were merely
legitimatehopes for 'an elevation into a sphere of higher usefulness'.
But no, there was something more than that. 'I do feel pleasure,' he
noted, 'in honour, precedence, elevation, the society of great people,
and all this is very shameful and mean.'

After Newman's conversion, he almost convinced himself that his 'visions
of an ecclesiastical future' were justified by the role that he would
play as a 'healer of the breach in the Church of England'. Mr. Gladstone
agreed with him; but there was One higher than Mr. Gladstone, and did He
agree?

'I am pierced by anxious thoughts. God knows what my desires have been
and are, and why they are crossed.... I am flattering myself with a
fancy about depth and reality.... The great question is: Is God enough
for you now? And if you are as now even to the end of life, will it
suffice you?... Certainly I would rather choose to be stayed on God,
than to be in the thrones of the world and the Church. Nothing else will
go into Eternity.'

In a moment of ambition, he had applied for the Readership of Lincoln's
Inn, but, owing chiefly to the hostile influence of the Record, the
appointment had gone elsewhere. A little later, a more important
position was offered to him--the office of sub-almoner to the Queen,
which had just been vacated by the Archbishop of York, and was almost
certain to lead to a mitre. The offer threw Manning into an agony of
self-examination. He drew up elaborate tables, after the manner of
Robinson Crusoe, with the reasons for and against his acceptance of the
post:

               FOR                      AGAINST

    1. That it comes unsought.  1. Not therefore to be accepted. Such
                                  things are trials as well as leadings.

    2. That it is honourable.   2. Being what I am, ought I
                                   not therefore to decline it--
                                  (1) as humiliation;
                                  (2) as revenge on myself
                                      for Lincoln's Inn;

                                  (3) as a testimony?

And so on. He found in the end ten 'negative reasons', with no
affirmative ones to balance them, and, after a week's deliberation, he
rejected the offer.

But peace of mind was as far off from him as ever. First the bitter
thought came to him that 'in all this Satan tells me I am doing it to be
thought mortified and holy'; and then he was obsessed by the still
bitterer feelings of ineradicable disappointment and regret. He had lost
a great opportunity, and it brought him small comfort to consider that
'in the region of counsels, self-chastisement, humiliation,
self-discipline, penance, and of the Cross', he had perhaps done right.

The crisis passed, but it was succeeded by a fiercer one. Manning was
taken seriously ill, and became convinced that he might die at any
moment. The entries in his Diary grew more elaborate than ever; his
remorse for the past, his resolutions for the future, his protestations
of submission to the will of God, filled page after page of parallel
columns, headings and sub-headings, numbered clauses, and analytical
tables. 'How do I feel about Death?' he wrote.

    'Certainly great fear:

    1. Because of the uncertainty of our state before God.
    2. Because of the consciousness--
       (1) of great sins past,
       (2) of great sinfulness,
       (3) of most shallow repentance.

    What shall I do?'

He decided to mortify himself, to read St Thomas Aquinas, and to make
his 'night prayers forty instead of thirty minutes'. He determined
during Lent 'to use no pleasant bread (except on Sundays and feasts)
such as cake and sweetmeat'; but he added the proviso 'I do not include
plain biscuits'. Opposite this entry appears the word 'KEPT'. And yet
his back-slidings were many. Looking back over a single week, he was
obliged to register 'petulance twice' and 'complacent visions'. He heard
his curate being commended for bringing so many souls to God during
Lent, and he 'could not bear it'; but the remorse was terrible: 'I
abhorred myself on the spot, and looked upward for help.' He made out
list upon list of the Almighty's special mercies towards him, and they
included his creation, his regeneration, and (No. 5) 'the preservation
of my life six times to my knowledge:

    (1) In illness at the age of nine.
    (2) In the water.
    (3) By a runaway horse at Oxford.
    (4) By the same.
    (5) By falling nearly through the ceiling of a church.
    (6) Again by a fall of a horse. And I know not
        how often in shooting, riding, etc.'

At last he became convalescent; but the spiritual experiences of those
agitated weeks left an indelible mark upon his mind, and prepared the
way for the great change which was to follow.

For he had other doubts besides those which held him in torment as to
his own salvation; he was in doubt about the whole framework of his
faith. Newman's conversion, he found, had meant something more to him
than he had first realised. It had seemed to come as a call to the
redoubling of his Anglican activities; but supposing, in reality, it
were a call towards something very different--towards an abandonment of
those activities altogether? It might be 'a trial', or again it might be
a 'leading'; how was he to judge? Already, before his illness, these
doubts had begun to take possession of his mind.

'I am conscious to myself,' he wrote in his Diary, 'of an extensively
changed feeling towards the Church of Rome ... The Church of England
seems to me to be diseased: 1. ORGANICALLY (six sub-headings). 2.
FUNCTIONALLY (seven sub-headings) ... Wherever it seems healthy, it
approximates the system of Rome.'

Then thoughts of the Virgin Mary suddenly began to assail him:

    (1) If John the Baptist were sanctified from the womb,
        how much more the B.V.!

    (2) If Enoch and Elijah were exempted from death,
        why not the B.V. from sin?

    (3) It is a strange way of loving the Son to slight
        the mother!'

The arguments seemed irresistible, and a few weeks later the following
entry occurs--'Strange thoughts have visited me:

    (1) I have felt that the Episcopate of the Church of England is
        secularised and bound down beyond hope....

    (2) I feel as if a light had fallen upon me. My feeling about the
        Roman Church is not intellectual. I have intellectual
        difficulties, but the great moral difficulties seem melting.

    (3) Something keeps rising and saying, "You will end in the Roman
        Church".

He noted altogether twenty-five of these 'strange thoughts'. His mind
hovered anxiously round--

    (1) The Incarnation,
    (2) The Real Presence,
           i. Regeneration,
          ii. Eucharist, and
    (3) The Exaltation of S. M. and Saints.

His twenty-second strange thought was as follows: 'How do I know where I
may be two years hence? Where was Newman five years ago?'

It was significant, but hardly surprising, that, after his illness,
Manning should have chosen to recuperate in Rome. He spent several
months there, and his Diary during the whole of that period is concerned
entirely with detailed descriptions of churches, ceremonies, and relics,
and with minute accounts of conversations with priests and nuns. There
is not a single reference either to the objects of art or to the
antiquities of the place; but another omission was still more
remarkable. Manning had a long interview with Pius IX, and his only
record of it is contained in the bald statement: 'Audience today at the
Vatican'. Precisely what passed on that occasion never transpired; all
that is known is that His Holiness expressed considerable surprise on
learning from the Archdeacon that the chalice was used in the Anglican
Church in the administration of Communion. 'What!' he exclaimed, is the
same chalice made use of by everyone?' 'I remember the pain I felt,'
said Manning, long afterwards, 'at seeing how unknown we were to the
Vicar of Jesus Christ. It made me feel our isolation.'

On his return to England, he took up once more the work in his
Archdeaconry with what appetite he might. Ravaged by doubt, distracted
by speculation, he yet managed to maintain an outward presence of
unshaken calm. His only confidant was Robert Wilberforce, to whom, for
the next two years, he poured forth in a series of letters, headed
'UNDER THE SEAL' to indicate that they contained the secrets of the
confessional--the whole history of his spiritual perturbations. The
irony of his position was singular; for, during the whole of this time,
Manning was himself holding back from the Church of Rome a host of
hesitating penitents by means of arguments which he was at the very
moment denouncing as fallacious to his own confessor. But what else
could he do? When he received, for instance, a letter such as the
following from an agitated lady, what was he to say?

'MY DEAR FATHER IN CHRIST,

' ... I am sure you would pity me and like to help me, if you knew the
unhappy, unsettled state my mind is in, and the misery of being
ENTIRELY, WHEREVER I AM, with those who look upon joining the Church of
Rome as the most awful "fall" conceivable to any one, and are devoid of
the smallest comprehension of how any enlightened person can do it....
My old Evangelical friends, with all my deep, deep love for them, do not
succeed in shaking me in the least....

'My brother has just published a book called "Regeneration", which all
my friends are reading and highly extolling; it has a very contrary
effect to what he would desire on my mind. I can read and understand it
all in an altogether different sense, and the facts which he quotes
about the articles as drawn up in 1536, and again in 1552, and of the
Irish articles of 1615 and 1634, STARTLE and SHAKE me about the Reformed
Church in England far more than anything else, and have done so ever
since I first saw them in Mr. Maskell's pamphlet (as quoted from Mr
Dodsworth's).

'I do hope you have some time and thought to pray for me still. Mr.
Galton's letters long ago grew into short formal notes, which hurt me
and annoyed me particularly, and I never answered his last, so,
literally, I have no one to say things to and get help from, which in
one sense is a comfort when my convictions seem to be leading me on and
on, and gaining strength in spite of all the dreariness of my lot.

'Do you know I can't help being very anxious and unhappy about poor
Sister Harriet. I am afraid of her GOING OUT OF HER MIND. She comforts
herself by an occasional outpouring of everything to me, and I had a
letter this morning.... She says Sister May has promised the Vicar never
to talk to her or allow her to talk on the subject with her, and I doubt
whether this can be good for her, because though she has lost her faith,
she says, in the Church of England, yet she never thinks of what she
could have faith in, and resolutely without inquiring into the question
determines not to be a Roman Catholic, so that really, you see, she is
allowing her mind to run adrift and yet perfectly powerless.

'Forgive my troubling you with this letter, and believe me to be always
your faithful, grateful and affectionate daughter,

'EMMA RYLE.

'P.S. I wish I could see you once more so very much.'

How was Manning, a director of souls, and a clergyman of the Church of
England, to reply that in sober truth there was very little to choose
between the state of mind of Sister Emma, or even of Sister Harriet, and
his own? The dilemma was a grievous one: when a soldier finds himself
fighting for a cause in which he has lost faith, it is treachery to
stop, and it is treachery to go on.

At last, in the seclusion of his library, Manning turned in agony to
those old writings which had provided Newman with so much instruction
and assistance; perhaps the Fathers would do something for him as well.
He ransacked the pages of St. Cyprian and St. Cyril; he went through the
complete works of St. Optatus and St. Leo; he explored the vast
treatises of Tertullian and Justin Martyr. He had a lamp put into his
phaeton, so that he might lose no time during his long winter drives.
There he sat, searching St. Chrysostom for some mitigation of his
anguish, while he sped along between the hedges to distant sufferers, to
whom he duly administered the sacraments according to the rites of the
English Church. He hurried back to commit to his Diary the analysis of
his reflections, and to describe, under the mystic formula of secrecy,
the intricate workings of his conscience to Robert Wilberforce. But,
alas! he was no Newman; and even the fourteen folios of St. Augustine
himself, strange to say, gave him very little help.

The final propulsion was to come from an entirely different quarter. In
November, 1847, the Reverend Mr. Gorham was presented by the Lord
Chancellor to the living of Bramford Speke in the diocese of Exeter. The
Bishop, Dr. Phillpotts, was a High Churchman, and he had reason to
believe that Mr. Gorham held evangelical opinions; he therefore
subjected him to an examination on doctrine, which took the form partly
of a verbal interrogatory, lasting thirty-eight hours, and partly of a
series of one hundred and forty-nine written questions. At the end of
the examination he came to the conclusion that Mr. Gorham held heretical
views on the subject of Baptismal Regeneration, and he therefore refused
to institute. Mr. Gorham, thereupon, took proceedings against the Bishop
in the Court of Arches. He lost his case; and he then appealed to the
judicial Committee of the Privy Council.

The questions at issue were taken very seriously by a large number of
persons. In the first place, there was the question of Baptismal
Regeneration itself. This is by no means an easy one to disentangle; but
it may be noted that the doctrine of Baptism includes: (1) God's
intention, that is to say, His purpose in electing certain persons to
eternal life--an abstruse and greatly controverted subject, upon which
the Church of England abstains from strict definition; (2) God's action,
whether by means of sacraments or otherwise--concerning which the Church
of England maintains the efficacy of sacraments,' but does not formally
deny that grace may be given by other means, repentance and faith being
present; and (3) the question whether sacramental grace is given
instrumentally, by and at the moment of the act of baptism, or in
consequence of an act of prevenient grace rendering the receiver
worthy--that is to say, whether sacramental grace in baptism is given
absolutely or conditionally.

It was over this last question that the dispute raged hottest in the
Gorham Case. The High Church party, represented by Dr. Phillpotts,
asserted that the mere act of baptism conferred regeneration upon the
recipient and washed away his original sin. To this the Evangelicals,
headed by Mr. Gorham, replied that, according to the Articles,
regeneration would not follow unless baptism was RIGHTLY received. What,
then, was the meaning of 'rightly'? Clearly it implied not merely lawful
administration, but worthy reception; worthiness, therefore, is the
essence of the sacrament; and worthiness means faith and repentance.
Now, two propositions were accepted by both parties--that all infants
are born in original sin, and that original sin could be washed away by
baptism. But how could both these propositions be true, argued Mr.
Gorham, if it was also true that faith and repentance were necessary
before baptism could come into operation at all? How could an infant in
arms be said to be in a state of faith and repentance? How, therefore,
could its original sin be washed away by baptism? And yet, as every one
agreed, washed away it was.

