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'.