‘But, God being my helper, I will not seek it by the lifting of a finger or the speaking of a word.’
So Manning wrote, and thought, and prayed; but what are words, and thoughts, and even prayers, to the mysterious and relentless powers of circumstance and character? Cardinal Wiseman was slowly dying; the tiller of the Church was slipping from his feeble hand; and Manning was beside him, the one man with the energy, the ability, the courage, and the conviction to steer the ship upon her course. More than that; there was the sinister figure of a Dr Errington crouching close at hand, ready to seize the helm and make straight – who could doubt it? – for the rocks. In such a situation the voice of self-abnegation must needs grow still and small indeed. Yet it spoke on, for it was one of the paradoxes in Manning’s soul that that voice was never silent. Whatever else he was, he was not unscrupulous. Rather, his scruples deepened with his desire; and he could satisfy his most exorbitant ambitions in a profundity of self-abasement. And so now he vowed to Heaven that he would seek nothing – no, not by the lifting of a finger or the speaking of a word. But, if something came to him –? He had vowed not to seek; he had not vowed not to take. Might it not be his plain duty to take? Might it not be the will of God?
Something, of course, did come to him, though it seemed for a moment that it would elude his grasp. Wiseman died, and there ensued in Rome a crisis of extraordinary intensity. ‘Since the creation of the hierarchy,’ Monsignor Talbot wrote, ‘it is the greatest moment for the Church that I have yet seen.’ It was the duty of the Chapter of Westminster to nominate three candidates for succession to the Archbishopric; they made one last effort, and had the temerity to place upon the list, besides the names of two Old Catholic bishops, that of Dr Errington. It was a fatal blunder. Pius IX was furious; the Chapter had committed an ‘insulta al Papa’, he exclaimed, striking his breast three times in his rage. ‘It was the Chapter that did it,’ said Manning afterwards; but even after the Chapter’s indiscretion, the fatal decision hung in the balance for weeks. ‘The great point of anxiety with me,’ wrote Monsignor Talbot to Manning,
is whether a Congregation will be held, or whether the Holy Father will perform a Pontifical act. He himself is doubting. I therefore say mass and pray every morning that he may have the courage to choose for himself, instead of submitting the matter to a Congregation. Although the Cardinals are determined to reject Dr Errington, nevertheless I am afraid that they should select one of the others. You know very well that Congregations are guided by the documents that are placed before them; it is for this reason that I should prefer the Pope’s acting himself.
But the Holy Father himself was doubting. In his indecision, he ordered a month of prayers and masses. The suspense grew and grew. Everything seemed against Manning. The whole English episcopate was opposed to him; he had quarrelled with the Chapter; he was a convert of but few years’ standing; even the congregated Cardinals did not venture to suggest the appointment of such a man. But suddenly the Holy Father’s doubts came to an end. He heard a voice – a mysterious inward voice – whispering something in his ear. ‘Mettetelo lì! Mettetelo lì!’ the voice repeated, over and over again. Mettetelo lì! It was an inspiration and Pius IX, brushing aside the recommendations of the Chapter and the deliberations of the Cardinals, made Manning, by a Pontifical act, Archbishop of Westminster.
Monsignor Talbot’s felicity was complete; and he took occasion, in conveying his congratulations to his friend, to make some illuminating reflections upon the great event. ‘My policy throughout,’ he wrote, ‘was never to propose you directly to the Pope, but to make others do so; so that both you and I can always say that it was not I who induced the Holy Father to name you, which would lessen the weight of your appointment. This I say, because many have said that your being named was all my doing. I do not say that the Pope did not know that I thought you the only man eligible; as I took care to tell him over and over again what was against all the other candidates; and in consequence he was almost driven into naming you. After he had named you, the Holy Father said to me, “What a diplomatist you are, to make what you wished come to pass!”
‘Nevertheless,’ concluded Monsignor Talbot, ‘I believe your appointment was specially directed by the Holy Ghost.’
