the act of the State in putting a man so unanimously adjudged heretical into the episcopate. The confusion and controversies of the time did not allow Manning for a moment to feel free from the ubiquitous and inexorable civil power, whose violent hands reached everywhere, and touched at every point his most sacred convictions. If he thought of the episcopate as the sine quâ non of unity, the State mocked his faith by co-operating with a schismatical body in founding a Jerusalem bishopric, and frocking its new bishop. If he argued that the Church had the power to interpret its own creed and enforce its own discipline, the State was at hand with the Gorham Judgment to prove his whole elaborate argument a series of logical illusions. By slow degrees he found himself deprived of every alternative, and reluctantly forced to the conclusion that if these two ideas, as he had conceived and defined them, were notes of the true Church, he must seek it elsewhere than in the Church of England.

2. Such seems to have been the process, stated in its most naked and simple form, by which Manning's conversion was effected; but of course it was a much more complex process than this. It did not move in a straight line, but was zigzag and circuitous, deflected by fresh currents of thought and emotion, by new views of policy, and by the changes incident to an agitated and distressful day. Vacillations are not duplicities, variations of mood are not changes of part. There is, in the English mind, no deeper, or more common and characteristic conviction than the belief in the sanity of the State; the belief in the sanctity of the Church is not so distinctive and

inveterate. The Churchman acquires the one, but the Englishman is born with the other. It is the instinctive basis of his jealous guardianship of the supremacy of the crown which, in its essential idea, represents the place and function of the laity in the Church. It means that, in the view of the English people, it is they, and neither the priesthood nor the episcopate, singly or com

a

bined, who constitute the English Church, and are the guarantees of both its unity and continuity. And we can well believe that this idea, though in a blind way, now and then seized Manning, and explains some of his most strenuous Protestant utterances, which were visions of a larger and more historical Church than the ecclesiastical mind of his day had conceived. But these were contradicted by experiences of another order. Civil action in the religious sphere seems, to the ecclesiastical mind, harsh and insolent; and, in troublous times, sensitive are imperious consciences. And Manning's conscience was here sensitive, for his deepest convictions were on the side of freedom for the Church, and they were quickened in suffering. Then, again, his continental wanderings, and long t residence at Rome, counted for much; he was, when in a most susceptible mood, isolated from England with all the coercive force of its traditions, social customs, and ambitions, and set in the very heart of new and potent influences, which made him feel what it was to live and worship in a Church State as distinguished from a State Church. The end of it all was that change became inevitable; he waited but a fit occasion, and this the Gorham Judgment supplied; under the shadow it so conveniently cast, he passed from the Anglican to the Roman Church.

If this analysis of the logical process of his conversion be even approximately correct, it places us in a position to appraise its significance. Within its limits the process was one of marked logical cogency; but the limits were marvellously narrow. The thing it most nearly resembles is a procession of the blind between two blank walls. The man argued his way to his conclusion with the very slenderest intellectual outfit, if, indeed, considering the problems at issue, he could be said to have had any such outfit at all. There was a wealth of reasoning, but a paucity of reasons; and it is reasons that justify and make a great thing mean or a mean thing great. There is no evidence that he had even conceived

what infallibility meant, how it had ever come to be the attribute of one Church, what the claim to it involved, or how the claim harmonized with its history. In his charges and sermons, and in the letters and memoranda here published, there are the usual current commonplaces now of the Protestant, now of the Anglican, and now of the Roman order; but there are no signs of an awakened intelligence, of a man thinking in grim earnest, challenging commonplaces, getting behind them, resolving them into their component parts, compelling them to give up the reason of their existence, to tell why they claim to be believed. For this man scholars have lived and inquired in vain, for him problems which touch the very heart of the formulæ he plays with, have no being. He does not know of their existence, he cannot understand the men who do know that they are and what they mean. As a consequence, his whole conception of religion is formal, emptiness and shallowness mark it from first to last. There never was a biography of a great father of the Church-so full of letters written in supreme crises of his own and his Church's history-that is yet so void of mystery, so vacant of awe, 80 without the traces of struggle after the everlasting rock on which truth stands, so without the infinite yearning towards the light, which is as the face of God. And this is due to no defect in the biographer, but to the character of the original documents he publishes. These things are not written in the mere love of being severe, but in wonder and regret, and out of deep conviction. The logic of Manning's conversion was the logic of an una wakened intellect, and as it was, so also was his policy as a father and prince of the Church.

IV.

