were afraid of it, although it is surely not new to him. He is a tall
thin personage, some sixty-two years of age. His face is bloodless--pale
as a ghost, one might say. He is so thin as to look almost cadaverous.
The outlines of the face are handsome and dignified. There is much of
courtly grace and refinement about the bearing and gestures of this
pale, weak, and wasted man. He wears a long robe of violet silk, with
some kind of dark cape or collar, and has a massive gold chain round his
neck, holding attached to it a great gold cross. There is a certain
nervous quivering about his eyes and lips, but otherwise he is perfectly
collected and master of the occasion. His voice is thin, but wonderfully
clear and penetrating. It is heard all through this great hall--a moment
ago so noisy, now so silent. The words fall with a slow, quiet force,
like drops of water. Whatever your opinion may be, you cannot choose but
listen; and, indeed, you want only to listen and see. For this is the
foremost man in the Catholic Church of England. This is the Cardinal
Grandison of Disraeli's "Lothair"--Dr. Henry Edward Manning, Roman
Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, successor in that office of the late
Cardinal Wiseman.
It is no wonder that the Irishmen at the meeting are enthusiastic about
Archbishop Manning. An Englishman of Englishmen, with no drop of Irish
blood in his veins, he is more Hibernian than the Hibernians themselves
in his sympathies with Ireland. A man of social position, of old family,
of the highest education and the most refined instincts, he would leave
the Catholic noblemen at any time to go down to his Irish teetotallers
at the East End of London. He firmly believes that the salvation of
England is yet to be accomplished through the influence of that
religious devotion which is at the bottom of the Irish nature, and which
some of us call superstition. He loves his own country dearly, but
turns away from her present condition of industrial prosperity to the
days before the Reformation, when yet saints trod the English soil. "In
England there has been no saint since the Reformation," he said the
other day, in sad, sweet tones, to one of wholly different opinions, who
listened with a mingling of amazement and reverence. No views that I
have ever heard put into living words embodied to anything like the same
extent the full claims and pretensions of Ultramontanism. It is quite
wonderful to sit and listen. One cannot but be impressed by the
sweetness, the thoughtfulness, the dignity, I had almost said the
sanctity of the man who thus pours forth, with a manner full of the most
tranquil conviction, opinions which proclaim all modern progress a
failure, and glorify the Roman priest or the Irish peasant as the true
herald and repository of light, liberty, and regeneration to a sinking
and degraded world.
Years ago, Henry Edward Manning was one of the brilliant lights of the
English Protestant Church. Just twenty years back he was appointed to
the high place of Archdeacon of Chichester, having also, according to
the manner in which the English State Church rewards its dignitaries,
more than one other ecclesiastical appointment at the same time. Dr.
Manning had distinguished himself highly during his career at the
University of Oxford. His father was a member of the House of Commons,
and Manning on starting into life had many friends and very bright
prospects. Nothing would have been easier, nothing seemingly would have
been more natural than for him to tread the way so plainly opened before
him, and to rise to higher and higher dignity, until at last perhaps the
princely renown of a bishopric and a seat in the House of Lords would
have been his reward. But Dr. Manning's career was cast in a time of
stress and trial for the English State Church. I have described briefly
in a former article the origin, growth, and effects of that remarkable
movement which, beginning within the Church itself and seeking to
establish loftier claims for her than she had long put forward, ended by
convulsing her in a manner more troublous than any religious crisis
which had occurred since the Reformation. Dr. Manning's is evidently a
nature which must have been specially allured by what I may be allowed
to call the supernatural claims put forward on behalf of the Church of
England. He was of course correspondingly disappointed by what he
considered the failure of those claims. As Coleridge says that every man
is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist, so it may perhaps be said that
every man is born with a predisposition to lean either on natural or
supernatural laws in the direct guidance of life. I am not now raising
any religious question whatever. What I say may be said of members of
the same sect or church--of any sect, of any church. One man, as
faithful and devout a believer as any, is yet content to go through his
daily duties and fulfil his career trusting to his religious principles,
his insight, and his reason, without requiring at every moment the light
of spiritual or supernatural guidance. Another must always have his
world in direct communion with the spiritual, or it is no world of faith
to him. Now it is impossible to look in Dr. Manning's face without
seeing that his is one of those sensitive, spiritual, I had almost said
morbid natures, which can find no endurable existence without a close
and constant communion with the supernatural. Keble, Newman, Time and
the Hour, called out for the assertion of the claim that the Church of
England was the true heir of the apostolic succession. Such a nature as
Manning's must have delightedly welcomed the claim. But the mere
investigation sent, as I have already explained, one Newman to
Catholicism and the other to Rationalism. Dr. Manning, too, felt
compelled to ask himself whether the Church could make good its claim,
and whether, if it could not, he had any longer a place within its
walls. The change does not appear to have come so rapidly to fulfilment
with him as with John Henry Newman. Dr. Manning seems to me to have a
less aggressive temperament than his distinguished predecessor in
secession. There is more about him of the quietist, of the ecstatic, so
far as religious thought is concerned, while it is possible that he may
be a more practical and influential guide in the mere policy of the
church to which he belongs. There is an amount of scorn in Newman's
nature which sometimes reminds one of Pascal, and which I have not
observed in Dr. Manning or in his writings. I cannot imagine Dr.