The only solution of the difficulty lay in the doctrine of prevenient
grace; and Mr. Gorham maintained that unless God performed an act of
prevenient grace by which the infant was endowed with faith and
repentance, no act of baptism could be effectual; though to whom, and
under what conditions, prevenient grace was given, Mr. Gorham confessed
himself unable to decide. The light thrown by the Bible upon the whole
matter seemed somewhat dubious, for whereas the baptism of St. Peter's
disciples at Jerusalem and St. Philip's at Samaria was followed by the
gift of the Spirit, in the case of Cornelius the sacrament succeeded the
gift. St. Paul also was baptised; and as for the language of St. John
iii 5; Rom. vi 3, 4; I Peter iii 21, it admits of more than one
interpretation. There could, however, be no doubt that the Church of
England assented to Dr. Phillpotts' opinion; the question was whether or
not she excluded Mr. Gorham's. If it was decided that she did, it was
clear that henceforward, there would be very little peace for
Evangelicals within her fold.

But there was another issue, even more fundamental than that of
Baptismal Regeneration itself, involved in the Gorham trial. An Act
passed in 1833 had constituted the Judicial Committee of the Privy
Council the supreme court of appeal for such cases; and this Committee
was a body composed entirely of laymen. It was thus obvious that the
Royal Supremacy was still a fact, and that a collection of lawyers
appointed by the Crown had the legal right to formulate the religious
doctrine of the Church of England. In 1850 their judgment was delivered;
they reversed the decision of the Court of Arches, and upheld the
position of Mr. Gorham. Whether his views were theologically correct or
not, they said, was not their business; it was their business to decide
whether the opinions under consideration were contrary or repugnant to
the doctrine of the Church of England as enjoined upon the clergy by its
Articles, Formularies, and Rubrics; and they had come to the conclusion
that they were not. The judgement still holds good; and to this day, a
clergyman of the Church of England is quite at liberty to believe that
Regeneration does not invariably take place when an infant is baptised.

The blow fell upon no one with greater violence than upon Manning. Not
only was the supreme efficacy of the sign of the cross upon a baby's
forehead one of his favourite doctrines, but up to that moment he had
been convinced that the Royal Supremacy was a mere accident--a temporary
usurpation which left the spiritual dominion of the Church essentially
untouched. But now the horrid reality rose up before him, crowned and
triumphant; it was all too clear that an Act of Parliament, passed by
Jews, Roman Catholics, and Dissenters, was the ultimate authority which
decided upon the momentous niceties of the Anglican faith. Mr. Gladstone
also, was deeply perturbed. It was absolutely necessary, he wrote, to
'rescue and defend the conscience of the Church from the present hideous
system'. An agitation was set on foot, and several influential
Anglicans, with Manning at their head, drew up and signed a formal
protest against the Gorham judgment. Mr. Gladstone however, proposed
another method of procedure: precipitate action, he declared, must be
avoided at all costs, and he elaborated a scheme for securing
procrastination, by which a covenant was to bind all those who believed
that an article of the creed had been abolished by Act of Parliament to
take no steps in any direction, nor to announce their intention of doing
so, until a given space of time had elapsed. Mr. Gladstone was hopeful
that some good might come of this--though indeed he could not be sure.
'Among others,' he wrote to Manning, 'I have consulted Robert
Wilberforce and Wegg-Prosser, and they seemed inclined to favour my
proposal. It might, perhaps, have kept back Lord Feilding. But he is
like a cork.'

The proposal was certainly not favoured by Manning. Protests and
procrastinations, approving Wegg-Prossers and cork-like Lord
Feildings--all this was feeding the wind and folly; the time for action
had come.

'I can no longer continue,' he wrote to Robert Wilberforce, 'under oath
and subscription binding me to the Royal Supremacy in Ecclesiastical
causes, being convinced:

  (1) That it is a violation of the Divine Office of the Church.

  (2) That it has involved the Church of England in a separation
  from the Universal Church, which separation I cannot clear of the
  character of schism.

  (3) That it has thereby suspended and prevented the functions of
  the Church of England.'

It was in vain that Robert Wilberforce pleaded, in vain that Mr.
Gladstone urged upon his mind the significance of John iii 8. ['The wind
bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst
not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth; so is everyone that is
born of the Spirit.']

'I admit,' Mr. Gladstone wrote, 'that the words might in some way be
satisfied by supposing our Lord simply to mean "the facts of nature are
unintelligible, therefore, be not afraid if revealed truths be likewise
beyond the compass of the understanding"; but this seems to me a meagre
meaning.'

Such considerations could hold him no longer, and Manning executed the
resignation of his office and benefice before a public notary. Soon
afterwards, in the little Chapel off Buckingham Palace Road, kneeling
beside Mr. Gladstone, he worshipped for the last time as an Anglican.
Thirty years later the Cardinal told how, just before the Communion
service commenced, he turned to his friends with the words:

'I can no longer take the Communion in the Church of England.' 'I rose
up, and laying my hand on Mr. Gladstone's shoulder, said "Come". It was
the parting of the ways. Mr. Gladstone remained; and I went my way. Mr.
Gladstone still remains where I left him.'

On April 6th, 1851, the final step was taken: Manning was received into
the Roman Catholic Church. Now at last, after the long struggle, his
mind was at rest.

'I know what you mean,' he wrote to Robert Wilberforce, 'by saying that
one sometimes feels as if all this might turn out to be only another
"Land of Shadows". I have felt it in time past, but not now. The
theologia from Nice to St. Thomas Aquinas, and the undivided unity
suffused throughout the world, of which the Cathedra Petri is the
centre, is now 1800 years old, and mightier in every power now than
ever--in intellect, in science, in separation from the world; and purer
too, refined by 300 years of conflict with the modern infidel
civilisation--all of this is a fact more solid than the earth.'


V.

WHEN Manning joined the Church of Rome, he acted under the combined
impulse of the two dominating forces in his nature. His preoccupation
with the supernatural might, alone, have been satisfied within the fold
of the Anglican communion; and so might his preoccupation with
himself--the one might have found vent in the elaborations of High
Church ritual, and the other in the activities of a bishopric. But the
two together could not be quieted so easily. The Church of England is a
commodious institution; she is very anxious to please, but somehow or
other, she has never managed to supply a happy home to superstitious
egotists. 'What an escape for my poor soul!' Manning is said to have
exclaimed when, shortly after his conversion, a mitre was going
a-begging. But, in truth, Manning's 'poor soul' had scented nobler
quarry. To one of his temperament, how was it possible, when once the
choice was plainly put, to hesitate for a moment between the respectable
dignity of an English bishop, harnessed by the secular power, with the
Gorham judgment as a bit between his teeth, and the illimitable
pretensions of the humblest priest of Rome?

For the moment, however, it seemed as if the Fates had at last been
successful in their little game of shunting Manning. The splendid career
which he had so laboriously built up from the small beginnings of his
Sussex curacy was shattered--and shattered by the inevitable operation
of his own essential needs. He was over forty, and he had been put back
once more to the very bottom rung of the ladder--a middle-aged neophyte
with, so far as could be seen, no special claim to the attention of his
new superiors. The example of Newman, a far more illustrious convert,
was hardly reassuring: he had been relegated to a complete obscurity, in
which he was to remain until extreme old age. Why should there be
anything better in store for Manning? Yet it so happened that within
fourteen years of his conversion Manning was Archbishop of Westminster
and the supreme ruler of the Roman Catholic community in England. This
time the Fates gave up the unequal struggle; they paid over their stakes
in despair, and retired from the game.

Nevertheless it is difficult to feel quite sure that Manning's plunge
was as hazardous as it appeared. Certainly he was not a man who was
likely to forget to look before he leaped, nor one who, if he happened
to know that there was a mattress spread to receive him, would leap with
less conviction. In the light of after-events, one would be glad to know
what precisely passed at that mysterious interview of his with the Pope,
three years before his conversion. It is at least possible that the
authorities in Rome had their eye on Manning; the may well have felt
that the Archdeacon of Chichester would be a great catch. What did Pio
Nono say? It is easy to imagine the persuasive innocence of his Italian
voice. 'Ah, dear Signor Manning, why don't you come over to us? Do you
suppose that we should not look after you?'

At any rate, when he did go over, Manning was looked after very
thoroughly. There was, it is true, a momentary embarrassment at the
outset: it was only with the greatest difficulty that he could bring
himself to abandon his faith in the validity of Anglican Orders, in
which he believed 'with consciousness stronger than all reasoning'. He
was convinced that he was still a priest. When the Rev. Mr. Tierney, who
had received him into the Roman Catholic communion, assured him that
this was not the case, he was filled with dismay and mortification.
After a five hour discussion, he started to his feet in a rage. 'Then,
Mr. Tierney,' he exclaimed, 'you think me insincere.'

The bitter draught was swallowed at last, and, after that, all went
smoothly. Manning hastened to Rome, and was immediately placed by the
Pope in the highly select Accademia Ecclesiastica, commonly known as the
'Nursery of Cardinals', for the purpose of completing his theological
studies. When the course was finished, he continued, by the Pope's
special request, to spend six months of every year in Rome, where he
preached to the English visitors, became acquainted with the great
personages of the Papal court, and enjoyed the privilege of constant
interviews with the Holy Father. At the same time, he was able to make
himself useful in London, where Cardinal Wiseman, the newly created
Archbishop of Westminster, was seeking to reanimate the Roman Catholic
community. Manning was not only extremely popular in the pulpit and in
the confessional; he was not only highly efficient as a gleaner of
souls--and of souls who moved in the best society; he also possessed a
familiarity with official persons and official ways, which was
invaluable. When the question arose of the appointment of Catholic
chaplains in the Crimea during the war, it was Manning who approached
the Minister, interviewed the Permanent Secretary, and finally succeeded
in obtaining all that was required. When a special Reformatory for
Catholic children was proposed, Manning carried through the negotiation
with the Government. When an attempt was made to remove Catholic
children from the Workhouses, Manning was again indispensable. No wonder
Cardinal Wiseman soon determined to find some occupation of special
importance for the energetic convert. He had long wished to establish a
congregation of secular priests in London particularly devoted to his
service, and the opportunity for the experiment had clearly now arisen.
The order of the Oblates of St. Charles was founded in Bayswater, and
Manning was put at its head. Unfortunately, no portion of the body of
St. Charles could be obtained for the new community, but two relics of
his blood were brought over to Bayswater from Milan. Almost at the same
time the Pope signified his appreciation of Manning's efforts by
appointing him Provost of the Chapter of Westminster--a position which
placed him at the head of the Canons of the diocese.

This double promotion was the signal for the outbreak of an
extraordinary internal struggle, which raged without intermission for
the next seven years, and was to end only with the accession of Manning
to the Archbishopric. The condition of the Roman Catholic community in
England was at that time a singular one. On the one hand the old
repressive laws of the seventeenth century had been repealed by liberal
legislation, and on the other a large new body of distinguished converts
had entered the Roman Church as a result of the Oxford Movement. It was
evident that there was a 'boom' in English Catholicism, and, in 1850,
Pius IX recognised the fact by dividing up the whole of England into
dioceses, and placing Wiseman at the head of them as Archbishop of
Westminster. Wiseman's encyclical, dated 'from without the Flaminian
Gate', in which he announced the new departure, was greeted in England
by a storm of indignation, culminating in the famous and furibund letter
of Lord John Russell, then Prime Minister, against the insolence of the
'Papal Aggression'. Though the particular point against which the outcry
was raised--the English territorial titles of the new Roman bishops--was
an insignificant one, the instinct of Lord John and of the English
people was in reality sound enough. Wiseman's installation did mean, in
fact, a new move in the Papal game; it meant an advance, if not an
aggression--a quickening in England of the long-dormant energies of the
Roman Church. That Church has never had the reputation of being an
institution to be trifled with; and, in those days, the Pope was still
ruling as a temporal Prince over the fairest provinces of Italy. Surely,
if the images of Guy Fawkes had not been garnished, on that fifth of
November, with triple crowns, it would have been a very poor compliment
to His Holiness.

