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.