Manning, for example, pelting Charles Kingsley with sarcasms and
overwhelming him with contempt, as Dr. Newman evidently delighted to do
in the famous controversy which was provoked by the apostle of Muscular
Christianity. I suppose therefore that Dr. Manning clung for a long time
to the faith in which he was bred. But his whole nature is evidently
cast in the mould which makes Roman Catholic devotees. He is a man of
the type which perhaps found in Fenelon its most illustrious example. I
think it is not too much to say that to him that light of private
judgment which some of us regard as man's grandest and most peculiarly
divine attribute, must always have presented itself as something
abhorrent to his nature. I am judging, of course, as an outsider and as
one little acquainted with theological subjects; but my impression of
the two men would be that Dr. Newman joined the Roman Catholic Church in
obedience to some compulsion of reason, acting in what must seem to most
of us an inscrutable manner, and that Dr. Manning never would have been
a Protestant at all if he had not believed that the Protestant Church
was truly all which its rival claims to be.
Dr. Manning in fact did not leave the Church. The Church left him. He
had misunderstood it. It became revealed at last as it really is, a
church founded on the right of private judgment, and Manning was
appalled and turned away from it. Something that may almost be called
accident brought home to his mind the true character of the Church to
which he belonged. Many readers of "The Galaxy" may have some
recollection of the once celebrated Gorham case in England--a case which
I shall not now describe any further than by saying that it raised the
question whether the Church of England can prescribe the religion of the
State. Had the Church the right to decide whether certain doctrine
taught by one of its clergy was heretical, and to condemn it if so
declared? In England, Church and State are so bound up together, that it
is practically the State and not the Church which decides whether this
or that teaching is heresy or true religion. A lord chancellor who may
be an infidel, and two or three "law lords" who may be anything or
nothing, settle the question in the end. We all remember the epigram
about Lord Chancellor Westbury, the least godly of men, having
"dismissed Hell with costs," and taken away from the English Protestant
"his last hope of damnation." The Gorham case, twenty years ago, showed
that the Church, as an ecclesiastical body, had no power to condemn
heresy. This, to men like Stuart Mill, appears on the whole a
satisfactory condition of things so long as there is a State Church, for
the plain reason which he gives--namely, that the State in England is
now far more liberal than the Church. But to Dr. Manning the idea of the
Church thus abdicating its function of interpreting and declaring
doctrine was equivalent to the renunciation of its right to existence.
He strove hard to bring about an organized and solemn declaration and
protest from the Church--a declaration of doctrine, a protest against
secular control. He became the leader of an effort in this direction.
The effort met with little support. The then Bishop of London did indeed
introduce a bill into the House of Lords for the purpose of enacting
that in matters of doctrine, as distinct from questions of mere law, the
final decision should rest with the prelates. Dr. Manning sat in the
gallery of the House of Lords on that memorable night. The Bishop of
London wholly failed. The House of Lords scouted the idea of liberal
England tolerating a sort of ecclesiastical inquisition. Every one
admitted the anomalous condition in which things then were placed; but
few indeed would think of enacting a dogma of infallibility in favor of
the bishops of the Church. Lord Brougham spoke against the bill with
what Dr. Manning himself admits to be plain English common sense. He
said the House of Lords through its law peers could decide questions of
mere ecclesiastical law, and the decisions would carry weight and
authority; but neither peers nor bishops could in England decide a
question of doctrine. Suppose, he asked, the bishops were divided
equally on such a question, where would the decision be then? Suppose
there was a very small majority, who would accept such a decision? Or
even suppose there was a large majority, but that the minority comprised
the few men of greatest knowledge, ability, and authority, what value
would attach to the judgment of such a majority? The bill was a hopeless
failure. Dr. Manning has himself described with equal candor and
clearness the effect which the debate had upon him. He mentally
supplemented Lord Brougham's questions by one other. Suppose that all
the bishops of the Church of England should decide unanimously on any
doctrine, would any one receive the decision as infallible? He was
compelled to answer, "No one." The Church of England had no pretension
to be the infallible spiritual guide of men. Were she to raise any such
pretension, it would be rejected with contempt by the common mind of the
nation. Hear then how this conviction affected the man who up to that
time had had no thought but for the interests and duties of the English
Church. "To those," he has himself told us, "who believed that God has
established upon the earth a divine and therefore an unerring guardian
and teacher of his faith, this event demonstrated that the Church of
England could not be that guardian and teacher."
