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.