DEATH OF CARDINAL MANNING.

Evening Star, Issue 8723, 15 January 1892, Page 4

DEATH OF CARDINAL MANNING.

[By Electric Telegraph—Copyright.|

|Fkb Passe Association.

LONDON, January 14. The Cardinal died at eight o’clock this

The death of this eminent dignitary of tho Roman Catholic Church, at the advanced age of eighty-four, not merely deprives his own religious communion of one of its brightest ornaments—its summum dean et tut'inwi —but removes a true and honored friend and brother from numbers of his sorrowing countrymen outside not least among the poor inhabitants of the vast metropolis, wherein his attenuated face and venerable figure were so long familiar, especially among the destitute, ignorant, and suffering round his episcopal doors at Westminster. Henry Edward Manning was something more, and, as many will consider, something nobler than an influential ecclesiastic—higher even than the chief of tho Anglo-Catholic Church, or than the accredited representative of the Holy Father’s own proper person in parlihm infiddium, His was a richly gifted intellect, just short of genius; b sincere and sympathetic heart; a deep earnestness ; a subdued intensity of constant conviction. With tho deceased cardinal varnishes the last survivor—or very nearly the last—of that famous group of High Anglicans at Oxford who, half a century ago, gathered round their mighty chief, the late John Henry The memory of such men as Newman, Kcblo, Pusey, and now Manning, when looked back upon in after years, best perhaps finds utterance in the poet's words: —

Call them from the de.-.d Far our eyes to see ! Prophet-bards whose awful word Shook the earth: “Thussaiththe Lord”; And mado tho Idols flee—

A glorious company. Among this company, but hardly known to our own generation, was John Hurrell Fronde, too early lost, near relative of his namesake the historian ; Wilberforce, the archdeacon, whose “ perversion” to Romo about the same time with Newman was so sorely lamented by his brother Samuel when Bishop of Oxford ; and sole survivor, I believe, tho yet vigorous and ever youthful W. E, Gladstone. Of Oxford Liberals —then so roundly abused alike by. Evangelicals and Anglicans, but now the accepted leaders of Oxford intelligence—who were more or less contemporary with Manning, may be mentioned James Anthony Froudo, less than forty years since expelled from his fellowship at Exeter College on the publication of bis * Nemesis of Faith ’; Thomas Arnold, of Rugby, appointed by Lord Melbourne regius professor of modern history to the University ; Lord Chief Justice Coleridge; Dean Stanley; and Francis W. Newman, younger brother of the Cardinal. O? all those, Coleridge, Fronde, Newman, Gladstone alone arc still with us.