But it was not only the honest Protestants of England who had cause to
dread the arrival of the new Cardinal Archbishop; there was a party
among the Catholics themselves who viewed his installation with alarm
and disgust. The families in which the Catholic tradition had been
handed down uninterruptedly since the days of Elizabeth, which had known
the pains of exile and of martyrdom, and which clung together an alien
and isolated group in the midst of English society, now began to feel
that they were, after all, of small moment in the counsels of Rome. They
had laboured through the heat of the day, but now it seemed as if the
harvest was to be gathered in by a crowd of converts who were
proclaiming on every side as something new and wonderful the truths
which the Old Catholics, as they came to be called, had not only known,
but for which they had suffered for generations. Cardinal Wiseman, it is
true, was no convert; he belonged to one of the oldest of the Catholic
families; but he had spent most of his life in Rome, he was out of touch
with English traditions, and his sympathy with Newman and his followers
was only too apparent. One of his first acts as Archbishop was to
appoint the convert W. G. Ward, who was not even in holy orders, to be
Professor of Theology at St. Edmund's College--the chief seminary for
young priests, in which the ancient traditions of Douay were still
flourishing. Ward was an ardent Papalist and his appointment indicated
clearly enough that in Wiseman's opinion there was too little of the
Italian spirit in the English community. The uneasiness of the Old
Catholics was becoming intense, when they were reassured by Wiseman's
appointing as his co-adjutor and successor his intimate friend, Dr.
Errington, who was created on the occasion Archbishop of Trebizond in
partibus infidelium. Not only was Dr. Errington an Old Catholic of the
most rigid type, he was a man of extreme energy, whose influence was
certain to be great; and, in any case, Wiseman was growing old, so that
before very long it seemed inevitable that the policy of the diocese
would be in proper hands. Such was the position of affairs when, two
years after Errington's appointment, Manning became head of the Oblates
of St. Charles and Provost of the Chapter of Westminster.

The Archbishop of Trebizond had been for some time growing more and more
suspicious of Manning's influence, and this sudden elevation appeared to
justify his worst fears. But his alarm was turned to fury when he
learned that St. Edmund's College, from which he had just succeeded in
removing the obnoxious W. G. Ward, was to be placed under the control of
the Oblates of St. Charles. The Oblates did not attempt to conceal the
fact that one of their principal aims was to introduce the customs of a
Roman Seminary into England. A grim perspective of espionage and
tale-bearing, foreign habits, and Italian devotions opened out before
the dismayed eyes of the Old Catholics; they determined to resist to the
utmost; and it was upon the question of the control of St. Edmund's that
the first battle in the long campaign between Errington and Manning was
fought.

Cardinal Wiseman was now obviously declining towards the grave. A man of
vast physique--'your immense', an Irish servant used respectfully to
call him--of sanguine temperament, of genial disposition, of versatile
capacity, he seemed to have engrafted upon the robustness of his English
nature the facile, child-like, and expansive qualities of the South. So
far from being a Bishop Blougram (as the rumour went) he was, in fact,
the very antithesis of that subtle and worldly-wise ecclesiastic. He had
innocently looked forward all his life to the reunion of England to the
See of Peter, and eventually had come to believe that, in God's hand, he
was the instrument destined to bring about this miraculous consummation.
Was not the Oxford Movement, with its flood of converts, a clear sign of
the Divine will? Had he not himself been the author of that momentous
article on St. Augustine and the Donatists, which had finally convinced
Newman that the Church of England was in schism? And then, had he not
been able to set afoot a Crusade of Prayer throughout Catholic Europe
for the conversion of England?

He awaited the result with eager expectation, and in the meantime he set
himself to smooth away the hostility of his countrymen by delivering
courses of popular lectures on literature and archaeology. He devoted
much time and attention to the ceremonial details of his princely
office. His knowledge of rubric and ritual, and of the symbolical
significations of vestments, has rarely been equalled, and he took a
profound delight in the ordering and the performance of elaborate
processions. During one of these functions, an unexpected difficulty
arose: the Master of Ceremonies suddenly gave the word for a halt, and,
on being asked the reason, replied that he had been instructed that
moment by special revelation to stop the procession. The Cardinal,
however, was not at a loss. 'You may let the procession go on,' he
smilingly replied. 'I have just obtained permission, by special
revelation, to proceed with it.' His leisure hours he spent in the
writing of edifying novels, the composition of acrostics in Latin Verse,
and in playing battledore and shuttlecock with his little nieces. There
was, indeed, only one point in which he resembled Bishop Blougram--his
love of a good table. Some of Newman's disciples were astonished and
grieved to find that he sat down to four courses of fish during Lent. 'I
am sorry to say,' remarked one of them afterwards, 'that there is a
lobster salad side to the Cardinal.'

It was a melancholy fate which ordained that the last years of this
comfortable, easygoing, innocent old man should be distracted and
embittered by the fury of opposing principles and the venom of personal
animosities. But so it was. He had fallen into the hands of one who
cared very little for the gentle pleasures of repose. Left to himself,
Wiseman might have compromised with the Old Catholics and Dr. Errington;
but when Manning had once appeared upon the scene, all compromise became
impossible. The late Archdeacon of Chichester, who had understood so
well and practised with such careful skill the precept of the golden
mean so dear to the heart of the Church of England, now, as Provost of
Westminster, flung himself into the fray with that unyielding intensity
of fervour, that passion for the extreme and the absolute, which is the
very lifeblood of the Church of Rome. Even the redoubtable Dr.
Errington, short, thickset, determined, with his `hawk-like expression
of face', as a contemporary described him, 'as he looked at you through
his blue spectacles', had been known to quail in the presence of his,
antagonist, with his tall and graceful figure, his pale ascetic
features, his compressed and icy lips, his calm and penetrating gaze. As
for the poor Cardinal, he was helpless indeed.

Henceforward, there was to be no paltering with that dangerous spirit of
independence--was it not almost Gallicanism which possessed the Old
Catholic families of England? The supremacy of the Vicar of Christ must
be maintained at all hazards. Compared with such an object, what were
the claims of personal affection and domestic peace? The Cardinal
pleaded in vain; his lifelong friendship with Dr. Errington was plucked
up by the roots, and the harmony of his private life was utterly
destroyed. His own household was turned against him. His favourite
nephew, whom he had placed among the Oblates under Manning's special
care, left the congregation and openly joined the party of Dr.
Errington. His secretary followed suit; but saddest of all was the case
of Monsignor Searle. Monsignor Searle, in the capacity of confidential
man of affairs, had dominated over the Cardinal in private for years
with the autocratic fidelity of a servant who has grown indispensable.
His devotion, in fact, seemed to have taken the form of physical
imitation, for he was hardly less gigantic than his master. The two were
inseparable; their huge figures loomed together like neighbouring
mountains; and on one occasion, meeting them in the street, a gentleman
congratulated Wiseman on 'your Eminence's fine son'. Yet now even this
companionship was broken up. The relentless Provost here too brought a
sword. There were explosions and recriminations. Monsignor Searle,
finding that his power was slipping from him, made scenes and protests,
and at last was foolish enough to accuse Manning of peculation to his
face; after that it was clear that his day was over; he was forced to
slink snarling into the background, while the Cardinal shuddered through
all his immensity, and wished many times that he were already dead.

Yet, he was not altogether without his consolations; Manning took care
to see to that. His piercing eye had detected the secret way into the
recesses of the Cardinal's heart--had discerned the core of simple faith
which underlay that jovial manner and that facile talk. Others were
content to laugh and chatter and transact their business; Manning was
more artistic. He watched his opportunity, and then, when the moment
came, touched with a deft finger the chord of the Conversion of England.
There was an immediate response, and he struck the same chord again, and
yet again. He became the repository of the Cardinal's most intimate
aspirations. He alone sympathised and understood. 'If God gives me
strength to undertake a great wrestling-match with infidelity,' Wiseman
wrote, 'I shall owe it to him.'

But what he really found himself undertaking was a wrestling-match with
Dr. Errington. The struggle over St. Edmund's College grew more and more
acute. There were high words in the Chapter, where Monsignor Searle led
the assault against the Provost, and carried a resolution declaring that
the Oblates of St. Charles had intruded themselves illegally into the
Seminary. The Cardinal quashed the proceedings of the Chapter;
whereupon, the Chapter appealed to Rome. Dr. Errington, carried away by
the fury of the controversy, then appeared as the avowed opponent of the
Provost and the Cardinal. With his own hand he drew up a document
justifying the appeal of the Chapter to Rome by Canon Law and the
decrees of the Council of Trent. Wiseman was deeply pained: 'My own
co-adjutor,' he exclaimed, 'is acting as solicitor against me in a
lawsuit.' There was a rush to Rome, where, for several ensuing years,
the hostile English parties were to wage a furious battle in the
antechambers of the Vatican. But the dispute over the Oblates now sank
into insignificance beside the rage of contention which centred round a
new and far more deadly question; for the position of Dr. Errington
himself was at stake. The Cardinal, in spite of illness, indolence, and
the ties of friendship, had been brought at last to an extraordinary
step--he was petitioning the Pope for nothing less than the deprivation
and removal of the Archbishop of Trebizond.

The precise details of what followed are doubtful. It is only possible
to discern with clearness, amid a vast cloud of official documents and
unofficial correspondences in English, Italian, and Latin, of Papal
decrees and voluminous scritture, of confidential reports of episcopal
whispers and the secret agitations of Cardinals, the form of Manning,
restless and indomitable, scouring like a stormy petrel the angry ocean
of debate. Wiseman, dilatory, unbusinesslike, and infirm, was ready
enough to leave the conduct of affairs in his hands. Nor was it long
before Manning saw where the key of the whole position lay. As in the
old days, at Chichester, he had secured the goodwill of Bishop
Shuttleworth by cultivating the friendship of Archdeacon Hare, so now,
on this vaster scale of operations, his sagacity led him swiftly and
unerringly up the little winding staircase in the Vatican and through
the humble door which opened into the cabinet of Monsignor Talbot, the
private secretary of the Pope. Monsignor Talbot was a priest who
embodied in a singular manner, if not the highest, at least the most
persistent traditions of the Roman Curia. He was a master of various
arts which the practice of ages has brought to perfection under the
friendly shadow of the triple tiara. He could mingle together astuteness
and holiness without any difficulty; he could make innuendoes as
naturally as an ordinary man makes statements of fact; he could apply
flattery with so unsparing a hand that even Princes of the Church found
it sufficient; and, on occasion, he could ring the changes of torture on
a human soul with a tact which called forth universal approbation. With
such accomplishments, it could hardly be expected that Monsignor Talbot
should be remarkable either for a delicate sense of conscientiousness or
for an extreme refinement of feeling, but then it was not for those
qualities that Manning was in search when he went up the winding stair.
He was looking for the man who had the ear of Pio Nono; and, on the
other side of the low-arched door, he found him. Then he put forth all
his efforts; his success was complete; and an alliance began which was
destined to have the profoundest effect upon Manning's career, and was
only dissolved when, many years later, Monsignor Talbot was
unfortunately obliged to exchange his apartment in the Vatican for a
private lunatic asylum at Passy.

It was determined that the coalition should be ratified by the ruin of
Dr. Errington. When the moment of crisis was seen to be approaching,
Wiseman was summoned to Rome, where he began to draw up an immense
scrittura containing his statement of the case. For months past, the
redoubtable energies of the Archbishop of Trebizond had been absorbed in
a similar task. Folio was being piled upon folio, when a sudden blow
threatened to put an end to the whole proceeding in a summary manner.
The Cardinal was seized by violent illness, and appeared to be upon his
deathbed. Manning thought for a moment that his labours had been in vain
and that all was lost. But the Cardinal recovered; Monsignor Talbot used
his influence as he alone knew how; and a papal decree was issued by
which Dr. Errington was 'liberated' from the Coadjutorship of
Westminster, together with the right of succession to the See.

It was a supreme act of authority--a 'colpo di stato di Dominiddio', as
the Pope himself said--and the blow to the Old Catholics was
correspondingly severe. They found themselves deprived at one fell swoop
both of the influence of their most energetic supporter and of the
certainty of coming into power at Wiseman's death. And in the meantime,
Manning was redoubling his energies at Bayswater. Though his Oblates had
been checked over St. Edmund's, there was still no lack of work for them
to do. There were missions to be carried on, schools to be managed,
funds to be collected. Several new churches were built; a community of
most edifying nuns of the Third Order of St. Francis was established;
and L30,000, raised from Manning's private resources and from those of
his friends, was spent in three years. 'I hate that man,' one of the Old
Catholics exclaimed, 'he is such a forward piece.' The words were
reported to Manning, who shrugged his shoulders.

'Poor man,' he said, 'what is he made of? Does he suppose, in his
foolishness, that after working day and night for twenty years in heresy
and schism, on becoming a Catholic, I should sit in an easy-chair and
fold my hands all the rest of my life?'

But his secret thoughts were of a different caste.

'I am conscious of a desire,' he wrote in his Diary, 'to be in such a
position: (I) as I had in times past; (2) as my present circumstances
imply; (3) as my friends think me fit for; and (4) as I feel my own
faculties tend to.

'But, God being my helper, I will not seek it by the lifting of a finger
or the speaking, of a word.'

