There are three great figures of the Catholic Church in England in the Ninetieth Century.
Lytton Strachey included only one of them in his list of five Eminent Victorians, but the other two also were worthy and would have qualified for entry into a list of ten.
Wiseman, Newman, Manning, they carried the emphasis of their manhood in their very names. The names were ‘punnable,’ Browning the poet delivered himself of what Mr. Chesterton has called ‘spluttering and spiteful’ puns on the subject. However different these three men of destiny were, all three attained the Red Hat.
Wiseman was Catholic born. But the other two, not born Catholic, yet entered the only Church and so each of them also was a wise man.
As the first of the archbishops of Westminister in the restoration of the hierarchy in England Wiseman was, in a sense, a new man. Manning, the ex-Archdeacon of Chichester turned Catholic and Catholic priest, was certainly a new man. Newman, the ex-Vicar of St. Mary’s Oxford, had by that time turned Catholic and had been ordained and was manning ably enough the Oratorian Superiorship at Birmingham.
When Wiseman died, Manning, the later arrival, succeeded to the vacant see. Early enough in Newman’s Catholic career there was talk of raising him to the see of Liverpool or Nottingham but it never came off and Newman thanked God for it as he had not the ‘power of ruling’ and therefore was not qualified, as he said time and again.
Until his elevation to the Cardinalated, Newman was free of high ecclesiastical office.
But as Mr. Shane Leslie has remarked: ‘Manning might convert his fifties, but Newman was converting his hundreds’.
Between these three names proclaiming their manhood there was an inter-relation which was a history of the Catholic Faith in England m their time. They were the intitiators of policy or counsel; they led action or thought; they met but not always in harmony. For they could see differently on Catholic things, while being in perfect agreement on the Catholic Thing.
Whether Newman was let down by Wiseman or impeded by Manning does not matter in the long run. On their strong shoulders the Catholic “Revival was borne in exultation. Whatever tears they caused each other, they returned triumphant from the harvest with full sheaves on their enduring backs. It is good to think of those occasions which arose for the trio to see the same matter differently, because the communion which Newman left behind made much ado of the fact that Newman had joined the Catholic Church to find peace and an end of argument. But, as Mr. Chesterton has said.
‘He had far more quarrels after he had gone over to Rome. But though he had far more quarrels, he had far fewer compromises; and he was of that temper which is tortured more by compromise than by quarrel’.
Mr. Chesterton continues:
‘He was a man at once of abnormal energy and abnormal sensibility; nobody without that combination could have written the Apologia. If he sometimes seemed to skin his enemies alive, it was because he himself lacked a skin’.
Newman’s letters are of the perturbation of spirit he experienced from the differences which sometimes arose between himself and the rest of his world.
There is nothing like it in Manning, there is nothing like it in Wiseman….When Wisemen set all England of the Establishment by the ears by his celebrated Letter from out of the Flaminian Gate, he calmly penned a letter of explanation to the English people and that won all the disaffected over to his side.
Newman, for one, admired this sound move of Wiseman’s almost envying his aplomb. But when it came to a choice between two courses and the one to be taken was bitter but the right one, this sensitive man did not quail before the act.
In the great dividing event of his life, his conversion, there was a ruthless burning of his boats, The Movement was doomed, friends were sundered for ever, which evoked the tears of his pulpit eloquence, but forward he went.
He abolished his past, He was content to be alone and a stranger in a new country. The devil might have attempted a last temptation on Newman, that of preferring to be the English Church’s leader and the idol of intellect of the day with their Credo in Newmannum, and refusing the nearly complete prospect of non-entity in the Catholic Church.
The sensation of Manning’s, coming-in was nothing compared to this of Newman.
Manning himself was in some way a devotee of Newmania.
With Newman; in follow-my-leader-fashion, there came in well-nigh a hundred at a go, the pick of Oxford and the cream of the Anglican ministry.
But in spite of even such white-hot energy Newman could not be the corner-stone that Wiseman t was, nor the doer of practical things that Manning was.
‘It is significant that when Wiseman was in Rome he had at separate times visits of courtesy from the pre-Catholic Newman as well as from the pre-Catholic Manning. Wiseman carried a vast learning without showing it; Newman was only too apparent and he could not help it. Manning was the man to do. Manning’s entry into the Church was by logic of action; Newman’s by the logic of argument. ‘
Wiseman was not without his laurels in literature. He wrote the ever popular Catholic story, Fabiola, and his Reminiscences of Four Popes. He founded the Dublin Review and his article in its Magazine on the Schism of the Donatists gave the last push to Newman, sending him across No-Man’s Land into the Catholic fold. To let the matter come full circle, Manning also wielded the literary pen. He chronicled the Vatican Council, wrote a ground-work of the Faith, a treatise on the Holy Ghost and the much translated work, The Eternal Priesthood. Not without credit for themselves the pens of Wiseman and Manning yield unconditionally to Newman’s.