Born in the year 180S, when the tide of evangelical revival, inspired originally by Wesley and Whitfield, was rapidly rising to fertilise the then barren ground of the Established Church, under the attraction of such luminaries as William Wilberforce, Leigh Richmond, li-ac Milner, Thomas Scott, Edward Bickerateth (father of Lie present Bishop of Exeter), and Charles Simeon, Henry Edward Manning spent his early years in tho school at Harrow-ou-the-Hill, near London, which had not then, nor lung afterwards, by any means reached its existing rank as one of the foremost of the public schools in England, yet had already numbered among its pupils Sir William Jones, Dr Parr, Lord Byron, George Canning, and Sir Robert Peel, He proceeded from Harrow to Oxford, entering Balliol College, amoagf-t whose eminent alumni may be named Sir William Hamilton and John Gibson Lochart, both, however, of a rather earlier day. It is interesting and not uninstructivo to reflect that this very college of Balliol many years afterwards became, aud still continues, under that dangerous heretic (as he was formeily considered) Dr Jowctt, thelate vicechancellor, tho chief nursery alike of Oxford liberalism and Oxford scholarship. Could the wildest imagination of the wildest Liberal have conceived, only a generation ago, that Cardinals Newman and Manning would both in their old age live to learn of the spontaneous aud cordial welcome given by Jowett, Sidgwick, Max Mailer, Hatch. Dryver, Bryce, the foremost leaders of liberalism in late conservative Oxford, to tho principals of Mansfield and Manchester new colleges ! la the year 1830 Manning, after graduating in tho university, was elected fellow of Merton—then and since perhaps tho wealthiest and probably the least influential of the older colleges. During the ten succeeding years up to 1840, when he was nominated archdeacon of Chichester, Manning was frequently chosen select preacher before the university. In 1851, six years after Dr Newman, Archdeacon Manning, following tho example of his chief, seceded to Rome. Three years subsequently Pope Pius IX. conferred upon him the honorary degree of doctor of divinity, and in 1857 named him provost of the newly created archdiocese of Westminster, to which the recent appointment of Cardinal Wiseman as first archbishop so greatly alarmed a multitude of excellent Protestants and originated Lord John Russell’s abortive and much - ridiculed Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. On the death of Dr Wiseman in 1865, Dr Manning was nominated by Hia Holiness to this Seo of Westminster and to the headship of the Catholics in England, an office which even his detractors can hardly deny he has well and nobly filled during the ensuing quarter of a century up to his decease. In 1875, the Sacred College, presided over by Pope Leo XIII., elected him cardinal, and His Holiness at the same time appointed him his Legate in Britain. This was the first instance sinoe the death of Pole, cousin of Queen Mary, of the double honor being conferred upon a native-born Englishman, The extraordinary progress made by Roman Catholicism in England and her colonies during the above period —a progress which has had nothing to approach it previously since tho death of Mary Tudor—is doubtless largely duo, among other agencies, to the strong personal influence of Dr Manning and his remarkable abilities as a ruler. This statement is emphatically true of members of the British aristocracy—e g., the Duke of Norfolk, the Marquess of Ripon, the Marquess of Bute, a late Earl of Shrewsbury, and certain lessor lights of the upper classes, not to name intelligent members of the middle class, of either sex. It is, however, not principally as a high ecclesiastical dignitary and a prince of the church that Henry Edward Manning will be best remembered and hold in deserved reverence by the majority of hia fellow countrymen 5 by no small number of the suffering and the sinful, unconfined to his own body, many indeed owned by no sect. Drunkards, fallen women, destitute orphans, homeless paupers, despised dock laborers, all had a friend and helper in Manning. Truly tho maxim of his life seems to have been, like hia Divine Master’s: “It Is more blessed to give than to receive.” His benignity, his graciousneas, his tenderness even in severity, his patience, his untiring devotion to duty, his sweet persuasiveness, were equalled only—they could hardly be surpassed—by those high mental endowments, tact, and courteous graces which contributed to place him m his lofty ecclesiastical position j

made him Archbishop, Cardinal, Papal Legate, Prince of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. The writer may perhaps bo forgiven if before concluding this imperfect memorial, a brief personal allusion bo entered on. About 1856, when recently become a convert to Roman Catholicism, and known by his Anglican title of Archdeacon, Manning was one evening to preach after vespers in the Catholic ebapol (as it was termed) at Islington, North London. The priest in residence was, I remember, the Rev, Father Oakley, a friend of Newman and Manning in Oxford days, and, like them, one who had left the church of his fathers for the older faith. Of Canon Oakley's taste and skill as a player on the organ of his church I also have a delightful recollection, After the lapse of more than four-and-thirty years, I have now the image before mo of Manning in that pulpit at Islington; of that thin, pale, set face ; of those luminous eyes, full of spiritual light; of that calm, gentle, persuasive, yet profoundly earnest manner. I still hear that clear, sweet, sustained, though at times rather feeble voice; I still have the impress of that whole air of the man, which, once felt, could never bo mistaken; the likeness of one who, while on earth, surrounded by these outward and visible objects, had his conversation in the heavens ; who, with the eye of his spirit even here, visibly saw Him who is invisible to the senses; of one whose every thought and word and deed was under the direct and immediate guidance and inspiration of the Eternal. Of Newman, of Manning, and such as they, in whatever church found, or, it may well be, outside of all visible churches, it may be remarked, in the words of a great living thinker and theologian (Dr James Martineau, upon which heretic, as it would have formerly regarded him, the University of Oxford two years ago conferred its proudest honorary distinction), that, “putting themselves into the hand of an unfailing guide, they, like all that will trust tlim, were led in paths they had not known ; and the blindness to them was turned into light for the world. _ God’s greatest things arc ever born of their own opposites; tho highest energy emerges from the lowest self-surrender ; secular progress from spiritual aims; social cohesion from lonely dignity of soul.” Ccivis,