So Manning wrote, and thought, and prayed; but what are words, and
thoughts, and even prayers, to the mysterious and relentless powers of
circumstance and character? Cardinal Wiseman was slowly dying; the
tiller of the Church was slipping from his feeble hand; and Manning was
beside him, the one man with the energy, the ability, the courage, and
the conviction to steer the ship upon her course. More than that; there
was the sinister figure of a Dr. Errington crouching close at hand,
ready to seize the helm and make straight--who could doubt it?--for the
rocks. In such a situation the voice of self-abnegation must needs grow
still and small indeed. Yet it spoke on, for it was one of the paradoxes
in Manning's soul that that voice was never silent. Whatever else he
was, he was not unscrupulous. Rather, his scruples deepened with his
desires; and he could satisfy his most exorbitant ambitions in a
profundity of self-abasement. And so now he vowed to Heaven that he
would SEEK nothing--no, not by the lifting of a finger or the speaking
of a word. But, if something came to him--? He had vowed not to seek; he
had not vowed not to take. Might it not be his plain duty to take? Might
it not be the will of God?

Something, of course, did come to him, though it seemed for a moment
that it would elude his grasp. Wiseman died, and there ensued in Rome a
crisis of extraordinary intensity. 'Since the creation of the
hierarchy,' Monsignor Talbot wrote, it is the greatest moment for the
Church that I have yet seen.' It was the duty of the Chapter of
Westminster to nominate three candidates for succession to the
Archbishopric; they made one last effort, and had the temerity to place
upon the list, besides the names of two Old Catholic bishops, that of
Dr. Errington. It was a fatal blunder. Pius IX was furious; the Chapter
had committed an 'insulta al Papa', he exclaimed, striking his breast
three times in his rage. 'It was the Chapter that did it,' said Manning,
afterwards; but even after the Chapter's indiscretion, the fatal
decision hung in the balance for weeks.

'The great point of anxiety with me, wrote Monsignor Talbot to Manning,
'is whether a Congregation will be held, or whether the Holy Father will
perform a Pontifical act. He himself is doubting. I therefore say mass
and pray every morning that he may have the courage to choose for
himself, instead of submitting the matter to a Congregation. Although
the Cardinals are determined to reject Dr. Errington, nevertheless I am
afraid that they should select one of the others. You know very well
that Congregations are guided by the documents that are placed before
them; it is for this reason that I should prefer the Pope's acting
himself.'

But the Holy Father himself was doubting. In his indecision, he ordered
a month of prayers and masses. The suspense grew and grew. Everything
seemed against Manning. The whole English episcopate was opposed to him;
he had quarrelled with the Chapter; he was a convert of but few years'
standing; even the congregated Cardinals did not venture to suggest the
appointment of such a man. But suddenly, the Holy Father's doubts came
to an end. He heard a voice--a mysterious inward voice--whispering
something in his ear. 'Mettetelo li! Mettetelo li!' the voice repeated,
over and over again. Mettetelo li! It was an inspiration; and Pius IX,
brushing aside the recommendations of the Chapter and the deliberations
of the Cardinals, made Manning, by a Pontifical act, Archbishop of
Westminster.

Monsignor Talbot's felicity was complete; and he took occasion in
conveying his congratulations to his friend, to make some illuminating
reflections upon the great event.

'MY policy throughout,' he wrote, 'was never to propose you DIRECTLY to
the Pope, but, to make others do so, so that both you and I can always
say that it was not I who induced the Holy Father to name you--which
would lessen the weight of your appointment. This I say, because many
have said that your being named was all my doing. I do not say that the
Pope did not know that I thought you the only man eligible--as I took
care to tell him over and over again what was against all the other
candidates--and in consequence, he was almost driven into naming you.
After he had named you, the Holy Father said to me, "What a diplomatist
you are, to make what you wished come to pass!"

'Nevertheless,' concluded Monsignor Talbot, 'I believe your appointment
was specially directed by the Holy Ghost.'

Manning himself was apparently of the same opinion.

'My dear Child,' he wrote to a lady penitent, 'I have in these last
three weeks felt as if our Lord had called me by name. Everything else
has passed out of my mind. The firm belief that I have long had that the
Holy Father is the most supernatural person I have ever seen has given
me this feeling more deeply. 'Still, I feel as if I had been brought,
contrary to all human wills, by the Divine Will, into an immediate
relation to our Divine Lord.'

'If indeed,' he wrote to Lady Herbert, 'it were the will of our Divine
Lord to lay upon me this heavy burden, He could have done it in no way
more strengthening and consoling to me. To receive it from the hands of
His Vicar, and from Pius IX, and after long invocation of the Holy
Ghost, and not only without human influences, but in spite of manifold
aria powerful human opposition, gives me the last strength for such a
cross.'


VI

MANNING'S appointment filled his opponents with alarm. Wrath and
vengeance seemed to be hanging over them; what might not be expected
from the formidable enemy against whom they had struggled for so long,
and who now stood among them armed with archiepiscopal powers and
invested with the special confidence of Rome? Great was their amazement,
great was their relief, when they found that their dreaded master
breathed nothing but kindness, gentleness, and conciliation. The old
scores, they found, were not to be paid off, but to be wiped out. The
new archbishop poured forth upon every side all the tact, all the
courtesy, all the dignified graces of a Christian magnanimity. It was
impossible to withstand such treatment. Bishops who had spent years in
thwarting him became his devoted adherents; even the Chapter of
Westminster forgot its hatred. Monsignor Talbot was extremely surprised.
'Your greatest enemies have entirely come round,' he wrote. 'I received
the other day a panegyric of you from Searle. This change of feeling I
cannot attribute to anything but the Holy Ghost.' Monsignor Talbot was
very fond of the Holy Ghost; but, so far, at any rate as Searle was
concerned, there was another explanation. Manning, instead of dismissing
Searle from his position of 'oeconomus' in the episcopal household, had
kept him on--at an increased salary; and the poor man, who had not
scrupled in the days of his pride to call Manning a thief, was now duly
grateful.

As to Dr. Errington, he gave an example of humility and submission by at
once withdrawing into a complete obscurity. For years the Archbishop of
Trebizond, the ejected heir to the See of Westminster, laboured as a
parish priest in the Isle of Man. He nursed no resentment in his heart,
and, after a long and edifying life of peace and silence, he died in
1886, a professor of theology at Clifton.

It might be supposed that Manning could now feel that his triumph was
complete. His position was secure; his power was absolute; his prestige
was daily growing. Yet there was something that irked him still. As he
cast his eyes over the Roman Catholic community in England, he was aware
of one figure which, by virtue of a peculiar eminence, seemed to
challenge the supremacy of his own. That figure was Newman's.

Since his conversion, Newman's life had been a long series of
misfortunes and disappointments. When he had left the Church of England,
he was its most distinguished, its most revered member, whose words,
however strange, were listened to with profound attention, and whose
opinions, however dubious, were followed in all their fluctuations with
an eager and indeed a trembling respect. He entered the Church of Rome,
and found himself forthwith an unimportant man. He was received at the
Papal Court with a politeness which only faintly concealed a total lack
of interest and understanding. His delicate mind, with its refinements,
its hesitations, its complexities--his soft, spectacled, Oxford manner,
with its half-effeminate diffidence-such things were ill calculated to
impress a throng of busy Cardinals and Bishops, whose days were spent
amid the practical details of ecclesiastical organisation, the
long-drawn involutions of papal diplomacy, and the delicious bickerings
of personal intrigue. And when, at last, he did succeed in making some
impression upon these surroundings, it was no better; it was worse. An
uneasy suspicion gradually arose; it began to dawn upon the Roman
authorities that Dr. Newman was a man of ideas. Was it possible that Dr.
Newman did not understand that ideas in Rome were, to say the least of
it, out of place? Apparently, he did not--nor was that all; not content
with having ideas, he positively seemed anxious to spread them. When
that was known, the politeness in high places was seen to be wearing
decidedly thin. His Holiness, who on Newman's arrival had graciously
expressed the wish to see him 'again and again', now, apparently, was
constantly engaged. At first Newman supposed that the growing coolness
was the result of misapprehension; his Italian was faulty, Latin was not
spoken at Rome, his writings had only appeared in garbled translations.
And even Englishmen had sometimes found his arguments difficult to
follow. He therefore determined to take the utmost care to make his
views quite clear; his opinions upon religious probability, his
distinction between demonstrative and circumstantial evidence, his
theory of the development of doctrine and the aspects of ideas--these
and many other matters, upon which he had written so much, he would now
explain in the simplest language. He would show that there was nothing
dangerous in what he held, that there was a passage in De Lugo which
supported him--that Perrone, by maintaining that the Immaculate
Conception could be defined, had implicitly admitted one of his main
positions, and that his language about Faith had been confused, quite
erroneously, with the fideism of M. Bautain.

Cardinal Barnabo, Cardinal Reisach, Cardinal Antonelli, looked at him
with their shrewd eyes and hard faces, while he poured into their ears
which, as he had already noticed with distress, were large and not too
clean--his careful disquisitions; but, it was all in vain--they had
clearly never read De Lugo or Perrone, and as for M. Bautain, they had
never heard of him. Newman, in despair, fell back upon St. Thomas
Aquinas; but, to his horror, he observed that St. Thomas himself did not
mean very much to the Cardinals. With a sinking heart, he realised at
last the painful truth: it was not the nature of his views, it was his
having views at all, that was objectionable. He had hoped to devote the
rest of his life to the teaching of Theology; but what sort of Theology
could he teach which would be acceptable to such superiors? He left
Rome, and settled down in Birmingham as the head of a small community of
Oratorians. He did not complain; it was God's will; it was better so. He
would watch and pray.

But God's will was not quite so simple as that. Was it right, after all,
that a man with Newman's intellectual gifts, his devoted ardour, his
personal celebrity, should sink away out of sight and use in the dim
recesses of the Oratory at Birmingham? If the call were to come to him
to take his talent out of the napkin, how could he refuse? And the call
did come. A Catholic University was being started in Ireland and Dr.
Cullen, the Archbishop of Armagh, begged Newman to become the Rector. At
first he hesitated, but when he learned that it was the Holy Father's
wish that he should take up the work, he could doubt no longer; the
offer was sent from Heaven. The difficulties before him were very great;
not only had a new University to be called up out of the void, but the
position was complicated by the presence of a rival institution--the
undenominational Queen's Colleges, founded by Peel a few years earlier
with the object of giving Irish Catholics facilities for University
education on the same terms as their fellow-countrymen. Yet Newman had
the highest hopes. He dreamt of something greater than a merely Irish
University--of a noble and flourishing centre of learning for the
Catholics of Ireland and England alike. And why should not his dream
come true? 'In the midst of our difficulties, he said, 'I have one
ground of hope, just one stay, but, as I think, a sufficient one, which
serves me in the stead of all other argument whatever. It is the
decision of the Holy See; St. Peter has spoken.'

The years that followed showed to what extent it was safe to depend upon
St. Peter. Unforeseen obstacles cropped up on every side. Newman's
energies were untiring, but so was the inertia of the Irish authorities.
On his appointment, he wrote to Dr. Cullen asking that arrangements
might be made for his reception in Dublin. Dr. Cullen did not reply.
Newman wrote again, but still there was no answer. Weeks passed, months
passed, years passed, and not a word, not a sign, came from Dr. Cullen.
At last, after dangling for more than two years in the uncertainties and
perplexities of so strange a situation, Newman was summoned to Dublin.
There he found nothing but disorder and discouragement. The laity took
no interest in the scheme; the clergy actively disliked it; Newman's
authority was disregarded. He appealed to Cardinal Wiseman, and then at
last a ray of hope dawned. The cardinal suggested that a bishopric
should be conferred upon him, to give him a status suitable to his
position; Dr. Cullen acquiesced, and Pius IX was all compliance.
'Manderemo a Newman la crocetta,' he said to Wiseman, smilingly drawing
his hands down each side of his neck to his breast, 'lo faremo vescovo
di Porfirio, o qualche luogo.' The news spread among Newman's friends,
and congratulations began to come in. But the official intimation seemed
to be unaccountably delayed; no crocetta came from Rome, and Cardinal
Wiseman never again referred to the matter. Newman was left to gather
that the secret representations of Dr. Cullen had brought about a change
of counsel in high quarters. His pride did not allow him to inquire
further; but one of his lady penitents, Miss Giberne, was less discreet.
'Holy Father,' she suddenly said to the Pope in an audience one day,
'why don't you make Father Newman a bishop?' Upon which the Holy Father
looked much confused and took a great deal of snuff.

For the next five years Newman, unaided and ignored, struggled
desperately, like a man in a bog, with the overmastering difficulties of
his task. His mind, whose native haunt was among the far aerial
boundaries of fancy and philosophy, was now clamped down under the
fetters of petty detail and fed upon the mean diet of compromise and
routine. He had to force himself to scrape together money, to write
articles for the students' Gazette, to make plans for medical
laboratories, to be ingratiating with the City Council; he was obliged
to spend months travelling through the remote regions of Ireland in the
company of extraordinary ecclesiastics and barbarous squireens. He was a
thoroughbred harnessed to a four-wheeled cab--and he knew it.
Eventually, he realised something else: he saw that the whole project of
a Catholic University had been evolved as a political and ecclesiastical
weapon against the Queen's Colleges of Peel, and that was all. As an
instrument of education, it was simply laughed at; and he himself had
been called in because his name would be a valuable asset in a party
game. When he understood that, he resigned his rectorship and returned
to the Oratory.

