THE NEW ARCHBISHOP OF WESTMINSTER.
THE Pope has chosen at last, and conferred the titular Arch- bishopric of Westminster vacant by the death of Cardinal Wiseman on Dr. Manning, once the Anglican Archdeacon of Chichester. It is said that Dr. Grant and Dr. Clifford had both written to express something more than a mere nob o archly- piscopari before the choice was made. The third name presented by the Chapter, that of Dr. Errington, was not likely to find acceptance with Pio Nono. Dr. Erriugton had quarrelled with the late Cardinal, and the Pope had warmly taken the side of the latter, so that if Dr. Grant and Dr. Clifford were absolute in their disclaimers, the Pope was naturally thrown upon his own choice. Dr. IJllathorne, the Bishop of Birmingham, had high claims, but Monsignore Manning had given greater proofs than any English Roman Catholic born, of that Ultramontane zeal which the late Cardinal used to say was "not so much a peculiar form of opinion, as a singular love of the Vicar of our Lord," and so it has hap- pened that an ex-dignitary of the English Church has risen to the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England. No doubt the very reason which has induced the Pope to select Dr. Manning for this dignity is that which will find least favour in the eyes of English heretics. It probably matters as little at Rome whether the choice of the Holy Father is likely to be approved by the ignorant and benighted people for whose con- version the hierarchy is established in England, as it would to the English Cabinet whether the choice of a Commander-in-Chief for India were approved by the restless frontier tribes whom he may have to subdue. But though we are not sanguine of modi- fying the infallible mind of the Vatican by any estimate of ours of the new Roman Catholic Archbishop, it will not be uninterest- ing to English Protestants to consider the character of the new Roman Catholic leader we have got amongst us, and the probable direction of his efforts.
Dr. Manning had a wide-spread reputation as a religious writer before he left the English Church. Quite without the genius and wide imaginative insight of Dr. Newman, quite without Dr. Newman's power of surprising each individual con- science and intellect with the feeling that its workings had been intuitively seen and analyzed, the quondam Archdeacon of Chichester had yet an influence and popularity of his own suitable to the thinner and less complex volume of his religious thought. Dr. Newman, like all men of large genius, raised far more questionings than he could satisfy. Over all the aspects of human life his intellectual imagination ranged at will ; and no man ever had a greater power of so touching the keys of thought and feeling as to produce the mood of mind most in harmony with his own faith. This was not, as Mr. Kingsley thought it, a kind of Jesuitical craft, but the natural effect of a wide intellect, itself tuned to harmony with deep religious emotions. Granted a specific mood of faith, and his far-ranging imagination would stray into the regions most dissonant with it, only to track the path winding through the desert of scepticism by which the wandering under- standing might yet be lirought back to its home. There are no more delicately-traced pictures of the actual forms of human per- plexity and frailty, of doubt, difficulty, and sin, of the various at- titudes of the human mind in relation to faith or the want of faith, in the English language, than Dr. Newman's. We speak of him and his writings, however, only for the sake of the contrast with" Dr. Manning's. Dr. Newman stirred human nature too deeply and too widely to give that peculiar sensation called religious comfort to ordinary minds. As you may find at last a rest upon the sea which no sheltered valley will give,—the rest of abandoning yourself to the grandeur of a power so mighty and so various in its forms of solemnity, its darkness and lustre, its calm and storm, that instead of trying to comprehend it you acquiesce in its comprehending you, and feel once more as an infant (if it could be conscious) would feel cradled in the arms of a universe of which it knows and can control nothing, —so there were minds that at length gained from Dr. New- man's wonderful and varied delineations of the human char- acter in its relation to faith, a sort of confidence in his power to lead and comprehend them intellectually which was wholly devoid of any clear insight into the grounds of their leader's own trust. But if there were many who were fascinated by this sort of wide intellectual environment, and trusted themselves to the currents of a great thinker's mind as the traveller trusts himself to the sea, there were more perhaps who felt it perplexing and alarming, who found the echoes of their own thoughts too subtle and exciting, the vistas of doubt too dreary, of faith too mysterious, of feeling too delicately-shaded, to give their minds the security and tranquillity of a sure anchorage. It was quite otherwise with Dr. Manning. Refined, definite, precise, never opening up widely-divergent lines of thought, keeping to a narrow line, and carrying a single clue to a clear conclusion, Dr. Manning was what may be called a comfortable preacher—to the intellect at least—of his followers. We do not mean that he soothed the conscience to sleep. On the contrary, his thin, clear accents were always addressed to sting it into sharper and more definite activity. But intellectually he stirred up no deep waters. To inno- cent persons who gave themselves up as religious devotees to a strict attendance on the Church, to frequent communions, and to religious charities, his discourses were at once awakening and re-assuring. They struck a chord well-accustomed to be struck, which sent a deep vibration through the mind, and they
engraved deeper and ever deeper the same monotonous answers. The function of the human will in relation to faith, the value of ordinances, the spiritual nourishment of the Eucharist, these were the themes on which, with a certain delicate tenuity of touch but a persistency that made up in constancy and emphasis what it wanted in breadth, Dr. Manning insisted in all his discourses.
