CARDINAL MANNING.*
Tins book, which professes to be little more than a record of the chief events in Cardinal Manning's life from materials already before the public, appears to us, nevertheless, to have greater value than average works of its class. It not only tells the story of his life well and clearly, but it gives, on the whole, a true estimate of the character and capacities of one who was not easily understood. The friends of Manning since his death have spoken of him as a great thinker and a great writer, as well as a great administrator, orator, and philan- thropist. His enemies have been inclined to trace to some of the faults of a demagogue that tendency of his mind which has been stigmatised as socialistic. Mr. A. Hatton's esti- mate seems to us truer than either of these. Briefly, he ascribes to him two predominant characteristics, the one on the side of capacity, the other of character. He was an able administrator and a great priest. Allowing the first expres- sion to cover a very remarkable power of grasping the details of a scheme, or the facts of a complicated case submitted to his judgment—a power which would have given him a high position among contemporary statesmen—we hold that it characterises truly the nature of his ability; although, as we shall see later on, he lacked the insight into character and the perception of unwelcome facts which were necessary to make him an entirely successful administrator. If untiring energy, unswerving purpose, and a power of most exact conception and expression of his own schemes, and of their consequences as they existed in his own mind, together with an admirable clearness in the practical discussions appropriate to com- mittees or deputations,—if these qualifications in their highest degree make up a great administrator, Manning undoubtedly was one. But we believe that the secret of the in- fluence and the respect which Manning gained among so many, lay in the union with his other endowments of that moral char- acter of which his biographer speaks, which was inseparable from his conception of the priesthood. His work on The Eternal Priesthood will reveal something of what we mean, to any one who cares to read it; while those who were associated with him in the work of his Episcopate know that it was a leading thought,—we might almost say, the ruling passion, of his life. Thus, Archbishop Vaughan, in his recent address, speaks of the "repeated and persuasive exposition of the noble and divine character of the Christian priesthood," as "the greatest of the spiritual services that he rendered to the Church within." The English people did not understand the Catholic conception of the priesthood, but it understood and respected regularity of life, devotion to public aims, zeal for good works, absolute detachment from luxury and pleasure; and these qualities in Manning were due to his unremitting efforts to realise the true priest's life both in himself and in others. It was this conception which led him immediately after he joined the Roman Church to take St. Charles Bor.
• Cardinal Mann2n9. By Arthur Woollaston Hutton, MA. London: Methuen land Co. 1892.
romeo as his pattern and model, and to form the Congregation of Oblates, the key-note of whose life was the priestly ideal. It was this same devotion to the idea of the true priest which led him, in one of his last public addresses, to tell his audience that he wished to die as a priest should, without debts and without money; it was the same haunting presence of the wish to do all that became a priest, which prompted him on his death-bed, when life was actually failing, to express his satisfaction that all the prescribed rites had been performed, and all had been done "in due order."
We think it important to emphasise this point in estimating Cardinal Manning, because we believe, as we have said, that he never could have been the power he was without it. Also, his almost mystical conception of the priesthood was sympto- matic of a vein in his character which explains much else. It sometimes strikes people as strange that a man whose first years of office were identified with the strongest vindication of Papal absolutism, should in later life be so identified with the popular cause as to be accused of Socialism. Yet we believe that the two tendencies, apparently so opposite, had to some extent the same cause. The absolute power which appealed to him was not that of a Louis XIV., nor of a Napo- leon. His love of exalting the central power in the Church had in it a strong vein of mysticism. The Bride of the Lamb stood forth pure and spotless in the midst of a corrupt world. He loved to mark the contrast and to concentrate the attention more and more on the concrete representative of the Church,—the Vicar of Christ. He saw the great battle going on between the Revolution and the Church, and his imagination tended to centralise the forces of good about the Rock of Peter, surrounded by the faith of Christian peoples and by the tradi- tions of centuries, with a halo of supernatural glory. The all- destroying sea was beating in vain against the immoveable rock. In that impregnable stronghold was the hope for the future, the ark of salvation, for these latter days. He fre- quently used such images as these in writing or in conversa- tion. No one can read his Pastorals, and other works of that time, without detecting a similar strain of thought.
