Eminent Victorians - Lytton Strachey (essential books to read TXT) 📗

costs, and he elaborated a scheme for securing procrastination, by which a covenant was to bind all those who believed that an article of the creed had been abolished by Act of Parliament to take no steps in any direction, nor to announce their intention of doing so, until a given space of time had elapsed. Mr. Gladstone was hopeful that some good might come of this⁠—though indeed he could not be sure. “Among others,” he wrote to Manning, “I have consulted Robert Wilberforce and Wegg-Prosser, and they seemed inclined to favour my proposal. It might, perhaps, have kept back Lord Feilding. But he is like a cork.”

The proposal was certainly not favoured by Manning. Protests and procrastinations, approving Wegg-Prossers and cork-like Lord Feildings⁠—all this was feeding the wind and folly; the time for action had come.

“I can no longer continue,” he wrote to Robert Wilberforce, “under oath and subscription binding me to the Royal Supremacy in Ecclesiastical causes, being convinced:

That it is a violation of the Divine Office of the Church.

That it has involved the Church of England in a separation from the Universal Church, which separation I cannot clear of the character of schism.

That it has thereby suspended and prevented the functions of the Church of England.”

It was in vain that Robert Wilberforce pleaded, in vain that Mr. Gladstone urged upon his mind the significance of John 3:8.1

“I admit,” Mr. Gladstone wrote, “that the words might in some way be satisfied by supposing our Lord simply to mean ‘the facts of nature are unintelligible, therefore, be not afraid if revealed truths be likewise beyond the compass of the understanding’; but this seems to me a meagre meaning.”

Such considerations could hold him no longer, and Manning executed the resignation of his office and benefice before a public notary. Soon afterwards, in the little Chapel off Buckingham Palace Road, kneeling beside Mr. Gladstone, he worshipped for the last time as an Anglican. Thirty years later the Cardinal told how, just before the Communion service commenced, he turned to his friends with the words:

“I can no longer take the Communion in the Church of England. I rose up, and laying my hand on Mr. Gladstone’s shoulder, said ‘Come.’ It was the parting of the ways. Mr. Gladstone remained; and I went my way. Mr. Gladstone still remains where I left him.”

On April 6th, 1851, the final step was taken: Manning was received into the Roman Catholic Church. Now at last, after the long struggle, his mind was at rest.

“I know what you mean,” he wrote to Robert Wilberforce, “by saying that one sometimes feels as if all this might turn out to be only another ‘Land of Shadows.’ I have felt it in time past, but not now. The Θεολοϒία from Nice to St. Thomas Aquinas, and the undivided unity suffused throughout the world, of which the Cathedra Petri is the centre, is now 1800 years old, and mightier in every power now than ever⁠—in intellect, in science, in separation from the world; and purer too, refined by 300 years of conflict with the modern infidel civilisation⁠—all of this is a fact more solid than the earth.”

V

When Manning joined the Church of Rome, he acted under the combined impulse of the two dominating forces in his nature. His preoccupation with the supernatural might, alone, have been satisfied within the fold of the Anglican communion; and so might his preoccupation with himself⁠—the one might have found vent in the elaborations of High Church ritual, and the other in the activities of a bishopric. But the two together could not be quieted so easily. The Church of England is a commodious institution; she is very anxious to please, but somehow or other, she has never managed to supply a happy home to superstitious egotists. “What an escape for my poor soul!” Manning is said to have exclaimed when, shortly after his conversion, a mitre was going a-begging. But, in truth, Manning’s “poor soul” had scented nobler quarry. To one of his temperament, how was it possible, when once the choice was plainly put, to hesitate for a moment between the respectable dignity of an English bishop, harnessed by the secular power, with the Gorham judgment as a bit between his teeth, and the illimitable pretensions of the humblest priest of Rome?

For the moment, however, it seemed as if the Fates had at last been successful in their little game of shunting Manning. The splendid career which he had so laboriously built up from the small beginnings of his Sussex curacy was shattered⁠—and shattered by the inevitable operation of his own essential needs. He was over forty, and he had been put back once more to the very bottom rung of the ladder⁠—a middle-aged neophyte with, so far as could be seen, no special claim to the attention of his new superiors. The example of Newman, a far more illustrious convert, was hardly reassuring: he had been relegated to a complete obscurity, in which he was to remain until extreme old age. Why should there be anything better in store for Manning? Yet it so happened that within fourteen years of his conversion Manning was Archbishop of Westminster and the supreme ruler of the Roman Catholic community in England. This time the Fates gave up the unequal struggle; they paid over their stakes in despair, and retired from the game.

Nevertheless it is difficult to feel quite sure that Manning’s plunge was as hazardous as it appeared. Certainly he was not a man who was likely to forget to look before he leaped, nor one who, if he happened to know that there was a mattress spread to receive him, would leap with less conviction. In the light of after-events, one would be glad to know what precisely passed at that mysterious interview of his with the Pope, three years before his conversion. It is at least possible that the authorities in Rome had their eye on Manning; the may well have felt that