But, his tribulations were not yet over. It seemed to be God's will that
he should take part in a whole succession of schemes, which, no less
than the project of the Irish University, were to end in disillusionment
and failure. He was persuaded by Cardinal Wiseman to undertake the
editorship of a new English version of the Scriptures, which was to be a
monument of Catholic scholarship and an everlasting glory to Mother
Church. He made elaborate preparations; he collected subscriptions,
engaged contributors, and composed a long and learned prolegomena to the
work. It was all useless; Cardinal Wiseman began to think of other
things; and the scheme faded imperceptibly into thin air. Then a new
task was suggested to him: "The Rambler", a Catholic periodical, had
fallen on evil days; would Dr Newman come to the rescue, and accept the
editorship? This time he hesitated rather longer than usual; he had
burned his fingers so often--he must be specially careful now. 'I did
all I could to ascertain God's Will,' he said, and he came to the
conclusion that it was his duty to undertake the work. He did so, and
after two numbers had appeared, Dr. Ullathorne, the Bishop of
Birmingham, called upon him, and gently hinted that he had better leave
the paper alone. Its tone was not liked at Rome; it had contained an
article criticising St. Pius V, and, most serious of all, the orthodoxy
of one of Newman's own essays had appeared to be doubtful. He resigned,
and in the anguish of his heart, determined never to write again. One of
his friends asked him why he was publishing nothing. 'Hannibal's
elephants,' he replied, 'never could learn the goose-step.'

Newman was now an old man--he was sixty-three years of age. What had he
to look forward to? A few last years of insignificance and silence. What
had he to look back upon? A long chronicle of wasted efforts,
disappointed hopes, neglected possibilities, unappreciated powers. And
now all his labours had ended by his being accused at Rome of lack of
orthodoxy. He could no longer restrain his indignation, and in a letter
to one of his lady penitents, he gave vent to the bitterness of his
soul. When his Rambler article had been complained of, he said, there
had been some talk of calling him to Rome.

'Call me to Rome,' he burst out--'what does that mean? It means to sever
an old man from his home, to subject him to intercourse with persons
whose languages are strange to him--to food and to fashions which are
almost starvation on the one hand, and involve restless days and nights
on the other--it means to oblige him to dance attendance on Propaganda
week after week and month after month--it means his death. (It was the
punishment on Dr. Baines, 1840-1, to keep him at the door of Propaganda
for a year.)

'This is the prospect which I cannot but feel probable, did I say
anything which one Bishop in England chose to speak against and report.
Others have been killed before me. Lucas went of his own accord
indeed--but when he got there, oh!' How much did he, as loyal a son of
the Church and the Holy See as ever was, what did he suffer because Dr.
Cullen was against him? He wandered (as Dr. Cullen said in a letter he
published in a sort of triumph), he wandered from Church to Church
without a friend, and hardly got an audience from the Pope. 'And I too
should go from St. Philip to Our Lady, and to St. Peter and St. Paul,
and to St. Laurence and to St. Cecilia, and, if it happened to me as to
Lucas, should come back to die.'

Yet, in spite of all, in spite of these exasperations of the flesh,
these agitations of the spirit, what was there to regret? Had he not a
mysterious consolation which outweighed every grief? Surely, surely, he
had.

    'Unveil, O Lord, and on us shine,
        In glory and in grace,'

he exclaims in a poem written at this time, called 'The Two Worlds':

    'This gaudy world grows pale before
       The beauty of Thy face.

    'Till Thou art seen it seems to he
       A sort of fairy ground,
    Where suns unsetting light the sky,
       And flowers and fruit abound.

    'But when Thy keener, purer beam
       Is poured upon our sight,
    It loses all its power to charm,
       And what was day is night ...

    'And thus, when we renounce for Thee
       Its restless aims and fears,
    The tender memories of the past,
       The hopes of coming years,

    'Poor is our sacrifice, whose eyes
       Are lighted from above;
    We offer what we cannot keep,
       What we have ceased to love.'

Such were Newman's thoughts when an unexpected event occurred which
produced a profound effect upon his life: Charles Kingsley attacked his
good faith, and the good faith of Catholics in general, in a magazine
article. Newman protested, and Kingsley rejoined in an irate pamphlet.
Newman's reply was the Apologia pro Vita Sua, which he wrote in seven
weeks, sometimes working twenty-two hours at a stretch, 'constantly in
tears, and constantly crying out with distress'. The success of the
book, with its transparent candour, its controversial brilliance, the
sweep and passion of its rhetoric, the depth of its personal feeling,
was immediate and overwhelming; it was recognised at once as a classic,
not only by Catholics, but by the whole English world. From every side
expressions of admiration, gratitude, and devotion poured in. It was
impossible for one so sensitive as Newman to the opinions of other
people to resist the happy influence of such an unlooked-for, such an
enormous triumph. The cloud of his dejection began to lift; et l'espoir
malgre lui s'est glisse dans son coeur.

It was only natural that at such a moment his thoughts should return to
Oxford. For some years past proposals had been on foot for establishing
there a Hall, under Newman's leadership, for Catholic undergraduates.
The scheme had been looked upon with disfavour in Rome, and it had been
abandoned; but now a new opportunity presented itself--some land in a
suitable position came into the market. Newman, with his reviving
spirits, felt that he could not let this chance go by, and bought the
land. It was his intention to build there not a Hall, but a Church, and
to set on foot a 'House of the Oratory'. What possible objection could
there be to such a scheme? He approached the Bishop of Birmingham, who
gave his approval; in Rome itself there was no hostile sign. The laity
were enthusiastic and subscriptions began to flow in. Was it possible
that all was well at last? Was it conceivable that the strange and weary
pilgrimage of so many years should end at length in quietude, if not in
happiness, where it had begun?

It so happened that it was at this very time that Manning was appointed
to the See of Westminster. The destinies of the two men, which had run
parallel to one another in so strange a fashion and for so many years,
were now for a moment suddenly to converge. Newly clothed with all the
attributes of ecclesiastical supremacy, Manning found himself face to
face with Newman, upon whose brows were glittering the fresh laurels of
spiritual victory--the crown of an apostolical life. It was the meeting
of the eagle and the dove. What followed showed, more clearly perhaps
than any other incident in his career, the stuff that Manning was made
of. Power had come to him at last; and he seized it with all the avidity
of a born autocrat, whose appetite for supreme dominion had been whetted
by long years of enforced abstinence and the hated simulations of
submission. He was the ruler of Roman Catholic England, and he would
rule. The nature of Newman's influence it was impossible for him to
understand, but he saw that it existed; for twenty years he had been
unable to escape the unwelcome iterations of that singular, that alien,
that rival renown; and now it stood in his path, alone and inexplicable,
like a defiant ghost. 'It is remarkably interesting,' he observed
coldly, when somebody asked him what he thought of the Apologia: 'it is
like listening to the voice of one from the dead.' And such voices, with
their sepulchral echoes, are apt to be more dangerous than living ones;
they attract too much attention; they must be silenced at all costs. It
was the meeting of the eagle and the dove; there was a hovering, a
swoop, and then the quick beak and the relentless talons did their work.

Even before his accession to the Archbishopric, Manning had scented a
peculiar peril in Newman's Oxford scheme, and so soon as he came into
power, he privately determined that the author of the Apologia should
never be allowed to return to his old University. Nor was there any lack
of excellent reasons for such a decision. Oxford was by this time a nest
of liberalism; it was no fit place for Catholic youths, and they would
inevitably be attracted there by the presence of Father Newman. And
then, had not Father Newman's orthodoxy been impugned? Had he not been
heard to express opinions of most doubtful propriety upon the question
of the Temporal Power? Was it not known that he might almost be said to
have an independent mind? An influence? Yes, he had an influence no
doubt; but what a fatal kind of influence to which to subject the rising
generation of Catholic Englishmen!

Such were the reflections which Manning was careful to pour into the
receptive car of Monsignor Talbot. That useful priest, at his post of
vantage in the Vatican, was more than ever the devoted servant of the
new Archbishop. A league, offensive and defensive, had been established
between the two friends.

'I daresay I shall have many opportunities to serve you in Rome,' wrote
Monsignor Talbot modestly, 'and I do not think any support will be
useless to you, especially on account of the peculiar character of the
Pope, and the spirit which pervades Propaganda; therefore, I wish you to
understand that a compact exists between us; if you help me, I shall
help you.' And a little later he added, 'I am glad you accept the
league. As I have already done for years, I shall support you, and I
have a hundred ways of doing so. A word dropped at the proper occasion
works wonders.'

Perhaps it was hardly necessary to remind his correspondent of that.

So far as Newman was concerned, it so fell out that Monsignor Talbot
needed no prompting. During the sensation caused by the appearance of
the Apologia, it had occurred to him that it would be an excellent plan
to secure Newman as a preacher during Lent for the fashionable
congregation which attended his church in the Piazza del Popolo; and, he
had accordingly written to invite him to Rome. His letter was
unfortunately not a tactful one. He assured Newman that he would find in
the Piazza del Popolo 'an audience of Protestants more educated than
could ever be the case in England', and 'I think myself,' he had added
by way of extra inducement, 'that you will derive great benefit from
visiting Rome, and showing yourself to the Ecclesiastical Authorities.'
Newman smiled grimly at this; he declared to a friend that the letter
was 'insolent'; and he could not resist the temptation of using his
sharp pen.

'Dear Monsignor Talbot,' he wrote in reply, 'I have received your
letter, inviting me to preach in your Church at Rome to an audience of
Protestants more educated than could ever be the case in England.

'However, Birmingham people have souls; and I have neither taste nor
talent for the sort of work which you cut out for me. And I beg to
decline your offer.

I am, yours truly,

JOHN H. NEWMAN.'

Such words were not the words of wisdom. It is easy to imagine the
feelings of Monsignor Talbot. 'Newman's work none here can understand,'
he burst out to his friend. 'Poor man, by living almost ever since he
has been a Catholic, surrounded by a set of inferior men who idolise
him, I do not think he has ever acquired the Catholic instincts.' As for
his views on the Temporal Power--'well, people said that he had actually
sent a subscription to Garibaldi. Yes, the man was incomprehensible,
heretical, dangerous; he was "uncatholic and unchristian."' Monsignor
Talbot even trembled for the position of Manning in England.

'I am afraid that the old school of Catholics will rally round Newman in
opposition to you and Rome. Stand firm, do not yield a bit in the line
you have taken. As I have promised, I shall stand by you. You will have
battles to fight because every Englishman is naturally anti-Roman. To be
Roman is an effort to an Englishman an effort. Dr. Newman is more English than
the English. His spirit must be crushed.'

His spirit must be crushed! Certainly there could be no doubt of that.

'What you write about Dr Newman,' Manning replied, 'is true. Whether he
knows it or not, he has become the centre of those who hold low views
about the Holy See, are anti-Roman, cold and silent, to say no more,
about the Temporal Power; national, English, critical of Catholic
devotions, and always on the lower side.... You will take care,' he
concluded, 'that things are correctly known and understood where you
are.'

The confederates matured their plans. While Newman was making his
arrangements for the Oxford Oratory, Cardinal Reisach visited London.
'Cardinal Reisach has just left,' wrote Manning to Monsignor Talbot: 'he
has seen and understands all that is going on in England.' But Newman
had no suspicions. It was true that persistent rumours of his
unorthodoxy and his anti-Roman leanings had begun to float about, and
these rumours had been traced to Rome. But what were rumours? Then, too,
Newman found out that Cardinal Reisach had been to Oxford without his
knowledge, and had inspected the land for the Oratory. That seemed odd;
but all doubts were set at rest by the arrival from Propaganda of an
official ratification of his scheme. There would be nothing but plain
sailing now. Newman was almost happy; radiant visions came into his mind
of a wonderful future in Oxford, the gradual growth of Catholic
principles, the decay of liberalism, the inauguration of a second Oxford
Movement, the conversion--who knows?--of Mark Pattison, the triumph of
the Church.... 'Earlier failures do not matter now,' he exclaimed to a
friend. 'I see that I have been reserved by God for this.'

Just then a long blue envelope was brought into the room. Newman opened
it. 'All is over,' he said, 'I am not allowed to go.' The envelope
contained a letter from the Bishop announcing that, together with the
formal permission for an Oratory at Oxford, Propaganda had issued a
secret instruction to the effect that Newman himself was by no means to
reside there. If he showed signs of doing so, he was blandly and suavely
('blande suaviterque' were the words of the Latin instrument) to be
prevented. And now the secret instruction had come into
operation--blande suaviterque: Dr. Newman's spirit had been crushed.