And how did such sentiments fall in with the democratic ideal ? Let it be remembered that the alliance is not new. Lamennais—however far removed from Manning in char- acter and career—combined the mostuncompromiaing assertion of Papal claims with devotion to the popular cause. So did Lacordaire and Montalembert, notably in their early days. With Manning, as with Lamennais in the days of his fervour, the hoped for ideal was that of a Christian people ruled and guided by an infallible Pope. With Manning, the idea of suffering and persecution was strong. To gather together the Catholic people in the stronghold of the Papal Church, which espoused their cause against the oppression of Governments and rich men,—this was the ideal mission of Catholicism. The time of retribution was to come. The St. Simonians invoked with approval the nitramontane Joseph de Maistre, because of the tinge of Illuminism which ran through the French Catholic's views. And similarly it was the almost mystical ex- pectation of a great time to come, a renovation of society, anew accession of happiness to the human race, a victory of oppressed over oppressors, which inspired Manning in his advocacy of the popular cause—the cause of the suffering people—as in his championship of the suffering and persecuted Church. Such was the nature of his sympathy with Home-rule. "The day of restitution has nearly come," he wrote to Mr. W. O'Brien ; "I hope to see the daybreak, and I hope you will see the noon- tide." Both in his advocacy of the definition of 1870, and of the Home-rule movement, the mystical element was so absorbing, that the strong opposing reasons from common- sense which, whether warranted or not, deserved consideration, were never even understood or weighed by him. The dread of Newman, Dupanloup, Montalembert, lest the emphasising of Papal claims would simply lead the Church into slavery at the hands of un-Christian Governments, was to Manning simply the voice of weak human nature against a divine cause and a divine truth. And similarly the practical knowledge which makes Unionists dread the Home-rule movement, was not merely unconvincing to Manning ; it had no effect on him whatever. He disposed of the fears of the Ulster Orangemen in one sentence "The children of martyrs are not persecutors." Why, then, were the "children of martyrs" boycotters and campaigners ? His enthusiasm for the people lived in a serene atmosphere outside the reach of discussion.
Vox populi, vox Dei,—even if he did not accept this saying as literal truth, it represents the spirit in which he espoused the popular cause where he did so. There was little or nothing in him of the mere vulgar love of popular applause. In the early days of his archiepiscopal life, he spoke much of a coming per- secution. He told his priests that when the time came, their business would simply be to "stand and be shot ; " and there is no reason to doubt that he would have boldly and cheerfully gone to the stake himself. In this spirit he never changed. Those who knew him best would say that he would have adhered to his advocacy whatever it cost him. It was not love of applause, but a mystical faith, which actuated him. We believe him to have been mistaken, and to have in many ways done great harm by his democratic tendency ; but, never- theless, we believe that in the man himself it had some elements of a very noble enthusiasm.
But while we hold that Manning's mysticism had a share in his deeply spiritual conceptions of the Catholic Church and priesthood, it had also another element which Mr. A. Hutton does not contemplate, which was allied to a type very different from the Catholic. The most mystical, per- haps, of modern Catholic saints was St. Theresa ; the most remarkable exemplification of the Catholic spiritual life, in many ways, since the Reformation, was St. Ignatius Loyola. Both of these saints founded orders which are still flourishing. Both were distinguished by their eminently practical turn of mind and frank recognition of facts. Their faith and their mysticism never for a moment made them fatalistic, or led them to be unreal, in anticipation of what was to come. Their mysticism was, indeed, more akin to Cardinal Newman's than to Cardinal Manning's. They saw the supernatural through the natural : but they never failed to recognise truly and exactly the forces which had to be reckoned with. Hence the admirably devised foundations of these typically Catholic saints, which have won the admiration of men of the world for the knowledge of human nature and the skill in organisa- tion which they displayed. Hence it is that the Jesuits have been such an extraordinary force in a Europe which was abandoning the traditions of Christendom, and out of har- mony with many of its old institutions. Parendo vincula. They have known how to bend to facts, as well as now to
control them. Manning, on the contrary, tended to carry his mysticism to fanaticism and fatalism. It had in it a Puritan element. He treated the definition of 1870 as a fixed point which was bound to be reached in the fated course of events. He tended to prophesy readily perse- cutions or millenniums. He did not habitually understand, as we have said, reasons against his schemes, regarding those schemes as divinely appointed, and as destined to be accom- plished by the divine will in opposition to human wills. He was apt to speak of "the Truth," meaning thereby the opinion or line which he had himself adopted ; and to hesitate as to its being in fact entirely true, even in deference to weighty considerations, appeared to him weakness or un- faithfulness. Consequently, he was in some ways a bad administrator in matters in which Catholics have been signally successful. We believe that his multiplication of ecclesiastical seminaries, in the teeth of the advice of men of practical experience, is looked on among English Romanists as a very unfortunate step ; and such a measure, in its neglect of practical considerations, is peculiarly out of harmony with the true genius of the Roman system, which is, in a sense, so empirical in its methods.
Be this as it may, it appears to us that the large share occupied by mysticism in Manning's character—a mysticism into which the ascetic spirit of devotion not unfrequently entered—needs to be more dwelt on than it has been. Mr. A. Hutton gives the key, but it does not fall into his plan to do more. Those who care to understand better a man the remarkable extent of whose influence is at first sight hard to account for, will do well to read more of his works on the Church and the spiritual life; and the bibliography at the end of this volume will give them every facility for such a purpose.
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