It so happened that it was at this very time that Manning was
appointed to the See of Westminster. The destinies of the two
men, which had run parallel to one another in so strange a
fashion and for so many years, were now for a moment suddenly to
converge. Newly clothed with all the attributes of ecclesiastical
supremacy, Manning found himself face to face with Newman, upon
whose brows were glittering the fresh laurels of spiritual
victory--the crown of an apostolical life. It was the meeting of
the eagle and the dove. What followed showed, more clearly
perhaps than any other incident in his career, the stuff that
Manning was made of. Power had come to him at last; and he seized
it with all the avidity of a born autocrat, whose appetite for
supreme dominion had been whetted by long years of enforced
abstinence and the hated simulations of submission. He was the
ruler of Roman Catholic England, and he would rule. The nature of
Newman's influence it was impossible for him to understand, but
he saw that it existed; for twenty years he had been unable to
escape the unwelcome itterations of that singular, that alien,
that rival renown; and now it stood in his path, alone and
inexplicable, like a defiant ghost. 'It is remarkably
interesting,' he observed coldly, when somebody asked him what he
thought of the Apologia: 'it is like listening to the voice of
one from the dead.' And such voices, with their sepulchral
echoes, are apt to be more dangerous than living ones; they
attract too much attention; they must be silenced at all costs.
It was the meeting of the eagle and the dove; there was a
hovering, a swoop, and then the quick beak and the relentless
talons did their work.