Cardinal Manning

HENRY EDWARD MANNING was born in 1807 and died in 1892. His life
was extraordinary in many ways, but its interest for the modern
inquirer depends mainly upon two considerations--the light which
his career throws upon the spirit of his age, and the
psychological problems suggested by his inner history. He
belonged to that class of eminent ecclesiastics -- and it is by
no means a small class -- who have been distinguished less for
saintliness and learning than for practical ability. Had he lived
in the Middle Ages he would certainly have been neither a Francis
nor an Aquinas, but he might have been an Innocent. As it was,
born in the England of the nineteenth century, growing up in the
very seed-time of modern progress, coming to maturity with the
first onrush of Liberalism, and living long enough to witness the
victories of Science and Democracy, he yet, by a strange
concatenation of circumstances, seemed almost to revive in his
own person that long line of diplomatic and administrative
clerics which, one would have thought, had come to an end for
ever with Cardinal Wolsey.

In Manning, so it appeared, the Middle Ages lived again. The tall
gaunt figure, with the face of smiling asceticism, the robes, and
the biretta, as it passed in triumph from High Mass at the
Oratory to philanthropic gatherings at Exeter Hall, from Strike
Committees at the Docks to Mayfair drawing-rooms where
fashionable ladies knelt to the Prince of the Church, certainly
bore witness to a singular condition of affairs. What had