1. But now we must proceed to an even more delicate and difficult question-his policy and career within the Roman Church. And here we may be allowed to remark that in those days a conversion was a critical event both

for the convert and the society he entered; and the more eminent the convert the more critical the event, for it was the fuller of dangerous possibilities. The Anglicans who reasoned themselves into Catholicism knew nothing of it as an actual and operative system. It was to many, in a sense, a mere algebraic symbol; they had assigned to it a definite value, and reasoned convincingly from it as a fixed quantity or stable standard. And the danger was that the convert might find the actual Catholicism a contradiction of his ideal, and, in the despair of disillusionment, take some rash and irreparable step. It is a matter of history that some entered only to return; it is an open secret that many remained, among whom we may number the greatest convert of all, in discomfort, disappointment, and despondency, even while cherishing the faith they had embraced. But the dangers to Catholicism were as real as those to the converts. They were, as a whole. personalities of no ordinary kind, men to be reckoned with. They were all men who had lived in controversy, and been convinced by it. Some were men of strong characters; a few were men of fine intellects and ripe scholarship; one was a man of real talent, of strong will, and exceptional angularity; another was a man of rare genius. They had been nursed in a proud and aristocratic Church, had been trained in an exclusive and conservative university, they were accustomed to a society which did homage to their culture, and they bore themselves as men who took life seriously and knew that they were seriously taken. And it was by no means certain that the men who had defied the authorities of their Mother Church would submit to those of their adopted communion. For within it there was much to offend and even shock. The culture was not so fine, the tone was the tone of a sect, with the feeling at its heart that in the eye of English law it was mere dissent, and that it had lived its life apart. separated by the penal legislation of centuries from the main stream of the

nation. To find themselves within a society of this kind was no small trial to the Oxford Tractarians; to find it a society as much divided by jealousies and feuds as the one they had left was a sorer trial still. It was a question whether the new men would transform the old society, or the society subdue the men. What is certain to-day is that the possibilities of good which entered with the men were, if at all, in a very doubtful degree realized, while the possibilities of evil, thanks to the men mainly concerned, were in no small degree averted.

He

2. If now we continue from this point our study of Manning, we must note two things-the mind he brought into Catholicism and the mind he found there. His mind we have seen in part; it was formal rather than creative, more rhetorical than speculative, more political than philosophical, convinced that the cardinal notes and necessities of the Church were a political unity and an official infallibility. He was, indeed, one of the least intellectual of men, and so his rational interests were always subordinate to his social or political, using these terms in their proper rather than their conventional sense. He could understand enthusiasm for institutions, but not for ideas. could never have written "The Idea of a University," or "The Present Position of Catholics in England," or "The Apologia pro Vita Suâ," or "The Grammar of Assent." He could not understand the man who wrote these books, or why they should have such an extraordinary influence, or why multitudes of men who had no belief in Catholicism should so admire their author. It all seemed to him evidence of an "anti-Roman" spirit in Newman,' of a proud intellect, unfaithful to the Holy See, exercising itself in dialectical gymnastics to the delectation of English rationalism! His eyes looked for help in an entirely opposite quarter. The Church he had entered was the Roman, and Rome meant the pope, and his supremacy was the infallibility which he was in search of, and without

1 ii. 323.

which he conceived the Church could not be. In practical working a complaisant pope was to prove a very convenient tool, and the actual infallibility a very different thing from the ideal.

The mind within English Catholicism was very unlike what he had anticipated. It was by no means a united or harmonious mind, or distinguished by anything really catholic or large. He found a laity "without catholic instincts," worldly, selfish, and self-indulgent, all they cared about being "the key to Grosvenor Square;" yet this is not surprising, considering Monsignor Talbot's definition of their proper function. "What is the province of the laity? To hunt, to shoot, to entertain? These matters they understand, but to meddle with ecclesiastical matters they have no right at all." And the clergy were even as the laity; "malcontent bishops, insubordinate chapters," everywhere "disloyalty to the Holy See," and "the taint of Gallicanism." The "Old Catholics" were not inspired by "zeal for religion, for the greater glory of God, and the salvation of souls," but by "jealousy and prejudice against the converts." The candidates for Holy Orders were “a shifting and discordant body, living under no rule." He and his principal Roman correspondent agree in the belief that "until the old generation of bishops and priests is removed no great progress of religion can be expected in England." It was no wonder that, as his biographer says, "Manning took a pessimist view of the state of Catholicism in England," and "was at that time a pessimist of the deepest dye." It would have been almost a miracle if he had been anything else; but much of his discontent was no doubt disillusionment. He may have expected to find a Catholicism which corresponded to his ideal of an infallible Church, and he had found instead one which corresponded to the ideas of a provincial sect, which had suffered much from penal laws, but more from the narrow and insulated life it had been compelled to live. It

2 ii. 318.

8

8 il. 88-9.