In the see of Westminster, Manning’s business .was to spread the Catholic realm in very deed; in the library of the Oratorians at Birmingham Newman was most active in the world of ideas. Of the Apologia Manning said that it was ‘the voice of the dead.’
Newman also yearned to do great deeds, not only weave great words. All his proposals came to almost nothing; though it was not his fault.
In the public sensation of the Achilli trial Newman was at the end fined a miserable one hundred pounds but Achilli was never more heard of and Newman heard of more and more.
The law says: Even a truth may be a libel. Newman said: The truth must out in spite of libel. But what the law says is law. Newman’s exposure of Achilli is one of the small masterpieces of sarcasm and Achilli the unfrocked Catholic priest and dubious stay of Anglicanism had the honour of being despatched by Achilles, the same hand as despatched Kingsley.
So Newman also has a way of succeeding in the world of practical things.” The Irish University project was very nearly still-born, but it yielded Newman’s permanent contribution to the theory of university study anywhere under the shining sun.
Newman fought all- his life’ with doctrinal liberalism but he could not “scotch it. In his own time it was victorious, but Newman was-not without his triumph either; He is the prophet of the crashing to pieces of this liberalism in a later time and- of the chaos of Anglican doctrine in these times. By the direction of these times Newman is completely justified.
But the fight with the pirates on the Sea of Galilee was not without its uses. Even when getting away with it they lost a lot of blood. Much of Newman’s work in this connection bears the evidence of being dated. Even his search of the credentials of the Church to direct his own quest is rather work of a time than for all time.
No doubt he also looked ahead and pondered the future. There was one thing he left to Manning to see with his far better qualified eyes of the realist.
It is said that the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine was in the field of religion an anticipation of Darwin in the field of physical science. So it may be.
But to visualise the economic heresy of these days and to anticipate Marx was the cue for Manning.. He became the dockers’ man and was mistaken for a Socialist.
Wiseman established; Manning expanded; and there was a time limit to the achievement of both.
But the work of the word in Newman is timeless.
His work is of the armoury of the Catholic Church, good for attack and defence; and it will last.
Wiseman, Manning and Newman, all three came of families engaged in business. Wiseman’s family was all along Catholic. With Newman none of the family went over. If the wife of the ex-Archdeacon of Chichester had survived to go over to Rome with Manning, there would have been no English Cardinal of that name.
All three were in to fight the notorious scare of Papal Aggression which swept the country. And the time also produced the Dogma of Papal Infallibility. Manning was whole heartedly for it. Newman did not approve the full blast of Manning’s ultramontanism but hailed the definition.
For this lack of warmth, as also for opinions on other matters similarly misunderstood, Newman live under a cloud even among Catholics. It was the grant of the Red Hat which restored him to universal popularity and Newman acknowledged it with the words: ‘Now the cloud is lifted for ever’.
Newman had started the Tractarian Movement, the pre Catholic Manning also acquiescing, to make the Anglican a better Anglican and to keep him in the Communion and not to suggest a Romeward direction.
Neither Newman nor Manning had this intention. On the contrary Newman hated Rome and Manning in a Guy Fawkes Day sermon had raised the cry of No-Popery.
Newman’s stock of charges at the earliest time against the Catholic Church was quite as imposing as any other Anglican’s. But as Mr. Chesterton’s juvenile poem said: Ah, child, that was long ago.
If Newman had set down Mariolatry also among his bugbears, than, in addition to his written retractations, he was minded upon his Confirmation by Wiseman to take, in all child-like-piety, the name of Mary as his Confirmation name and he signed his name on that day as J. H. M. Newman.
Manning was then outside the Church. Manning was still outside, when after the famous lectures in King William Street at which Wiseman was present vested in a cope and applauded heartily, the Oratorians dared out of doors in their cassocks Newman led.
As the one time exponent of the Via Media passed down the road a no-Popery zealot emptied a sack of flour on Newman’s head. Nothing like it ever happened to Wiseman or to Manning in spite of their own stormy careers.
Certainly the meaning of the Omen was that there was less bread in the house of the Establishment.
Covered all over with this extra allowance of the ingredient of the staff of life Newman returned to St. Philip, to give back bread for stones and fish for scorpions, to be a new Father of the Church, to attain the title of St. George in Velabro, to write thirty-six volumes all told, to live to ninety years, to bequeath to the Church a kindly light of leaving no more to be put out, to die and be transfigured-a greater than Manning and a greater also than Wiseman.