VIII

IN 1875, Manning's labours received their final reward: he was
made a Cardinal. His long and strange career, with its high
hopes, its bitter disappointments, its struggles, its
renunciations, had come at last to fruition in a Princedom of the
Church. 'Ask in faith and in perfect confidence,' he himself once
wrote, and God will give us what we ask. You may say, "But do you
mean that He will give us the very thing?" That, God has not
said. God has said that He will give you whatsoever you ask; but
the form in which it will come, and the time in which He will
give it, He keeps in His own power. Sometimes our prayers are
answered in the very things which we put from us; sometimes it
may be a chastisement, or a loss, or a visitation against which
our hearts rise, and we seem to see that God has not only
forgotten us, but has begun to deal with us in severity. Those
very things are the answers to our prayers. He knows what we
desire, and He gives us the things for which we ask; but in the
form
which His own Divine Wisdom sees to be best.'

There was one to whom Manning's elevation would no doubt have
given a peculiar satisfaction--his old friend Monsignor Talbot.
But this was not to be. That industrious worker in the cause of
Rome had been removed some years previously to a sequestered home
at Passy, whose padded walls were impervious to the rumours of
the outer world. Pius IX had been much afflicted by this
unfortunate event; he had not been able to resign himself to the
loss of his secretary, and he had given orders that Monsignor
Talbot's apartment in the Vatican should be preserved precisely