HENRY EDWARD, CARDINAL MANNING 1808-1892 Henry Edward Manning was born at Totteridge, Hertfordshire, in 1808. He began his education at Harrow, and in 1827 went to Oxford, where he was graduated, first in classics, in 1830, and two years after was elected Fellow of Merton College. This was just at the beginning of the Tractarian movement, in which Manning took no active part at Oxford, for he left the university in 1833 for the rectorship of Woollavington and Graffham, Sussex. He was, however, a decided High Churchman. His abilities were early recognized by his appointment as archdeacon of Chichester in 1840, the year before the celebrated Tract "90" was published. Manning must be called an ambitious man, if ambition means a consciousness of great powers coupled with a desire to exercise them in a wide field. He had made himself famous as a striking preacher, and since his wife had died in 1837 there was nothing to prevent his ordination to the Roman Catholic priesthood when the "Gorham Judgment" moved him to join the Church of Rome in 1851. Gorham was an Anglican clergyman, whose teachings on baptism, which Manning considered at variance with the English Prayer-book, were declared by the Privy Council to be the teachings of the Church of England. In 1865 Manning crowned a ministry of incessant activity and devotion by succeeding Cardinal Wiseman as Archbishop of Westminster, and five years later rose up in the Vatican Council of 1870 as one of the most ardent and uncompromising supporters of Papal infallibility. He was made a Cardinal in 1875 and became a most powerful advocate of Roman Catholicism. He was, however, very much more than a mere ecclesiastic, and by his Christian charity and noble life he conciliated all religious parties and won their support in his humanitarian work. Manning belonged, as a great Englishman, rather to the whole nation, than to any denomination in England, being a broad-minded philanthropist and reformer, whose zeal and abilities the Government recognized by making him, in 1885, a member of the Royal Commission. During his later years he was to be found sitting side by side with laymen and ministers of all sorts of denominations on any platform where he could advocate the rights of labor and the cause of temperance. He died in 1892, leaving many writings, including sermons and addresses of commanding eloquence, as well as several polemical and controversial pamphlets. His address On Progress" gives an excellent idea of his eloquence and erudition. He was an eloquent and impressive preacher, a dogmatic theologian, untainted by rationalism, indifferent to, and presumably not well acquainted with, the school of modern criticism. " ON PROGRESS Delivered before a meeting of the Young Men's Catholic Association, October 10, 1871 WHEN HEN a boy, I remember reading a book which had a great name nearly a century ago, in which one of the chapters was headed: "Our hero talks of what he does not understand." I have no doubt that I will hear that I am talking of what I do not understand; but in my defence I think I may say, I am about to talk of what I do not understand for this reason: I cannot get those who talk about it to tell me what they mean. I know what I mean by it, but I am not at all sure that I know what they mean by it; and those who use the same words in different senses are like men that run up and down the two sides of a hedge, and so can never meet. That perhaps will happen to me in talking about progress. I have tried all I can to find out some definition or description to give me an idea of what is meant by progress. The perpetual repetition of the word stuns and deafens us day by day. At the feet of newspaper editors and article-writers, the great teachers of the day-philosophers and sophists are gone-at the feet of these we sit, and hear constantly a great deal about progress, of which, if I could understand it to be something true and good, I should become one of the preachers; but these apostles of the nineteenth century will not tell us their meaning. They leave us in a state of blank amazement. I have tried to find some authorities to depend upon, and have found two-one the present Prime Minister of England, who, in a speech in Liverpool four years ago, says that progress is what the police say to the people on the pavement, "Move on!" My other authority is the leader of Her Majesty's Opposition who, in one of his books introduces his hero talking with a stranger from the other side of the Atlantic, who held very cheap our great commercial towns with their machinery and manufactures, saying that they were nothing at all compared with the States. At parting he presents his card to his companion, on which was written," Mr. G. O. A. Head." These are the only two authoritative meanings I can gather from our two political parties as to what progress means. It is talked of by most people as if it were a Holy Grail of which people are in quest. Some of them spend their lives in great energy to promote progress; but unfortunately they appear to me to verify what St. Augustin said about men who make great speed after truth without finding the right way to it. He said: "You are making great strides, but are out of the road." And when I see people making for progress in different directions, we are quite sure they cannot all be right. Some people tell us progress means liberalism. It is difficult again to know what that is-and when you do get their definition of it, it seems to be the emancipation of the human will from every kind of law. I do not think that is progress, or that it leads to a good result. Then, again, plebiscites, or universal suffrage, are taken to be one of the tokens of progress, and the results of plebiscites do not seem to me to be the ultimate good of societyat least they are so frequently given in different directions, and one is so