Manning himself was apparently of the same opinion. ‘My dear Child,’ he wrote to a lady penitent,
I have in these last three weeks felt as if our Lord had called me by name. Everything else has passed out of my mind. The firm belief that I have long had that the Holy Father is the most supernatural person I have ever seen has given me this feeling more deeply still. I feel as if I had been brought, contrary to all human wills, by the Divine Will, into an immediate relation to our Divine Lord.
‘If indeed,’ he wrote to Lady Herbert,
it were the will of our Divine Lord to lay upon me this heavy burden, He could have done it in no way more strengthening and consoling to me. To receive it from the hands of His Vicar, and from Pius IX, and after long invocation of the Holy Ghost, and not only without human influences, but in spite of manifold and powerful human opposition, gives me the last strength for such a cross.
6
MANNING’S appointment filled his opponents with alarm. Wrath and vengeance seemed to be hanging over them: what might not be expected from the formidable enemy against whom they had struggled for so long, and who now stood among them armed with archiepiscopal powers and invested with the special confidence of Rome? Great was their amazement, great was their relief, when they found that their dreaded master breathed nothing but kindness, gentleness, and conciliation. The old scores, they found, were not to be paid off, but to be wiped out. The new archbishop poured forth upon every side all the tact, all the courtesy, all the dignified graces of a Christian magnanimity. It was impossible to withstand such treatment. Bishops who had spent years in thwarting him became his devoted adherents; even the Chapter of Westminster forgot its hatred. Monsignor Talbot was extremely surprised. ‘Your greatest enemies have entirely come round,’ he wrote. ‘I received the other day a panegyric of you from Searle. This change of feeling I cannot attribute to anything but the Holy Ghost.’ Monsignor Talbot was very fond of the Holy Ghost; but, so far at any rate as Searle was concerned, there was another explanation. Manning, instead of dismissing Searle from his position of ‘oeconomus’ in the episcopal household, had kept him on – at an increased salary; and the poor man, who had not scrupled in the days of his pride to call Manning a thief, was now duly grateful.
As to Dr Errington, he gave an example of humility and submission by at once withdrawing into a complete obscurity. For years the Archbishop of Trebizond, the ejected heir to the See of Westminster, laboured as a parish priest in the Isle of Man. He nursed no resentment in his heart, and, after a long and edifying life of peace and silence, he died in 1886, a professor of theology at Clifton.
It might be supposed that Manning could now feel that his triumph was complete. His position was secure; his power was absolute; his prestige was daily growing. Yet there was something that irked him still. As he cast his eyes over the Roman Catholic community in England, he was aware of one figure which, by virtue of a peculiar eminence, seemed to challenge the supremacy of his own. That figure was Newman’s.
Since his conversion, Newman’s life had been a long series of misfortunes and disappointments. When he had left the Church of England, he was its most distinguished, its most revered member, whose words, however strange, were listened to with profound attention, and whose opinions, however dubious, were followed in all their fluctuations with an eager and indeed a trembling respect. He entered the Church of Rome, and found himself forthwith an unimportant man. He was received at the Papal Court with a politeness which only faintly concealed a total lack of interest and understanding. His delicate mind, with its refinements, its hesitations, its complexities – his soft, spectacled, Oxford manner, with its half-effeminate diffidence – such things were ill calculated to impress a throng of busy Car
dinals and Bishops, whose days were spent amid the practical details of ecclesiastical organization, the long-drawn involutions of papal diplomacy; and the delicious bickerings of personal intrigue. And when, at last, he did succeed in making some impression upon these surroundings, it was no better; it was worse. An uneasy suspicion gradually arose; it began to dawn upon the Roman authorities that Dr Newman was a man of ideas. Was it possible that Dr Newman did not understand that ideas in Rome were, to say the least of it, out of place? Apparently he did not; nor was that all; not content with having ideas, he positively seemed anxious to spread them. When that was known, the politeness in high places was seen to be wearing decidedly thin. His Holiness, who on Newman’s arrival had graciously expressed the wish to see him ‘again and again’, now, apparently, was constantly engaged. At first Newman supposed that the growing coolness was the result of misapprehension; his Italian was faulty, Latin was not spoken at Rome, his writings had only appeared in garbled translations. And even Englishmen had sometimes found his