Even to this day, though Dr. Manning is now a renegade, numbers of pious persons in the Anglican communion find those thin, deli- cately-traced, emphatic sermons, these sermons clear in their drift, narrow in their scope, positive and even ecstatic in their assurances, their most comfortable reading, though they wonder painfully as they read how "so good a man could leave the Church of his baptism."
We believe that when Dr. Manning joined the Roman Church these qualities gained him great influence as a religious adviser and as a father confessor ; for consciences in difficulty do not need, nay, even dread, too large and comprehensive an appreciation. They need a clear way out of their difficulty, and any man who can with full confidence accentuate for them a single suggestion of duty so as to make it predominate absolutely over the rest, solves their perplexity, while any one who really exhibits to them clearly the tangle of motives in their own mind would only increase it. Dr. Manning had the consuming dogmatic thirst and lucid thin insight which rendered him peculiarly qualified to cut a narrow
way through the maze of human .notives, and, especially for what was at that time a considerable class of persons—religious persons on the verge of Romanism—his counsels had, we believe, a far greater fascination than Dr. Newman's, who saw deeper into this class of responsibilities, and shrank more fastidiously from meddling with the maze of human good and ill.
When Dr. Manning joined the Roman Catholic Church, there was of course, as with all English converts, that marked develop-
meat of energy, that stimulus to his intellectual and moral constitution, whieh results from accepting any authoritative solution for the exhausting doubts which distract the human intellect. But this efflorescence of new vigour showed itself in very different ways in different natures. In all of them the sense that instead of trusting any longer that intellectual power which "Through words arid things
Goes sounding on its dim and perilous way" they had delivered up the reins to an infallible Church, produced a certain lavish energy and unrestrained overflow of those feelings which had so long been urging them towards it. Perhaps in all we missed, after their conversion, the charm of that calm and restrained manner which the compressing power of doubt and difficulty had produced. But in all the controlling force which had been exerted by the will at the centre of their life seemed to pass out into more eager intellectual energy. In Dr. Newman the new life was a power playing all over his intellect. On every side he applied his ii#w solution for the enigmas of existence, and on every aide the strength released from the task of warning, sifting, and searching, blossomed into rich illustration, deep humour, wide pathos, passionate eloquence. With Dr. Manning the same strong impulse took a different turn. The new power instead of spreading wide over his nature, and overflowing the intellectual channel of his thought which had long been narrowing, ran deeper, thinner, and narrower than ever. To our appreciation he has become from a deli- cate, precise, pious thinker, a thin, one-stringed visionary, who can never satiate his passion for marking more and more his submission to the authority of the Church. He has become truly Ultra- montane, for he is more and more passing into the likeness of the pions, narrow-minded, fanatical Old man who rules in the chair of St. Peter. Though a convert from the Protestant Church, he is one of the most vehement of Mariolaters. In his funeral sermon on the Cardinal he said, in praise of Rome, "It is especially the home of the Blessed Mother of God. Her name and her form are to be seen in all its streets, in the palaces of the rich, in the dwellings of the poor, shedding abroad the fragrance of the cinnamon and the odour of the balsam." This sort of gallantry to the Virgin, which always reminds us of burning pastilles in a lady's boudoir or bringing new scents for her pocket-handkerchief, is to our minds intensely repelling from an English convert. For that sort of language cannot be required from any Roman Catholic, and a Protestant who adopts it must be yielding to that kind of fasci- nation which succeeds aversion, when he uses it. But this is not the most distinct sign of what seems to us the Ultramontane deterioration in DeM•iiiining He has a violence of language sin- gularly like Pio Nono's, when, for instance, the latter condemns what he deems errors as "pests," and singularly unlike Dr. Manning's former delicately-cut style. Thus, he calls Comt- ism the "Brutal Philosophy" in his recent lecture to the Academia, adopting, we venture to think, an exceedingly violent, vulgar, and false name for what we, no leas than he, think a false and dreary system of thought. Again, he quotes Mr. Lewes's most 'melancholy and we believe also most misleading epigram on the history of modern philosophy with a comment altogether coarse and unjust. "Modern philosophy," says Lewes, "opens with a method—Bacon ; and ends with a method—Comte ; and in each case this method leads to positive science and sets metaphysics aside. Within these limits we have witnessed various efforts to solve the problem of philosophy, and all these efforts have ended in scepticism ;" on which Monsignore Manning remarks, "It sounds like the voice of the buffoon in the chariot reminding CTsar that he is but a man." On the contrary, it sounds to us like the voice of a man conscious of the great void, and searching hopelessly for God.
We fear, then, that in the fine current of driving feminine fana- ticism which anyone may see in the thin compressed lips and stony earnestness of the Archbishop Elect we shall have the nearest approach to an English Pio Nono. Cardinal Wiseman was an external-minded, pageant-loving, but also large-minded man. Archbishop Manning will be in danger of shutting his eyes to facts, and repeating in London the blunders of the Vatican.
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