His friends made some gallant efforts to retrieve the situation; but, it
was in vain. Father St. John hurried to Rome and the indignant laity of
England, headed by Lord Edward Howard, the guardian of the young Duke of
Norfolk, seized the opportunity of a particularly virulent anonymous
attack upon Newman, to send him an address in which they expressed their
feeling that 'every blow that touches you inflicts a wound upon the
Catholic Church in this country'. The only result was an outburst of
redoubled fury upon the part of Monsignor Talbot. The address, he
declared, was an insult to the Holy See. 'What is the province of the
laity?' he interjected. 'To hunt, to shoot, to entertain. These matters
they understand, but to meddle with ecclesiastical matters they have no
right at all.' Once more he warned Manning to be careful.

'Dr. Newman is the most dangerous man in England, and you will see that
he will make use of the laity against your Grace. You must not be afraid
of him. It will require much prudence, but you must be firm. The Holy
Father still places his confidence in you; but if you yield and do not
fight the battle of the Holy See against the detestable spirit growing
up in England, he will begin to regret Cardinal Wiseman, who knew how to
keep the laity in order.' Manning had no thought of 'yielding'; but, he
pointed out to his agitated friend that an open conflict between himself
and Newman would be 'as great a scandal to the Church in England, and as
great a victory to the Anglicans, as could be'. He would act quietly,
and there would be no more difficulty. The Bishops were united, and the
Church was sound.

On this, Monsignor Talbot hurried to Father St. John's lodgings in Rome
to express his regret at the misunderstanding that had arisen, to wonder
how it could possibly have occurred, and to hope that Dr. Newman might
consent to be made a Protonotary Apostolic. That was all the
satisfaction that Father St. John was to obtain from his visit to Rome.
A few weeks later, the scheme of the Oxford Oratory was finally quashed.

When all was over, Manning thought that the time had come for a
reconciliation. He made advances through a common friend; what had he
done, he asked, to offend Dr. Newman? Letters passed, and, naturally
enough, they only widened the breach. Newman was not the man to be
polite.

'I can only repeat,' he wrote at last, 'what I said when you last heard
from me. I do not know whether I am on my head or my heels when I have
active relations with you. In spite of my friendly feelings, this is the
judgment of my intellect.' 'Meanwhile,' he concluded, 'I propose to say
seven masses for your intention amid the difficulties and anxieties of
your ecclesiastical duties.'

And Manning could only return the compliment.

At about this time, the Curate of Littlemore had a singular experience.
As he was passing by the Church he noticed an old man, very poorly
dressed in an old grey coat with the collar turned up, leaning over the
lych gate, in floods of tears. He was apparently in great trouble, and
his hat was pulled down over his eyes as if he wished to hide his
features. For a moment, however, he turned towards the Curate, who was
suddenly struck by something familiar in the face. Could it be--? A
photograph hung over the Curate's mantelpiece of the man who had made
Littlemore famous by his sojourn there more than twenty years ago--he
had never seen the original; but now, was it possible--? He looked
again, and he could doubt no longer. It was Dr. Newman. He sprang
forward, with proffers of assistance. Could he be of any use? 'Oh no,
no!' was the reply. 'Oh no, no!' But the Curate felt that he could not
run away and leave so eminent a character in such distress. 'Was it not
Dr. Newman he had the honour of addressing?' he asked, with all the
respect and sympathy at his command. 'Was there nothing that could be
done?' But the old man hardly seemed to understand what was being said
to him. 'Oh no, no!' he repeated, with the tears streaming down his
face, 'Oh no, no!'


VII

MEANWHILE, a remarkable problem was absorbing the attention of the
Catholic Church. Once more, for a moment, the eyes of all Christendom
were fixed upon Rome. The temporal Power of the Pope had now almost
vanished; but, as his worldly dominions steadily diminished, the
spiritual pretensions of the Holy Father no less steadily increased. For
seven centuries the immaculate conception of the Virgin had been highly
problematical; Pio Nono spoke, and the doctrine became an article of
faith. A few years later, the Court of Rome took another step: a
Syllabus Errorum was issued, in which all the favourite beliefs of the
modern world--the rights of democracies, the claims of science, the
sanctity of free speech, the principles of toleration--were
categorically denounced, and their supporters abandoned to the Divine
wrath.

Yet it was observed that the modern world proceeded as before. Something
more drastic appeared to be necessary--some bold and striking measure
which should concentrate the forces of the faithful, and confound their
enemies. The tremendous doctrine of Papal Infallibility, beloved of all
good Catholics, seemed to offer just the opening that was required. Let
that doctrine be proclaimed, with the assent of the whole Church, an
article of faith, and, in the face of such an affirmation, let the
modern world do its worst! Accordingly, a General Council--the first to
be held since the Council of Trent more than 300 years before--was
summoned to the Vatican, for the purpose, so it was announced, of
providing 'an adequate remedy to the disorders, intellectual and moral,
of Christendom'. The programme might seem a large one, even for a
General Council; but everyone knew what it meant.

Everyone, however, was not quite of one mind. There were those to whom
even the mysteries of infallibility caused some searchings of heart. It
was true, no doubt, that Our Lord, by saying to Peter, 'Thou art Cephas,
which is by interpretation a stone', thereby endowed that Apostle with
the supreme and full primacy and principality over the Universal
Catholic Church; it was equally certain that Peter afterwards became the
Bishop of Rome; nor could it be doubted that the Roman Pontiff was his
successor. Thus it followed directly that the Roman Pontiff was the
head, heart, mind, and tongue of the Catholic Church; and moreover, it
was plain that when Our Lord prayed for Peter that his faith should not
fail, that prayer implied the doctrine of Papal Infallibility. All these
things were obvious, and yet--and yet--might not the formal declaration
of such truths in the year of his grace 1870 be, to say the least of it,
inopportune? Might it not come as an offence, as a scandal even, to
those unacquainted with the niceties of Catholic dogma? Such were the
uneasy reflections of grave and learned ecclesiastics and theologians in
England, France, and Germany. Newman was more than usually upset;
Monseigneur Dupanloup was disgusted; and Dr. Dollinger prepared himself
for resistance. It was clear that there would be a disaffected minority
at the Council.

Catholic apologists have often argued that the Pope's claim to
infallibility implies no more than the necessary claim of every ruler,
of every government, to the right of supreme command. In England, for
instance, the Estates of the Realm exercise an absolute authority in
secular matters; no one questions this authority, no one suggests that
it is absurd or exorbitant; in other words, by general consent the
Estates of the Realm are, within their sphere, infallible. Why,
therefore, should the Pope, within his sphere--the sphere of the
Catholic Church--be denied a similar infallibility? If there is nothing
monstrous in an Act of Parliament laying down what all men shall do, why
should there be anything monstrous in a Papal Encyclical laying down
what all men shall believe? The argument is simple; in fact, it is too
simple; for it takes for granted the very question which is in dispute.
Is there indeed no radical and essential distinction between supremacy
and infallibility? Between the right of a Borough Council to regulate
the traffic and the right of the Vicar of Christ to decide upon the
qualifications for Everlasting Bliss?

There is one distinction, at any rate, which is palpable: the decisions
of a supreme authority can be altered; those of an infallible authority
cannot. A Borough Council may change its traffic regulations at the next
meeting; but the Vicar of Christ, when in certain circumstances and with
certain precautions, he has once spoken, has expressed, for all the
ages, a part of the immutable, absolute, and eternal Truth. It is this
that makes the papal pretensions so extraordinary and so enormous. It is
also this that gives them their charm. Catholic apologists, when they
try to tone down those pretensions and to explain them away, forget that
it is in their very exorbitance that their fascination lies. If the Pope
were indeed nothing more than a magnified Borough Councillor, we should
hardly have heard so much of him. It is not because he satisfies the
reason, but because he astounds it, that men abase themselves before the
Vicar of Christ.

And certainly the doctrine of Papal Infallibility presents to the reason
a sufficiency of stumbling-blocks. In the fourteenth century, for
instance, the following case arose. John XXII asserted in his bull 'Cum
inter nonnullos' that the doctrine of the poverty of Christ was
heretical. Now, according to the light of reason, one of two things must
follow from this--either John XXII was himself a heretic, or he was no
Pope. For his predecessor, Nicholas III, had asserted in his bull 'Exiit
qui seminat' that the doctrine of the poverty of Christ was the true
doctrine, the denial of which was heresy. Thus if John XXII was right,
Nicholas III was a heretic, and in that case Nicholas's nominations of
Cardinals were void, and the conclave which elected John was illegal--so
that John was no Pope, his nominations of Cardinals were void, and the
whole Papal succession vitiated. On the other hand, if John was
wrong--well, he was a heretic; and the same inconvenient results
followed. And, in either case, what becomes of Papal Infallibility?

But such crude and fundamental questions as these were not likely to
trouble the Council. The discordant minority took another line.
Infallibility they admitted readily enough, the infallibility, that is
to say, of the Church; what they shrank from was the pronouncement that
this infallibility was concentrated in the Bishop of Rome. They would
not actually deny that, as a matter of fact, it was so concentrated; but
to declare that it was, to make the belief that it was an article of
faith--what could be more--it was their favourite expression--more
inopportune? In truth, the Gallican spirit still lingered among them. At
heart, they hated the autocracy of Rome--the domination of the
centralised Italian organisation over the whole vast body of the Church.
They secretly hankered, even at this late hour, after some form of
constitutional government, and they knew that the last faint vestige of
such a dream would vanish utterly with the declaration of the
infallibility of the Pope. It did not occur to them, apparently, that a
constitutional Catholicism might be a contradiction in terms, and that
the Catholic Church, without the absolute dominion of the Pope, might
resemble the play of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark.

Pius IX himself was troubled by doubts. 'Before I was Pope,' he
observed, 'I believed in Papal Infallibility, now I feel it.' As for
Manning, his certainty was no less complete than his master's. Apart
from the Holy Ghost, his appointment to the See of Westminster had been
due to Pio Nono's shrewd appreciation of the fact that he was the one
man in England upon whose fidelity the Roman Government could absolutely
rely. The voice which kept repeating 'Mettetelo li, mettetelo li' in his
Holiness's ear, whether or not it was inspired by God, was certainly
inspired by political sagacity. For now Manning was to show that he was
not unworthy of the trust which had been reposed in him. He flew to Rome
in a whirlwind of Papal enthusiasm. On the way, in Paris, he stopped for
a moment to interview those two great props of French respectability, M.
Guizot and M. Thiers. Both were careful not to commit themselves, but
both were exceedingly polite. 'I am awaiting your Council,' said M.
Guizot, 'with great anxiety. It is the last great moral power and may
restore the peace of Europe.' M. Thiers delivered a brief harangue in
favour of the principles of the Revolution, which, he declared, were the
very marrow of all Frenchmen; yet, he added, he had always supported the
Temporal Power of the Pope. 'Mais, M. Thiers,' said Manning, 'vous etes
effectivement croyant.' 'En Dieu,' replied M. Thiers.

The Rome which Manning reached towards the close of 1869 was still the
Rome which, for so many centuries, had been the proud and visible apex,
the palpitating heart, the sacred sanctuary, of the most extraordinary
mingling of spiritual and earthly powers that the world has ever known.
The Pope now, it is true, ruled over little more than the City
itself--the Patrimony of St. Peter--and he ruled there less by the Grace
of God than by the goodwill of Napoleon III; yet he was still a
sovereign Prince, and Rome was still the capital of the Papal State; she
was not yet the capital of Italy. The last hour of this strange dominion
had almost struck. As if she knew that her doom was upon her, the
Eternal City arrayed herself to meet it in all her glory.

The whole world seemed to be gathered together within her walls. Her
streets were filled with crowned heads and Princes of the Church, great
ladies and great theologians, artists and friars, diplomats and
newspaper reporters. Seven hundred bishops were there from all the
corners of Christendom, and in all the varieties of ecclesiastical
magnificence in falling lace and sweeping purple and flowing violet
veils. Zouaves stood in the colonnade of St Peter's, and Papal troops
were on the Quirinal. Cardinals passed, hatted and robed, in their
enormous carriage of state, like mysterious painted idols. Then there
was a sudden hush: the crowd grew thicker and expectation filled, the
air. Yes! it was he! He was coming! The Holy Father! But first there
appeared, mounted on a white mule and clothed in a magenta mantle, a
grave dignitary bearing aloft a silver cross. The golden coach followed,
drawn by six horses gorgeously caparisoned, and within, the smiling
white-haired Pio Nono, scattering his benedictions, while the multitude
fell upon its knees as one man. Such were the daily spectacles of
coloured pomp and of antique solemnity, which so long as the sun was
shining, at any rate--dazzled the onlooker into a happy forgetfulness of
the reverse side of the Papal dispensation--the nauseating filth of the
highways, the cattle stabled in the palaces of the great, and the fever
flitting through the ghastly tenements of the poor.