arguments difficult to follow. He therefore determined to take the utmost care to make his views quite clear; his opinions upon religious probability, his distinction between demonstrative and circumstantial evidence, his theory of the development of doctrine and the aspects of ideas – these and many other matters, upon which he had written so much, he would now explain in the simplest language. He would show that there was nothing dangerous in what he held, that there was a passage in De Lugo which supported him, that Perrone, by maintaining that the Immaculate Conception could be defined, had implicitly admitted one of his main positions, and that his language about Faith had been confused, quite erroneously, with the fideism of M. Bautain. Cardinal Barnabò, Cardinal Reisach, Cardinal Antonelli, looked at him with their shrewd eyes and hard faces, while he poured into their ears – which, as he had already noticed with distress, were large and not too clean – his careful disquisitions; but it was all in vain; they had clearly never read De Lugo or Perrone, and as for M. Bautain, they had never heard of him. Newman in despair fell back upon St Thomas Aquinas; but, to his horror, he observed that St Thomas himself did not mean very much to the Cardinals. With a sinking heart, he realized at last the painful truth: it was not the nature of his views, it was his having views at all, that was objectionable. He had hoped to devote the rest of his life to the teaching of Theology; but what sort of Theology could he teach which would be acceptable to such superiors? He left Rome, and settled down in Birmingham as the head of a small community of Oratorians. He did not complain; it was God’s will; it was better so. He would watch and pray.
But God’s will was not quite so simple as that. Was it right, after all, that a man with Newman’s intellectual gifts, his devoted ardour, his personal celebrity, should sink away out of sight and use in the dim recesses of the Oratory at Birmingham? If the call were to come to him to take his talent out of the napkin, how could he refuse? And the call did come. A Catholic University was being started in Ireland, and Dr Cullen, the Archbishop of Armagh, begged Newman to become the Rector. At first he hesitated, but when he learnt that it was the Holy Father’s wish that he should take up the work, he could doubt no longer; the offer was sent from Heaven. The difficulties before him were very great; not only had a new University to be called up out of the void, but the position was complicated by the presence of a rival institution – the undenominational Queen’s Colleges, founded by Peel a few years earlier with the object of giving Irish Catholics facilities for University education on the same terms as their fellow-countrymen. Yet Newman had the highest hopes. He dreamt of something greater than a merely Irish University – of a noble and flourishing centre of learning for the Catholics of Ireland and England alike. And why should not his dream come true? ‘In the midst of our difficulties,’ he said, ‘I have one ground of hope, just one stay, but, as I think, a sufficient one, which serves me in the stead of all other argument whatever. It is the decision of the Holy See; St Peter has spoken.’
The years that followed showed to what extent it was safe to depend upon St Peter. Unforeseen obstacles cropped up on every side. Newman’s energies were untiring, but so was the inertia of the Irish authorities. On his appointment, he wrote to Dr Cullen asking that arrangements might be made for his reception in Dublin. Dr Cullen did not reply. Newman wrote again, but still there was no answer. Weeks passed, months passed, years passed, and not a word, not a sign, came from Dr Cullen. At last, after dangling for more than two years in the uncertainties and perplexities of so strange a situation, Newman was summoned to Dublin. There he found nothing but disorder and discouragement. The laity took no interest in the scheme, the clergy actively disliked it; Newman’s authority was disregarded. He appealed to Cardinal Wiseman, and then at last a ray of hope dawned. The cardinal suggested that a bishopric should be conferred upon him, to give him a status suitable to his position; Dr Cullen acquiesced, and Pius IX was all compliance. ‘Manderemo a Newman la crocetta,’ he said to Wiseman, smilingly drawing his hands down each side of his neck to his breast, ‘lo faremo vescovo di Porfirio, o qualche luogo.’ The news spread among Newman’s friends, and congratulations began to come in. But the official intimation seemed to be unaccountably delayed; no crocetta came from Rome, and Cardinal Wiseman never again referred to the matter. Newman was left to gather that the secret representations of Dr Cullen had brought about a change of counsel in high quarters. His pride did not allow him to inquire further; but one of his lady penitents, Miss Giberne, was less discreet. ‘Holy Father,’ she suddenly said to the Pope in an audience one day, ‘why don’t you make Father Newman a bishop?’ Upon which the Holy Father looked much confused and took a great deal of snuff.
