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

Syllabus Errorum, for example, issued ex cathedra or not? Grave theologians have never been able to make up their minds. Yet to admit doubts in such matters as these is surely dangerous. “In duty to our supreme pastoral office,” proclaimed the Sovereign Pontiff, “by the bowels of Christ we earnestly entreat all Christ’s faithful people, and we also command them by the authority of God and our Saviour, that they study and labour to expel and eliminate errors and display the light of the purest faith.” Well might the faithful study and labour to such ends! For, while the offence remained ambiguous, there was no ambiguity about the penalty. One hair’s-breadth from the unknown path of truth, one shadow of impurity in the mysterious light of faith, and there shall be anathema! anathema! anathema! When the framers of such edicts called upon the bowels of Christ to justify them, might they not have done well to have paused a little, and to have called to mind the counsel of another sovereign ruler, though a heretic⁠—Oliver Cromwell? “Bethink ye, bethink ye, in the bowels of Christ, that ye may be mistaken!”

One of the secondary results of the Council was the excommunication of Dr. Dollinger, and a few more of the most uncompromising of the Inopportunists. Among these, however, Lord Acton was not included. Nobody ever discovered why. Was it because he was too important for the Holy See to care to interfere with him? Or was it because he was not important enough?

Another ulterior consequence was the appearance of a pamphlet by Mr. Gladstone, entitled “Vaticanism,” in which the awful implications involved in the declaration of Infallibility were laid before the British Public. How was it possible, Mr. Gladstone asked, with all the fulminating accompaniments of his most agitated rhetoric, to depend henceforward upon the civil allegiance of Roman Catholics? To this question the words of Cardinal Antonelli to the Austrian Ambassador might have seemed a sufficient reply. “There is a great difference,” said his Eminence, “between theory and practice. No one will ever prevent the Church from proclaiming the great principles upon which its Divine fabric is based; but, as regards the application of those sacred laws, the Church, imitating the example of its Divine Founder, is inclined to take into consideration the natural weaknesses of mankind.” And, in any case, it was hard to see how the system of Faith, which had enabled Pope Gregory XIII to effect, by the hands of English Catholics, a whole series of attempts to murder Queen Elizabeth, can have been rendered a much more dangerous engine of disloyalty by the Definition of 1870. But such considerations failed to reassure Mr. Gladstone; the British Public was of a like mind; and 145,000 copies of the pamphlet were sold within two months. Various replies appeared, and Manning was not behindhand. His share in the controversy led to a curious personal encounter.

His conversion had come as a great shock to Mr. Gladstone. Manning had breathed no word of its approach to his old and intimate friend, and when the news reached him, it seemed almost an act of personal injury. “I felt,” Mr. Gladstone said, “as if Manning had murdered my mother by mistake.” For twelve years the two men did not meet, after which they occasionally saw each other and renewed their correspondence. This was the condition of affairs when Mr. Gladstone published his pamphlet. As soon as it appeared, Manning wrote a letter to the New York Herald, contradicting its conclusions and declaring that its publication was “the first event that has overcast a friendship of forty-five years.” Mr. Gladstone replied to this letter in a second pamphlet. At the close of his theological arguments, he added the following passage:

“I feel it necessary, in concluding this answer, to state that Archbishop Manning has fallen into most serious inaccuracy in his letter of November 10th, wherein he describes my Expostulation as the first event which has overcast a friendship of forty-five years. I allude to the subject with regret; and without entering into details.”

Manning replied in a private letter:

“My dear Gladstone,” he wrote, “you say that I am in error in stating that your former pamphlet is the first act which has overcast our friendship.

“If you refer to my act in 1851 in submitting to the Catholic Church, by which we were separated for some twelve years, I can understand it.

“If you refer to any other act either on your part or mine I am not conscious of it, and would desire to know what it may be.

“My act in 1851 may have overcast your friendship for me. It did not overcast my friendship for you, as I think the last years have shown.

“You will not, I hope, think me oversensitive in asking for this explanation. Believe me, yours affectionately,

“✝ H. E. M.”

“My dear Archbishop Manning,” Mr. Gladstone answered, “it did, I confess, seem to me an astonishing error to state in public that a friendship had not been overcast for forty-five years until now, which your letter declares has been suspended as to all action for twelve⁠ ⁠…

“I wonder, too, at your forgetting that during the forty-five years I had been charged by you with doing the work of the Antichrist in regard to the Temporal Power of the Pope.

“Our differences, my dear Archbishop, are indeed profound. We refer them, I suppose, in humble silence to a Higher Power⁠ ⁠… You assured me once of your prayers at all and at the most solemn time. I received that assurance with gratitude, and still cherish it. As and when they move upwards, there is a meeting-point for those whom a chasm separates below. I remain always, affectionately yours,

“W. E. Gladstone.”

Speaking of this correspondence in after years, Cardinal Manning said: “From the way in which Mr. Gladstone alluded to the overcasting of our friendship, people might have thought that I had picked his pocket.”

VIII

In 1875, Manning’s labours received their final reward: he was