CARDINAL MANNING.
PROTESTANTS as well as Catholics are pleased to hear of Archbishop Manning's elevation to the Cardinalate. A heretical nation must be glad to find that its greatest religious enemy deems it worthy of being ruled in spiritual things by a Prince of the Church, just as the sturdiest of Protestants in the time of Elizabeth may have drawn a secret satisfaction from the strenuous efforts of Campion and his fellow-Jesuits to bring back this island to the Catholic faith. We are apt to fancy that we must be made of good spiritual stuff, when the heads of the Roman Church cast so wistful an eye to this island, after it has passed through three hundred years of stubborn heresy. We may therefore take the honour which has been done to Archbishop Manning as a compliment to ourselves. And it is the more noticeable because, in a certain sense, he is the first English Cardinal whom we have had since the Reformation. Other Englishmen have, of course, been raised to the Cardinalate, but their countrymen have known nothing about them, and they have lived in Rome. Not one Englishman in ten thousand, for example, knows anything about Cardinal Acton. In Dr. Wiseman we had a resident Cardinal, who tried hard to act and speak like one of ourselves ; but he was not a native of England, and he had been trained abroad ; nor was he ever quite able to throw off a foreign air of thought, speech, and style, although he was a man of marvellous flexibility. Cardinal Manning, on the other hand, is not only a born Englishman, but he is closely connected with the most characteristic of our institu- ° tions. Trained at Oxford, a constant speaker at the Union, a
college friend of Mr. Gladstone and of other men who have helped to make the history of our time, a youth of great promise when he entered the English Church, a distinguished preacher and an Archdeacon when he was comparatively young, he seemed to be going swiftly to high ecclesiastical office at the time when he went to Rome. He had already gained great influence among the clergy, by a mixture of gracious subtility with an unbending assertion of sacerdotal claims. His sermons were, we believe, delightful to devout women, and the secret of their influence is amply explained by the mingled sweetness of their tone and austerity of their doctrine. Women have less tenderness than men for frailty or passion. They like to see the old Adam smitten with an iron heel, if soothing words be said to the onlookers. They rejoice when men of the world and statesmen are told that the sins which are readily excused by themselves may be more sternly punished at the Judgment Day than the grosser offences of the ignorant, and the Archdeacon of Chichester delivered that message with a sternness and yet with a beauty which must have charmed the austerity of those female enthusiasts who are ignorant alike of passions and of temptations. There was the same fascination in his personal manners. A certain measure of downright English frankness being united to a peculiar soft- ness of address, the Archdeacon became a favourite in society as well as in the pulpit. Few ecclesiastics were better known to rich and lettered people. Nor did he cut himself loose from English pleasures and ways of life, although the asceticism of his creed grew year by year. We believe that he was a good cricketer. He also took unto himself a wife, after the admirable fashion of the English clergy. It is interesting to reflect that if he had not been bereaved, ho would have been cut off from the Roman priesthood, and the rich rewards that have been showered upon his zeal. Thus it was no mere ascetic who went to Rome when the decision on the Gorham case told him that Queen Victoria tolerated a denial of Bap- tismal Regeneration. He was not one of those Tractarians who had been monks in all but the name. Nor was he even a theologian like Newman, who, in the estimation of the British PhiKstine, had allowed the canker of subtility to eat away his brains and his conscience. As an English parochial clergyman, he had taken an active part in the practical work of the Church, and he was a mau of the world and a man of business, as well as a man of sanctity.
Nor did Cardinal Manning allow his English qualities to sleep when he became the most zealous of Ultramontanes. He has shown in a hundred ways how eager he is to be deemed a thorough Englishman. By judiciously mixing tolerance of address and tone with a Hildebrandine assertion of Papal claims, he has kept up old friendships and connections. It says much for his tact that the immense change in his ecclesiasti- cal position so little altered his place in society. It is no secret that he was an unwelcome successor to Cardinal Wiseman. Both the Catholic gentry of England and the Catholic Clergy of his own diocese may have thought that his desertion from the English Church and his flaming Ultra- montane zeal would make him disliked in London, and that he would soon undo all the service which had been rendered by the easy, gracious, tolerant manners of Cardinal Wiseman.
But he has falsified these apprehensions by the mingled suavity of his tone and the almost politic way in which he has played the frank Englishman. We pay a high compliment to his tact when we say, in no offensive spirit, that he knows how to come round his countrymen. Although more Roman in many ways than the Romans themselves, he never parades any ultra-Catholic doctrine without protesting that it is as English as the House of Commons. Some astounding paradoxes have thus been let loose on the wings of that insular self-complacency to which our enemies give the name of insular self-conceit.
