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

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 li! Mettetelo li!” the voice repeated, over and over again. “Mettetelo li!” 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 aria powerful human opposition, gives me the last strength for such a cross.”

VI

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 Cardinals and Bishops, whose days were spent amid the practical details of ecclesiastical organisation, the long-drawn involutions of papal diplomacy, and the delicious bickerings of personal intrigue. And when, at