While Dr. Manning was still uncertain whither to turn, the celebrated
"Papal aggression" took place. Cardinal Wiseman was sent to England by
the Pope, with the title of Archbishop of Westminster. All England
raged. Earl Russell wrote his famous "Durham Letter." The Lord
Chancellor Campbell, at a public dinner in the city of London, called up
a storm of enthusiasm by quoting the line from Shakespeare, which
declares that
Under our feet we'll stamp the cardinal's hat.
Protestant zealots in Stockport belabored the Roman Catholics and sacked
their houses; Irish laborers in Birkenhead retorted upon the
Protestants. The Government brought in the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill--a
measure making it penal for any Catholic prelate to call himself
archbishop or bishop of any place in England. Let him be "Archbishop
Wiseman" or "Cardinal Wiseman, Archbishop of Mesopotamia," as long as he
liked--but not Archbishop of Westminster or Tuam. The bill was
powerfully, splendidly opposed by Gladstone, Bright, and Cobden, on the
broad ground that it invaded the precincts of religious liberty; but it
was carried and made law. There it remained. There never was the
slightest attempt made to enforce it. The Catholic prelates held to the
titles the Pope had given them; and no English court, judge, magistrate,
or policeman ever offered to prevent or punish them. So ludicrous, so
barren a proceeding as the carrying of that measure has not been known
in the England of our time.
Cardinal Wiseman was an able and a discreet man. He was calm, plausible,
powerful. He was very earnest in the cause of his Church, but he seemed
much more like a man of the world than Newman or Dr. Manning. There was
little of the loftily spiritual in his manner or appearance. His bulky
person and swollen face suggested at the first glance a sort of Abbot
Boniface; he was, I believe, in reality an ascetic. The corpulence which
seemed the result of good living was only the effect of ill health. He
had a persuasive and an imposing way. His ability was singularly
flexible. His eloquence was often too gorgeous and ornamental for a pure
taste, but when the occasion needed he could address an audience in
language of the simplest and most practical common sense. The same
adaptability, if I may use such a word, was evident in all he did. He
would talk with a cabinet minister on terms of calm equality, as if his
rank must be self-evident, and he delighted to set a band of poor school
children playing around him. He was a cosmopolitan--English and Irish by
extraction, Spanish by birth, Roman by education. When he spoke English
he was exactly like what a portly, dignified British bishop ought to
be--a John Bull in every respect. When he spoke Italian at Rome he fell
instinctively and at once into all the peculiarities of intonation and
gesture which distinguish the people of Italy from all other races. When
he conversed in Spanish he subsided into the grave, somewhat saturnine
dignity and repose of the true Castilian. All this, I presume, was but
the natural effect of that flexibility of temperament I have attempted
to describe. I had but slight personal acquaintance with Cardinal
Wiseman, and I paint him only as he impressed me, a casual observer. I
am satisfied that he was a profoundly earnest and single-minded man; the
testimony of many whom I know and who knew him well compels me to that
conviction. But such was not the impression he would have left on a mere
acquaintance. He seemed rather one who could, for a purpose which he
believed great, be all things to all men. He impressed me quite
differently from the manner in which I have been impressed by John Henry
Newman and by Archbishop Manning. He reminded one of some great,
capable, worldly-wise, astute Prince of the Church of other generations,
politician rather than priest, more ready to sustain and skilled to
defend the temporal power of the Papacy than to illustrate its highest
spiritual influence.
The events which brought Cardinal Wiseman to England had naturally a
powerful effect upon the mind of Dr. Manning. It was the renewed claim
of the Roman Church to enfold England in its spiritual jurisdiction. For
Dr. Manning, who had just seen what he regarded as the voluntary
abdication of the English Church, the claim would in any case have
probably been decisive. It "stepped between him and his fighting soul."
But the personal influence of Cardinal Wiseman had likewise an immense
weight and force. Dr. Manning ever since that time entertained a feeling
of the profoundest devotion and reverence for Cardinal Wiseman. The
change was consummated in 1851, and one of the first practical comments
upon the value of the Ecclesiastical Titles Act was the announcement
that a scholar and divine of whom the Protestant Church had long been
especially proud had resigned his preferments, his dignities, and his
prospects, and passed over to the Church of Rome. I cannot better
illustrate the effect produced on the public mind than by saying that
even the secession of John Henry Newman hardly made a deeper impression.