Thus he taught astonished Britons that Thomas it Becket was not a headstrong and domineering priest, but a typical English- man, who was brutally murdered because he stood up for the historical liberties of England,—the insinuation being that the rights which he claimed still belong to the Church. The same bewildered audience also learned that all opposition to Ultra- montanism is Cwsarism, that Cwsarism is Atheism, and that Ultramontanism is genuine British Christianity. We do not mean that the use of such pleas convicts the Cardinal of the slightest duplicity. We have no doubt that they are perfectly sincere. But they show that he has mastered the art of putting things. If he, instead of Dr. Colenso, had been Bishop of Natal, the arithmetical Zulus, so far from getting the better of him, would have been charmed to find that the immensely elaborate theology and ritual of Rome were essentially in accord with the most sacred of Kaffir customs and beliefs; and they would have been delighted to find that, in becoming Christians, they would be paying a high compliment to the wisdom of their ancestors. They would wonder, in fact, that they had never thought of the coincidence before.
Cardinal Manning has climbed high indeed above the Archdeaconry of Chichester. It is probable that he would have been made a Bishop if he had remained in the Establish- ment • but in the scale of hierarchies a Bishopric of an insular Church ranks far below the Prince of a Church which, be its sins what they may, is still the greatest spiritual
organisation that the world has ever seen. The rise is so great that Cardinal Manning must expect to encounter some of that insinuation which is the penalty of success, when success follows a change of faith. We have heard a lady, who knew him when he was a Protestant, say that he bad left
• on her mind the impression not so much of an able as of a holy man. But there are, of course, traditions of a different kind. It was quite natural that hostile onlookers should accuse him of ambition. But the Cardinal anticipated such a reproach in one of the most austere and beautiful of his Protestant sermons by denouncing "Worldly Ambition," with merciless rigour. He de- nounced all who climbed to the offices either of the State or the Church by means of their own natural faculties, even although those powers should be exercised in a way which the world would deem pure as well as harmless. "It is not only by simoniacal contracts," he said, "that men may obtain holy functions by barter with the enemy of the Church. The use and laying-out of natural gifts and powers, such as intellect, learning, dexterity, eloquence, and, much worse, of the gifts of the Spirit, so as to attract the notice of those in whose hands is the disposal of dignities and preferments ; the willing acceptance of prominent places ; the doing of acts in a direct line of suggestion or in- vitation of ulterior ends ; the outrunning of the providence of God ; the overpassing of limits which He has drawn along our path, into spheres where we no longer have His sanction, which in themselves are lawful, but are not for us ; in these and many other ways men do distinctly transfer the intention of their heart and its affections from God, as the guide and dis- poser of their life, to an unknown power, which is partly self, partly the world, and covertly he who through the world and ourselves, leads us captive at his will." who, Cardinal Manning wrote these words, he little thought that he should be re- warded with dignities and preferments which should place him on the very steps of the Papacy. Assuredly the denuncia-
tion was perfectly sincere. Assuredly, also, the Cardinal could still recite it with perfectly good faith. But the words do not exactly give the point of view from which a Prince of the Church would naturally choose to look at the pomps and vanities of this sinful life. However true they may be in themselves, they might seem a little out of place in his mouth, and might give rise to misunderstanding. In fact, it may be laid down as a good rule that, since no single Christian can effectively expound all the pre- cepts of the Gospel, the teaching of humility should be left to the lesser orders of the clergy. Meekness of spirit must come much more naturally to them than it possibly can to an Archbishop or a Cardinal. Hence it is no reproach to Cardinal Manning that the sermons of his lowly Protestant days are far more filled with the beauty of holiness than the skilful discourses of his later years. Even the sanctity of St. John would have been ruffled by the splendid cares of a diocese in the West End and the prospect of a seat in the College of Cardinals.
The new Cardinal's place will be altogether different from that which Dr. Newman owes to his profound and brooding spirit, to the marvellous subtility of his analytical power, and to his mastery over the finest notes of written speech. But Cardinal Manning possesses gifts which are much more useful for the rough, every-day work of his Church. While he has accepted media3val doctrines in their most rigid shape, and while he be- lieves that England as well as the Continent may still be brought under the yoke of the Roman Church, he never forgets that she must work with the tools which the world puts into her hands. It would seem as if her most sagacious minds had begun to see that they can no longer put their trust. in Princes, and that the time has come for a bold appeal to the Democratic instincts. The rulers of their Church have been too wise to bind her fast to any form of government, however much they may have flattered powerful dynasties, and her theological neccessities give no reason why she should disdain or fear an alliance with the Democracy. She might use her influence to bring about social reforms, become the friend of the oppressed classes, and brave the powerful for the sake of the poor. Dr. Newman sketched some such policy forty years ago, and it has actually been tried in Ireland. Now, Cardinal Manning seems ready to hazard that experiment. He has gone out of his way to aid all charitable work ; he has placed himself almost at the head of a campaign against intoxi- cating drink; he has flung aside his episcopal dignity to address a mass temperance meeting in Hyde Park ; and alone
among the clergy of London, he had the courage to address the great meeting which was convened in Exeter Hall for the sake of helping the agricultural labourers who were then on strike. If the Catholic Clergy throughout England were to act in that fashion with fearless vigour, they might touch the hearts of the poor, and, whatever might be the number of conver- sions to Rome, the political results of the movement might soon be interesting. If that were to become the policy of the Catholic Church throughout the world, a new chapter of ecclesiastical history might still have to be written. And if Cardinal Manning were to be the next Pope! But we stop on the brink of that di2zy speculation.
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