speedily necessary to correct another, and build up what another throws down, that neither does this seem to me progress, unless progress means perpetual motion, swaying to and fro. Again, we are told that material improvements, such as gas, railroads, and the abolition of intramural burials the other day, came among the evidences of progress; trades which are what we call roaring trades; steamboats, races between them, with the steam shut in, and excited passengers stamping upon the paddle-boxes-this is taken by some people as evidence of progress. One thing, however, I see. In every country of Europe there is what is called a " party of progress," but, unfortunately, this party of progress has a trail behind it like certain reptiles, and that trail is revolution. We have not, therefore, as yet arrived at a very clear notion of progress from the popular teachers of the day; I will therefore venture to give my own humble conception of what progress is. I will say, then, that progress with us simple people means the growth and ripening of anything from its first principles to its perfection. We distinguish between progress which is growth, and progress which is decay; because decay is the re verse of growth, and it is a departure from first principles. It is the dissolution of perfection; and therefore we distinguish between growth and decay as between ripeness and rottenness -and growth we call progress, but decay we call ruin. Now I want to show what may be classified under progress of growth, and what under decay or ruin-that is my subject. The growth of an oak is a very intelligible thing. The acorn. planted in the clay strikes its tap-root, then rises into a stem, and spreads into branches; and in the whole tree completes its symmetry, stature, and perfection-this is an example of progress from a germ in nature. But when that oak has attained its maturity, and has run through its period of time, it begins to decay, which reverses this progress. The sap sinks to the root, the leaves begin to fall, the sprays wither, the branches decay and fall from the trunk, the rot in the substance of the tree gradually spreads, the trunk becomes hollow, and the tree disappears in dust: this is, then, the reverse of progress. The same is true of every fruit we hold in our hands; so Shakespeare tells us of man: "And so from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe; And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot; Let us apply this to human things, and first to an individual man. The idea of physical progress in man is first of all the growth from childhood to manhood, the complete expansion and development of the whole man in stature, symmetry, strength, and countenance; the whole human being filling up as it were the outline and type which belongs not only to man in general, but to that particular individual-that is what we call progress. Then there is the moral progress in every man; that is, the progress of his character, which begins in the selfcontrol of the will and in obedience; then in the rectitude of conduct; and then again in prudence and the whole range of duty, and, finally, in excellence—that is, in surpassing others according to the capacity of that which is in him by nature. For men are not all equal, they are variously endowed and some have capacities and qualities and energies far beyond others; and each individual has a progress of his own, which means, as I said before, the filling up of that which is not only due to the type of race to which he belongs, but also to his own individual gifts and capacities. In like manner of intellectual progress: there is a passive intellect in us all, which first receives the instruction of teachers, and then becomes an active intellect, whereby we educate and form ourselves; and then that active intellect becomes reflective, and has a power of research and discovery. The whole intellect of the man is thus matured and ripened according to his capacities and circumstances, and that from very small beginnings. For instance, it is said in the life of St. Gregory VII, the greatest ruler the world ever saw, the loftiest of all legislators, the justest of all judges, and the most intrepid of all pontiffs, who ruled over the whole Christian world with a sway which for wisdom and fortitude has never been excelled-it is said that in his childhood he was kneeling at the feet of a carpenter who was hewing wood; and the chips, so traditions say, formed themselves into the words from the Book of Psalms, "He shall reign from sea to sea." This was taken as an indication of his future, which he fulfilled to the letter. The movement which connected this small beginning with his mighty end was a progress of the whole man, moral and intellectual. Take also the example of Fergusson, the astronomer, who, when a shepherd's boy, would lie on his back, and with a string of beads over his eye measure the distance or intervals of the stars, and then mark them down with his pencil-this was the beginning of his progress in astronomy. So again take another instance in the familiar anecdote of Nelson, who was perhaps one of the most intrepid and fearless of men. When a boy in Norfolk, he left his father's house, and was lost for the whole day, not coming home until after dark. His father said he wondered fear did not drive him home, upon which the boy asked: "Who is fear? I do not know him." I suppose that was the index of his genius, which progressed into the heroic fearless character which is written in history. That is my notion of progress in the individual man-a consistent growth of the same principles from first to last. The next example shall be the progress of a people. I do not know whether any of you have read Carlyle's "Chartism"; if so, you will find me a plagiarist, but I shall only take his outline, not his words. He says of the British Empire, |