In St. Peter's, the North Transept had been screened off; rows of wooden
seats had been erected covered with Brussels carpet; and upon these
seats sat each crowned with a white mitre, the 700 Bishops in Council.
Here all day long rolled forth, in sonorous Latin, the interminable
periods of episcopal oratory; but it was not here that the issue of the
Council was determined. The assembled Fathers might talk till the
marbles of St. Peter's themselves grew weary of the reverberations; the
fate of the Church was decided in a very different manner--by little
knots of influential persons meeting quietly of a morning in the back
room of some inconspicuous lodging-house, by a sunset rendezvous in the
Borghese Gardens between a Cardinal and a Diplomatist by a whispered
conference in an alcove at a Princess's evening party, with the gay
world chattering all about. And, of course, on such momentous occasions
as these, Manning was in his element. None knew those difficult ropes
better than he; none used them with a more serviceable and yet discreet
alacrity. In every juncture he had the right word, or the right silence;
his influence ramified in all directions, from the Pope's audience
chamber to the English Cabinet. 'Il Diavolo del Concilio' his enemies
called him; and he gloried in the name.

The real crux of the position was less ecclesiastical than diplomatic.
The Papal Court, with its huge majority of Italian Bishops, could make
sure enough, when it came to the point, of carrying its wishes through
the Council; what was far more dubious was the attitude of the foreign
Governments--especially those of France and England. The French
Government dreaded a schism among its Catholic subjects; it disliked the
prospect of an extension of the influence of the Pope over the mass of
the population of France; and, since the very existence of the last
remnant of the Pope's Temporal Power depended upon the French army, it
was able to apply considerable pressure upon the Vatican. The interests
of England were less directly involved, but it happened that at this
moment Mr. Gladstone was Prime Minister, and Mr. Gladstone entertained
strong views upon the Infallibility of the Pope. His opinions upon the
subject were in part the outcome of his friendship with Lord Acton, a
historian to whom learning and judgment had not been granted in equal
proportions, and who, after years of incredible and indeed well-nigh
mythical research, had come to the conclusion that the Pope could err.
In this Mr. Gladstone entirely concurred, though he did not share the
rest of his friend's theological opinions; for Lord Acton, while
straining at the gnat of Infallibility, had swallowed the camel of the
Roman Catholic Faith. 'Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galere?'
one cannot help asking, as one watched that laborious and scrupulous
scholar, that lifelong enthusiast for liberty, that almost hysterical
reviler of priesthood and persecution, trailing his learning so
discrepantly along the dusty Roman way. But, there are some who know how
to wear their Rome with a difference; and Lord Acton was one of these.

He was now engaged in fluttering like a moth round the Council and in
writing long letters to Mr. Gladstone, impressing upon him the gravity
of the situation, and urging him to bring his influence to bear. If the
Dogma were carried--he declared, no man who accepted it could remain a
loyal subject and Catholics would everywhere become 'irredeemable
enemies of civil and religious liberty'. In these circumstances, was it
not plainly incumbent upon the English Government, involved as it was
with the powerful Roman Catholic forces in Ireland, to intervene? Mr.
Gladstone allowed himself to become convinced, and Lord Acton began to
hope that his efforts would be successful. But, he had forgotten one
element in the situation; he had reckoned without the Archbishop of
Westminster. The sharp nose of Manning sniffed out the whole intrigue.
Though he despised Lord Acton almost as much as he disliked him--'such
men,' he said, 'are all vanity: they have the inflation of German
professors, and the ruthless talk of undergraduates'--yet he realised
clearly enough the danger of his correspondence with the Prime Minister,
and immediately took steps to counteract it. There was a semi-official
agent of the English Government in Rome, Mr. Odo Russell, and around him
Manning set to work to spin his spider's web of delicate and clinging
diplomacy. Preliminary politenesses were followed by long walks upon the
Pincio, and the gradual interchange of more and more important and
confidential communications. Soon poor Mr. Russell was little better
than a fly buzzing in gossamer. And Manning was careful to see that he
buzzed on the right note. In his dispatches to the Foreign Secretary,
Lord Clarendon, Mr. Russell explained in detail the true nature of the
Council, that it was merely a meeting of a few Roman Catholic prelates
to discuss some internal matters of Church discipline, that it had no
political significance whatever, that the question of Infallibility,
about which there had been so much random talk, was a purely theological
question, and that, whatever decision might be come to on the subject,
the position of Roman Catholics throughout the world would remain
unchanged.

Whether the effect of these affirmations upon Lord Clarendon was as
great as Manning supposed is somewhat doubtful; but it is at any rate
certain that Mr. Gladstone failed to carry the Cabinet with him; and,
when at last a proposal was definitely made that the English Government
should invite the Powers of Europe to intervene at the Vatican, it was
rejected. Manning always believed that this was the direct result of Mr.
Russell's dispatches, which had acted as an antidote to the poison of
Lord Acton's letters, and thus carried the day. If that was so, the
discretion of biographers has not yet entirely lifted the veil from
these proceedings Manning had assuredly performed no small service for
his cause. Yet his modesty would not allow him to assume for himself a
credit which, after all, was due elsewhere; and when he told the story
of those days, he would add, with more than wonted seriousness, 'It was
by the Divine Will that the designs of His enemies were frustrated'.

Meanwhile, in the North Transept of St. Peter's a certain amount of
preliminary business had been carried through. Various miscellaneous
points in Christian doctrine had been satisfactorily determined. Among
others, the following Canons were laid down by the Fathers: 'If anyone
does not accept for sacred and canonical the whole and every part of the
Books of Holy Scripture, or deny that they are divinely inspired, let
him be anathema.' 'If anyone says that miracles cannot be, and
therefore, the accounts of them, even those in Holy Scriptures must be
assigned a place among fables and myths, or that the divine origin of
the Christian religion cannot rightly be proved from them, let him be
anathema.' 'If anyone says that the doctrines of the Church can ever
receive a sense in accordance with the progress of science, other than
that sense which the Church has understood and still understands, let
him be anathema.' 'If anyone says that it is not possible, by the
natural light of human reason, to acquire a certain knowledge of the One
and True God, let him be anathema.' In other words, it became an article
of Faith that Faith was not necessary for a true knowledge of God.
Having disposed of these minor matters, the Fathers found themselves at
last approaching the great question of Infallibility.

Two main issues, it soon appeared, were before them: the. Pope's
infallibility was admitted, ostensibly at least, by all; what remained
to be determined was: (1) whether the definition of the Pope's
Infallibility was opportune, and (2) what the definition of the Pope's
Infallibility was.

(1) It soon became clear that the sense of the Council was
overwhelmingly in favour of a definition. The Inopportunists were a
small minority; they were outvoted, and they were obliged to give way.
It only remained, therefore, to come to a decision upon the second
question--what the definition should actually be.

(2) It now became the object of the Inopportunists to limit the scope of
the definition as much as possible, while the Infallibilists were no
less eager to extend it. Now everyone, or nearly everyone, was ready to
limit the Papal Infallibility to pronouncements ex cathedra--that is to
say, to those made by the Pope in his capacity of Universal Doctor; but
this only served to raise the ulterior, the portentous, and indeed the
really crucial question--to WHICH of the Papal pronouncements ex
cathedra did Infallibility adhere?

The discussions which followed were, naturally enough, numerous,
complicated, and embittered, and in all of them Manning played a
conspicuous part. For two months the Fathers deliberated; through fifty
sessions they sought the guidance of the Holy Ghost. The wooden seats,
covered though they were with Brussels carpet, grew harder and harder;
and still the mitred Councillors sat on. The Pope himself began to grow
impatient; for one thing, he declared, he was being ruined by the mere
expense of lodging and keeping the multitude of his adherents. 'Questi
infallibilisti mi faranno fallire', said his Holiness. At length it
appeared that the Inopportunists were dragging out the proceedings in
the hope of obtaining an indefinite postponement. Then the authorities
began to act; a bishop was shouted down, and the closure was brought
into operation. At this point the French Government, after long
hesitation, finally decided to intervene, and Cardinal Antonelli was
informed that if the Definition was proceeded with, the French troops
would be withdrawn from Rome. But the astute Cardinal judged that he
could safely ignore the threat. He saw that Napoleon III was tottering
to his fall and would never risk an open rupture with the Vatican.
Accordingly, it was determined to bring the proceedings to a close by a
final vote. Already the Inopportunists, seeing that the game was up, had
shaken the dust of Rome from their feet. On July 18th, 1870, the Council
met for the last time. As the first of the Fathers stepped forward to
declare his vote, a storm of thunder and lightning suddenly burst over
St. Peter's. All through the morning the voting continued, and every
vote was accompanied by a flash and a roar from heaven. Both sides, with
equal justice, claimed the portent as a manifestation of the Divine
Opinion. When the votes were examined, it was found that 533 were in
favour of the proposed definition and two against it. Next day, war was
declared between France and Germany, and a few weeks later the French
troops were withdrawn from Rome. Almost in the same moment, the
successor of St. Peter had lost his Temporal Power, and gained
Infallibility.

What the Council had done was merely to assent to a definition of the
dogma of the Infallibility of the Roman Pontiff which Pius IX had
issued, proprio motu, a few days before. The definition itself was
perhaps somewhat less extreme than might have been expected. The Pope,
it declared, is possessed, when he speaks ex cathedra, of 'that
infallibility with which the Redeemer willed that His Church should be
endowed for defining doctrine regarding faith or morals'. Thus it became
a dogma of faith that a Papal definition regarding faith or morals is
infallible; but beyond that, both the Holy Father and the Council
maintained a judicious reserve. Over what OTHER matters besides faith
and morals the Papal infallibility might or might not extend still
remained in doubt. And there were further questions, no less serious, to
which no decisive answer was then, or ever has been since, provided.

How was it to be determined, for instance, which particular Papal
decisions did in fact come within the scope of the definition? Who was
to decide what was or was not a matter of faith or morals? Or precisely
WHEN the Roman Pontiff was speaking ex cathedra? Was the famous Syllabus
Errorum, for example, issued ex cathedra or not? Grave theologians have
never been able to make up their minds. Yet to admit doubts in such
matters as these is surely dangerous. 'In duty to our supreme pastoral
office,' proclaimed the Sovereign Pontiff, 'by the bowels of Christ we
earnestly entreat all Christ's faithful people, and we also command them
by the authority of God and our Saviour, that they study and labour to
expel and eliminate errors and display the light of the purest faith.'
Well might the faithful study and labour to such ends! For, while the
offence remained ambiguous, there was no ambiguity about the penalty.
One hair's-breadth from the unknown path of truth, one shadow of
impurity in the mysterious light of faith, and there shall be anathema!
anathema! anathema! When the framers of such edicts called upon the
bowels of Christ to justify them, might they not have done well to have
paused a little, and to have called to mind the counsel of another
sovereign ruler, though a heretic--Oliver Cromwell? 'Bethink ye, bethink
ye, in the bowels of Christ, that ye may be mistaken!'

One of the secondary results of the Council was the excommunication of
Dr. Dollinger, and a few more of the most uncompromising of the
Inopportunists. Among these, however, Lord Acton was not included.
Nobody ever discovered why. Was it because he was too important for the
Holy See to care to interfere with him? Or was it because he was not
important enough?

Another ulterior consequence was the appearance of a pamphlet by Mr.
Gladstone, entitled 'Vaticanism', in which the awful implications
involved in the declaration of Infallibility were laid before the
British Public. How was it possible, Mr. Gladstone asked, with all the
fulminating accompaniments of his most agitated rhetoric, to depend
henceforward upon the civil allegiance of Roman Catholics? To this
question the words of Cardinal Antonelli to the Austrian Ambassador
might have seemed a sufficient reply. 'There is a great difference,'
said his Eminence, between theory and practice. No one will ever prevent
the Church from proclaiming the great principles upon which its Divine
fabric is based; but, as regards the application of those sacred laws,
the Church, imitating the example of its Divine Founder, is inclined to
take into consideration the natural weaknesses of mankind.' And, in any
case, it was hard to see how the system of Faith, which had enabled Pope
Gregory XIII to effect, by the hands of English Catholics, a whole
series of attempts to murder Queen Elizabeth, can have been rendered a
much more dangerous engine of disloyalty by the Definition of 1870. But
such considerations failed to reassure Mr. Gladstone; the British Public
was of a like mind; and 145,000 copies of the pamphlet were sold within
two months. Various replies appeared, and Manning was not behindhand.
His share in the controversy led to a curious personal encounter.

His conversion had come as a great shock to Mr. Gladstone. Manning had
breathed no word of its approach to his old and intimate friend, and
when the news reached him, it seemed almost an act of personal injury.
'I felt,' Mr. Gladstone said, 'as if Manning had murdered my mother by
mistake.' For twelve years the two men did not meet, after which they
occasionally saw each other and renewed their correspondence. This was
the condition of affairs when Mr. Gladstone published his pamphlet. As
soon as it appeared, Manning wrote a letter to the New York Herald,
contradicting its conclusions and declaring that its publication was
'the first event that has overcast a friendship of forty-five years'.
Mr. Gladstone replied to this letter in a second pamphlet. At the close
of his theological arguments, he added the following passage:

'I feel it necessary, in concluding this answer, to state that
Archbishop Manning has fallen into most serious inaccuracy in his letter
of November 10th, wherein he describes 'my Expostulation as the first
event which has overcast a friendship of forty-five years. I allude to
the subject with regret; and without entering into details.'