For the next five years Newman, unaided and ignored, struggled desperately, like a man in a bog, with the over-mastering difficulties of his task. His mind, whose native haunt was among the far aerial boundaries of fancy and philosophy, was now clamped down under the fetters of petty detail and fed upon the mean diet of compromise and routine. He had to force himself to scrape together money, to write articles for the students’ Gazette, to make plans for medical laboratories, to be ingratiating with the City Council; he was obliged to spend months travelling through the regions of Ireland in the company of extraordinary ecclesiastics and barbarous squireens. He was a thoroughbred harnessed to a four-wheeled cab; and he knew it. Eventually he realized something else: he saw that the whole projects of a Catholic University had been evolved as a political and ecclesiastical weapon against the Queen’s Colleges of Peel, and that was all. As an instrument of education, it was simply laughed at; and he himself had been called in because his name would be a valuable asset in a party game. When he understood that, he resigned his rectorship and returned to the Oratory.
But his tribulations were not yet over. It seemed to be God’s will that he should take part in a whole succession of schemes, which, no less than the project of the Irish University, were to end in disillusionment and failure. He was persuaded by Cardinal Wiseman to undertake the editorship of a new English version of the Scriptures, which was to be a monument of Catholic scholarship and an everlasting glory to Mother Church. He made elaborate preparations; he collected subscriptions, engaged contributors, and composed a long and learned prolegomena to the work. It was all useless; Cardinal Wiseman began to think of other things; and the scheme faded imperceptibly into thin air. Then a new task was suggested to him. The Rambler, a Catholic periodical, had fallen on evil days; would Dr Newman come to the rescue, and accept the editorship? This time he hesitated rather longer than usual; he had burnt his fingers so often; he must be specially careful now. ‘I did all I could to ascertain God’s will,’ he said, and he came to the conclusion that it was his duty to undertake the work. He did so, and after two numbers had appeared Dr Ullathorne, the Bishop of Birmingham, called upon him, and gently hinted that he had better leave the paper alone. Its tone was not liked at Rome; it had contained an article criticizing St Pius V, and, most serious of all, the orthodoxy
of one of Newman’s own essays had appeared to be doubtful. He resigned, and in the anguish of his heart determined never to write again. One of his friends asked him why he was publishing nothing. ‘Hannibal’s elephants,’ he replied, ‘never could learn the goose-step.’
Newman was now an old man – he was sixty-three years of age. What had he to look forward to? A few last years of insignificance and silence. What had he to look back upon? A long chronicle of wasted efforts, disappointed hopes, neglected possibilities, unappreciated powers. And now all his labours had ended by his being accused at Rome of lack of orthodoxy. He could no longer restrain his indignation, and in a letter to one of his lady penitents he gave vent to the bitterness of his soul. When his Rambler article had been complained of, he said, there had been some talk of calling him to Rome. ‘Call me to Rome,’ he burst out – ‘what does that mean? It means to sever an old man from his home, to subject him to intercourse with persons whose languages are strange to him – to food and to fashions which are almost starvation on the one hand, and involve restless days and nights on the other – it means to oblige him to dance attendance on Propaganda week after week and month after month – it means his death. (It was the punishment on Dr Baines, 1840–41, to keep him at the door of Propaganda for a year.)
‘This is the prospect which I cannot but feel probable, did I say anything which one Bishop in England chose to speak against and report. Others have been killed before me. Lucas went of his own accord indeed – but when he got there, oh! how much did he, as loyal a son of the Church and the Holy See as ever was, what did he suffer because Dr Cullen was against him? He wandered (as Cullen said in a letter he published in a sort of triumph), he wandered from church to church without a friend, and hardly got an audience from the Pope. And I too should go from St Philip to Our Lady, and to St Peter and St Paul, and to St Laurence and to St Cecilia, and, if it happened to me as to Lucas, should come back to die.’
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