DEATH OF CARDINAL MANNING.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XX, Issue 14, 22 January 1892, Page 27

DEATH OF CARDINAL MANNING.

(Danedin Evening Star.)

Thi death of this eminent dignitary of the Boman Catholic Church, at the advanced age of eighty-four, not merely deprives his own religions communion of one of its brightest ornaments — its twnmum decut et tutamen— but removes a true and honoured friend and brother from numbers of bis 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, sb many will consider, something nobler than an influential ecclesiastic— higher even than the chief of the Anglo- Catholic Church or than the accredited representative of the Holy Father's own proper person in partibus infldelium. His was a richly gifted intellect* just short of geniua ; a sincere and sympathetic heart ; a deep earnestness ; a subdued intensity of constant conviction. With the deceased cardinal vanishes 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 Newman. The memory of each mea as Newman, Keble, Puaey, and now Manning, when looked back upon in after years, best perhaps finds utterance in the poet's words :— " Call them from the dead For our eyes to see I Prophet-bards whose awful word Shook the earth : " Thus saith the Lord " ; And made the idols flee— A glorious company." Among this company, but hardly known to our own generation, was Jonn Hurrell Froude, too early lost, near relative of his namesake the historian ; Wilberforce, the archdeacon, whose " perversion " to Borne about the same time with Newman was co sorely lamented by his brother Samuel when Bishop of Oxford ; and Bole survivor, I believe, the yet vigorous and ever youthful W. B. Gladstone. Of Oxford Liberals — tben so roundly abused alike by Evangelicals and Anglicns* b ut now the accepted leaders of Oxford intelligence — who were more or less contemporary with Manning, may be mentioned James Anthony Froude, less than forty years since expelled from his fellowship at Exeter College on the publication of his " Nemesis of Faith " ; Thomas Arnold, of Bugby, appointed by Lord Melbourne regius professor of modern history to the University ; Lord Chief Jaatica Coleridge ; Dean Stanley ; and Francis W. Newman, younger brother of tie Cardinal. Of all these, Coleridge, Froude, Newman, Gladstone alone are still with u».

Bom in the year 1808, when the tide of evangelical revival inspired originally by Weßley 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 Bichmond, Isaac Milner, Thomas, Scott, Edward Bickersteth (father of the present Bishop of Exeter), and Charles SimeoD, Henry Edward Manning spent his early years in the school at Harrow •on-the-Hill, near London, which had not then, nor loDg 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 Bobert Peel. He proceeded from Harrow to Oxford, entering Balliol College, amongst whose eminent alumoi may be named Sir William Hamilton, and John Gibson Lochart, both, however, of a rather earlier day. It is interesting and not uninstructive to reflect that this very college of Balliol many years afterwards became, and still continues, under that dangerous heretic (as he was formerly considered) Dr Jowett, tbe late vice-chancellor, the chief nursery alike of Oxford liberalism and Oxford scholarship. Could the wildest imagination of tbe 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 and cordial welcome given by Jowett, Sidgwick, Max Mil Her, Hatch, Dryver, Bryce, the foremost leaders of liberalism in late conservative Oxford, to the principals of Mansfield and Man. Chester new colleges? In tbe year 1830 Manning, after graduating at tbe university, was elected fellow of Merton — then and since perhaps the wealthiest and probably the least influential of the older

colleges. During the ten succeeding years up to 1810, 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 the example of his chief, seceded to Borne. 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 Busbcll's abortive and much ridiculed Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. On the death of Dr Wiseman in 1865, Dr Manning was nominated by his Holiness to this see 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 bis Holiness at the same time appointed him his Legate in Britain. This was the first instance since the death of Pole, cousin of Queen Mary, of the double honour being conferred upon a nativeborn Englishman. The extraordinary progress made by Boman Catholicism in England and her Colonies during the above period— a progress which has had nothing to approach it previously since the death of Mary Tudor— is doubtless largely due, 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 Marquis of Bipon, the Marquis of Bute, a late Earl of Shrewsbury, and certain lesser 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 dignity and a prince of the Church that Henry Edward Manning will be best remembered and held in deserved reverence by the majority of his fellow-countrymen ; 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 labourers, all had a friend and helper in Manning. Truly the maxim of his life seems to have been, like his divine Master's : " It is more blessed to give than to receive." His benignity, his graciousness, 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 in his lofty ecclesiastical position ; made him Archbishop, Cardinal, Papal Legate, Princa of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. The writer may perhaps be forgiven if before concluding this imperfect memorial, a brief personal allusion be entered on. About 1856, when recently become a convert to Boman Catholicism, and known by his Anglican title of Archdeacon, Manning was one evening to preach after vespers in the Catholic chapel (as it was termed) at Islington, North London. The priest in residence was, I remember, the Bey. Father Oakley, a friend of New man and Manning in Oxford days, and, like them, one who bad 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 me of Manning in that pulpit at Islington ; ot that thin, pale, set face ; of those luminous eyes, full of spiritual light ; of that calm, gentle, persuasive, yet profoundly earnest man" ner. I still bear 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 ba mistaken ; the likeness of one who, while on earth, surrounded by these outward and visible objects, bad his conversation in the heavens ; who, with the eye of bis spirit even here, visibly Baw 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 band of an unfailing guide, they like all that will trust Him, were led in paths they had not known ; and the blindness to them was turned into light for the world. God's greatest things are ever born of their own opposites ; the highest energy emerges from the lowest self-surrender ; secular progress from spiritual aims ; social cohesion from lonely dignity of soul." CUIVIS.

Of 2,100 buildings in Consuegra, Spain, before the recent flood, only 600 are now standing. Twenty-five Sisters of Mercy of the Convent of St Anne at Saragossa have embarked at Barcelona for Venezuela, where they propose to devote themselves to nursing lepers in the hospitals founded by tbeir Order there. The fact has just been made public that all the robes of the cardinals have been supplied to the Vatican for more than two centuries by a Protestant firm at Burtschied, near Aix-la-Chapelle, which has always enjoyed a monopoly in the manufacture of this particular colour and quality .