Manning replied in a private letter:

'My dear Gladstone,' he wrote, 'you say that I am in error in stating
that your former pamphlet is the first act which has overcast our
friendship.

'If you refer to my act in 1851 in submitting to the Catholic Church, by
which we were separated for some twelve years, I can understand it.

'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,

'H. E. M.'

'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 the 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,

'W. E. GLADSTONE.'

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.'


VIII

IN 1875, Manning's labours received their final reward: he was made a
Cardinal. His long and strange career, with its high hopes, its bitter
disappointments, its struggles, its renunciations, had come at last to
fruition in a Princedom of the Church.

'Ask in faith and in perfect confidence,' he himself once wrote, and God
will give us what we ask. You may say, "But do you mean that He will
give us the very thing?" That, God has not said. God has said that He
will give you whatsoever you ask; but the form in which it will come,
and the time in which He will give it, He keeps in His own power.
Sometimes our prayers are answered in the very things which we put from
us; sometimes it may be a chastisement, or a loss, or a visitation
against which our hearts rise, and we seem to see that God has not only
forgotten us, but has begun to deal with us in severity. Those very
things are the answers to our prayers. He knows what we desire, and He
gives us the things for which we ask; but in the form which His own
Divine Wisdom sees to be best.'

There was one to whom Manning's elevation would no doubt have given a
peculiar satisfaction--his old friend Monsignor Talbot. But this was not
to be. That industrious worker in the cause of Rome had been removed
some years previously to a sequestered home at Passy, whose padded walls
were impervious to the rumours of the outer world. Pius IX had been much
afflicted by this unfortunate event; he had not been able to resign
himself to the loss of his secretary, and he had given orders that
Monsignor Talbot's apartment in the Vatican should be preserved
precisely as he had left it, in case of his return. But Monsignor Talbot
never returned. Manning's feelings upon the subject appear to have been
less tender than the Pope's. In all his letters, in all his papers, in
all his biographical memoranda, not a word of allusion is to be found to
the misfortune, nor to the death, of the most loyal of his adherents.
Monsignor Talbot's name disappears suddenly and for ever--like a stone
cast into the waters.

Manning was now an old man, and his outward form had assumed that
appearance of austere asceticism which is, perhaps, the one thing
immediately suggested by his name to the ordinary Englishman. The spare
and stately form, the head--massive, emaciated, terrible--with the great
nose, the glittering eyes, and the mouth drawn back and compressed into
the grim rigidities of age, self-mortification, and authority--such is
the vision that still lingers in the public mind--the vision which,
actual and palpable like some embodied memory of the Middle Ages, used
to pass and repass, less than a generation since, through the streets of
London. For the activities of this extraordinary figure were great and
varied. He ruled his diocese with the despotic zeal of a born
administrator. He threw himself into social work of every kind; he
organised charities, he lectured on temperance; he delivered innumerable
sermons; he produced an unending series of devotional books. And he
brooked no brother near the throne: Newman languished in Birmingham; and
even the Jesuits trembled and obeyed.

Nor was it only among his own community that his energy and his
experience found scope. He gradually came to play an important part in
public affairs, upon questions of labour, poverty, and education. He sat
on Royal Commissions and corresponded with Cabinet Ministers. At last,
no philanthropic meeting at the Guildhall was considered complete
without the presence of Cardinal Manning. A special degree of precedence
was accorded to him. Though the rank of a Cardinal-Archbishop is
officially unknown in England, his name appeared in public documents--as
a token, it must be supposed, of personal consideration--above the names
of peers and bishops, and immediately below that of the Prince of Wales.

In his private life he was secluded. The ambiguities of his social
position, and his desire to maintain intact the peculiar eminence of his
office, combined to hold him aloof from the ordinary gatherings of
society, though on the rare occasions of his appearance among
fashionable and exalted persons, he carried all before him. His
favourite haunt was the Athenaeum Club, where he sat scanning the
newspapers, or conversing with the old friends of former days. He was a
member, too, of that distinguished body, the Metaphysical Society, which
met once a month during the palmy years of the seventies to discuss, in
strict privacy, the fundamental problems of the destiny of man.

After a comfortable dinner at the Grosvenor Hotel, the Society, which
included Professor Huxley and Professor Tyndall, Mr. John Morley and Sir
James Stephen, the Duke of Argyll, Lord Tennyson, and Dean Church, would
gather around to hear and discuss a paper read by one of the members
upon such questions as: 'What is death?' 'Is God unknowable?' or 'The
nature of the Moral Principle'. Sometimes, however, the speculations of
the Society ranged in other directions.

'I think the paper that interested me most of all that were ever read at
our meetings,' says Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant-Duff, 'was one on
"Wherein consists the special beauty of imperfection and decay?" in
which were propounded the questions "Are not ruins recognised and felt
to be more beautiful than perfect structures? Why are they so? Ought
they to be so?'

'Unfortunately, however, the answers given to these questions by the
Metaphysical Society have not been recorded for the instruction of
mankind.

Manning read several papers, and Professor Huxley and Mr. John Morley
listened with attention while he expressed his views upon 'The Soul
before and after Death', or explained why it is 'That legitimate
Authority is an Evidence of Truth'. Yet, somehow or other, his Eminence
never felt quite at ease in these assemblies; he was more at home with
audiences of a different kind; and we must look in other directions for
the free and full manifestation of his speculative gifts.

In a series of lectures, for instance, delivered in 1861--it was the
first year of the unification of Italy--upon 'The Present Crisis of the
Holy See, tested by prophecy', we catch some glimpses of the kind of
problems which were truly congenial to his mind.

'In the following pages,' he said, 'I have endeavoured, but for so great
a subject most insufficiently, to show that what is passing in our times
is the prelude of the antichristian period of the final dethronement of
Christendom, and of the restoration of society without God in the
world.' 'My intention is,' he continued, 'to examine the present
relation of the Church to the civil powers of the world by the light of
a prophecy recorded by St Paul.'

This prophecy (2 Thess. ii 3 to 11) is concerned with the coming of the
Antichrist, and the greater part of the lectures is devoted to a minute
examination of this subject. There is no passage in Scripture, Manning
pointed out, relating to the coming of Christ more explicit and express
than those foretelling Antichrist; it therefore behoved the faithful to
consider the matter more fully than they are wont to do. In the first
place, Antichrist is a person. 'To deny the personality of Antichrist is
to deny the plain testimony of Holy Scripture.' And we must remember
that 'it is a law of Holy Scripture that when persons are prophesied of,
persons appear'.

Again, there was every reason to believe that Antichrist, when he did
appear, would turn out to be a Jew.

'Such was the opinion of St. Irenaeus, St. Jerome, and of the author of
the work De Consummatione Mundi, ascribed to St. Hippolytus, and of a
writer of a Commentary on the Epistle to the Thessalonians, ascribed to
St. Ambrose, of many others, who said that he will be of the tribe of
Dan: as, for instance, St. Gregory the Great, Theodoret, Aretas of
Caesarea, and many more. Such also is the opinion of Bellarmine, who
calls it certain. Lessius affirms that the Fathers, with unanimous
consent, teach as undoubted that Antichrist will be a Jew. Ribera
repeats the same opinion, and adds that Aretas, St. Bede, Haymo, St.
Anselm, and Rupert affirm that for this reason the tribe of Dan is not
numbered among those who are sealed in the Apocalypse ... Now, I think
no one can consider the dispersion and providential preservation of the
Jews among all the nations of the world and the indestructible vitality
of their race without believing that they are reserved for some future
action of His judgment and Grace. And this is foretold again and again
in the New Testament.'

'Our Lord,' continued Manning, widening the sweep of his speculations,
'has said of these latter times: "There shall arise false Christs and
false prophets, insomuch as to deceive even the elect"; that is, they
shall not be deceived; but those who have lost faith in the Incarnation,
such as humanitarians, rationalists, and pantheists, may well be
deceived by any person of great political power and success, who should
restore the Jews to their own land, and people Jerusalem once more with
the sons of the Patriarchs. And, there is nothing in the political
aspect of the world which renders such a combination impossible; indeed,
the state of Syria, and the tide of European diplomacy, which 'is
continually moving eastward, render such an event within a reasonable
probability.'

Then Manning threw out a bold suggestion. 'A successful medium,' he
said, 'might well pass himself off by his preternatural endowments as
the promised Messiahs.'

Manning went on to discuss the course of events which would lead to the
final catastrophe. But this subject, he confessed,

'deals with agencies so transcendent and mysterious, that all I shall
venture to do will be to sketch in outline what the broad and luminous
prophecies, especially of the Book of Daniel and the Apocalypse, set
forth without attempting to enter into minute details, which can only be
interpreted by the event'.

While applauding his modesty, we need follow Manning no further in his
commentary upon those broad and luminous works; except to observe that
'the apostasy of the City of Rome from the Vicar of Christ and its
destruction by the Antichrist' was, in his opinion, certain. Nor was he
without authority for this belief. For it was held by 'Malvenda, who
writes expressly on the subject', and who, besides, 'states as the
opinion of Ribera, Gaspar Melus, Viegas, Suarez, Bellarmine, and Bosius
that Rome shall apostatise from the faith'.


IX

THE death of Pius IX brought to Manning a last flattering testimony of
the confidence with which he was regarded at the Court of Rome. In one
of the private consultations preceding the Conclave, a Cardinal
suggested that Manning should succeed to the Papacy. He replied that he
was unfit for the position, because it was essential for the interests
of the Holy See that the next Pope should be an Italian. The suggestion
was pressed, but Manning held firm. Thus it happened that the Triple
Tiara seemed to come, for a moment, within the grasp of the late
Archdeacon of Chichester; and the cautious hand refrained.

Leo XIII was elected, and there was a great change in the policy of the
Vatican. Liberalism became the order of the day. And now at last the
opportunity seemed ripe for an act which, in the opinion of the majority
of English Catholics, had long been due--the bestowal of some mark of
recognition from the Holy See upon the labours and the sanctity of
Father Newman. It was felt that a Cardinal's hat was the one fitting
reward for such a life, and accordingly the Duke of Norfolk,
representing the Catholic laity of England, visited Manning, and
suggested that he should forward the proposal to the Vatican. Manning
agreed, and then there followed a curious series of incidents--the last
encounter in the jarring lives of those two men. A letter was drawn up
by Manning for the eye of the Pope, embodying the Duke of Norfolk's
proposal; but there was an unaccountable delay in the transmission of
this letter; months passed, and it had not reached the Holy Father. The
whole matter would, perhaps, have dropped out of sight and been
forgotten, in a way which had become customary when honours for Newman
were concerned, had not the Duke of Norfolk himself, when he was next in
Rome, ventured to recommend to Leo XIII that Dr. Newman should be made a
Cardinal. His Holiness welcomed the proposal; but, he said, he could do
nothing until he knew the views of Cardinal Manning. Thereupon, the Duke
of Norfolk wrote to Manning, explaining what had occurred; shortly
afterwards, Manning's letter of recommendation, after a delay of six
months, reached the Pope, and the offer of a Cardinalate was immediately
dispatched to Newman.

But the affair was not yet over. The offer had been made; would it be
accepted? There was one difficulty in the way. Newman was now an infirm
old man of seventy-eight; and it is a rule that all Cardinals who are
not also diocesan Bishops or Archbishops reside, as a matter of course,
at Rome. The change would have been impossible for one of his years--for
one, too, whose whole life was now bound up with the Oratory at
Birmingham. But, of course, there was nothing to prevent His Holiness
from making an exception in Newman's case, and allowing him to end his
days in England. Yet how was Newman himself to suggest this? The offer
of the Hat had come to him as an almost miraculous token of renewed
confidence, of ultimate reconciliation. The old, long, bitter
estrangement was ended at last. 'The cloud is lifted from me for ever!'
he exclaimed when the news reached him. It would be melancholy indeed if
the cup were now to be once more dashed from his lips and he was obliged
to refuse the signal honour. In his perplexity he went to the Bishop of
Birmingham and explained the whole situation. The Bishop assured him
that all would be well; that he himself would communicate with the
authorities, and put the facts of the case before them. Accordingly,
while Newman wrote formally refusing the Hat, on the ground of his
unwillingness to leave the Oratory, the Bishop wrote two letters to
Manning, one official and one private, in which the following passages
occurred:

'Dr. Newman has far too humble and delicate a mind to dream of thinking
or saying anything which would look like hinting at any kind of terms
with the Sovereign Pontiff.... I think, however, that I ought to express
my own sense of what Dr. Newman's dispositions are, and that it will be
expected of me ... I am thoroughly confident that nothing stands in the
way of his most grateful acceptance, except what he tells me greatly
distresses him--namely, the having to leave the Oratory at a critical
period of its existence, and the impossibility of his beginning a new
life at his advanced age.'

And in his private letter the Bishop said:

'Dr. Newman is very much aged, and softened with age and the trials he
has had, especially the loss of his two brethren, St. Jo

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