Dr. Manning, of course, rose to high rank in the church of his adoption.
He became Roman of the Romans--Ultramontane of the Ultramontanes. On the
death of his friend and leader, Cardinal Wiseman, whose funeral sermon
he preached, Henry Manning became Archbishop of Westminster. Except for
his frequent journeys to Rome, he has always since his appointment lived
in London. Although a good deal of an ascetic, as his emaciated face and
figure would testify, he is nothing of a hermit. He mingles to a certain
extent in society, he takes part in many public movements, and he has
doubtless given Mr. Disraeli ample opportunity of studying his manner
and bearing. I don't believe Mr. Disraeli capable of understanding the
profound devotion and single-minded sincerity of the man. A more
singular, striking, marvellous figure does not stand out, I think, in
our English society. Everything that an ordinary Englishman or American
would regard as admirable and auspicious in the progress of our
civilization, Dr. Manning calmly looks upon as lamentable and
evil-omened. What we call progress is to his mind decay. What we call
light is to him darkness. What we reverence as individual liberty he
deplores as spiritual slavery. The mere fact that a man gives reasons
for his faith seems shocking to this strangely-gifted apostle of
unconditional belief. Though you were to accept on bended knees
ninety-nine of the decrees of Rome, you would still be in his mind a
heretic if you paused to consider as to the acceptance of the hundredth
dogma. All the peculiarly modern changes in the legislation of England,
the admission of Jews to Parliament, the introduction of the principle
of divorce, the practical recognition of the English divine's right of
private judgment, are painful and odious to him. I have never heard from
any other source anything so clear, complete, and astonishing as his
cordial acceptance of the uttermost claims of Rome; the prostration of
all reason and judgment before the supposed supernatural attributes of
the Papal throne. In one of the finest passages of his own writings he
says: "My love for England begins with the England of St. Bede. Saxon
England, with all its tumults, seems to me saintly and beautiful. Norman
England I have always loved less, because, although majestic, it became
continually less Catholic, until the evil spirit of the world broke off
the light yoke of faith at the so-called Reformation. Still I loved the
Christian England which survived, and all the lingering outlines of
diocese and parishes, cathedrals and churches, with the names of saints
upon them. It is this vision of the past which still hovers over England
and makes it beautiful and full of the memories of the kingdom of God.
Nay, I loved the parish church of my childhood and the college chapel of
my youth, and the little church under a green hillside where the morning
and evening prayers and the music of the English Bible for seventeen
years became a part of my soul. Nothing is more beautiful in the natural
order, and if there were no eternal world I could have made it my home."
To Dr. Manning the time when saints walked the earth of England is more
of a reality than the day before yesterday to most of us. Where the
ordinary eye sees only a poor, ignorant Irish peasant, Dr. Manning
discerns a heaven-commissioned bearer of light and truth, destined by
the power of his unquestioning faith to redeem perhaps, in the end, even
English philosophers and statesmen. When it was said in the praise of
the murdered Archbishop of Paris that he was disposed to regret the
introduction of the dogma of infallibility, Archbishop Manning came
eagerly to the rescue of his friend's memory, and as one would vindicate
a person unjustly accused of crime, he vindicated the dead Archbishop
from the stigma of having for a moment dared to have an opinion of his
own on such a subject. Of course, if Dr. Manning were an ordinary
theological devotee or fanatic, there would be nothing remarkable in all
this. But he is a man of the widest culture, of high intellectual gifts,
of keen and penetrating judgment in all ordinary affairs, remarkable for
his close and logical argument, his persuasive reasoning, and for a
genial, quiet kind of humor which seems especially calculated to
dissolve sophistry by its action. He is an English gentleman, a man of
the world; he was educated at Oxford with Arthur Pendennis and young
Lord Magnus Charters; he lives at York Place in the London of to-day; he
drives down to the House of Commons and talks politics in the lobby with
Gladstone and Lowe; he meets Disraeli at dinner parties, and is on
friendly terms, I dare say, with Huxley and Herbert Spencer; he reads
the newspapers, and I make no doubt is now well acquainted with the
history of the agitation against Tammany and Boss Tweed. I think such a
man is a marvellous phenomenon in our age. It is as if one of the
mediaeval saints from the stained windows of a church should suddenly
become infused with life and take a part in all the ways of our present
world. I can understand the long-abiding power of the Catholic Church
when I remember that I have heard and seen and talked with Henry Edward
Manning.