This affection for Mr. Gladstone was a personal matter, quite independent of politics; but in political matters also they had much in common.  “You know,” wrote the Cardinal to Mrs. Gladstone on her Golden Wedding, “how nearly I have agreed in William’s political career, especially in his Irish policy of the last twenty years.”  He accepted the principle of Home Rule, though he thought badly of the Bill of 1886, and predicted its failure from the day when it was brought in.  The exclusion of the Irish members was in his eyes a fatal blot, as tending rather to separation than to that Imperial federation which was his political ideal.  But the Cardinal always held his politics in subordination to his religion, and at the General Election of 1885 his vigorous intervention on behalf of denominational education which he considered to be imperilled by the Radical policy, considerably embarrassed the Liberal cause in those districts of London where there is a Roman Catholic vote.

It is necessary to say a word about Cardinal Manning’s method of religious propagandism.  He excelled in the art of driving a nail where it would go.  He never worried his acquaintance with controversy, never introduced religious topics unseasonably, never cast his pearls before unappreciative animals.  But when he saw a chance, an opening, a sympathetic tendency, or a weak spot, he fastened on it with unerring instinct.  His line was rather admonitory than persuasive.  When he thought that the person whom he was addressing had an inkling of the truth, but was held back from avowing it by cowardice or indecision, he would utter the most startling warnings about the danger of dallying with grace.

“I promise you to become a Catholic when I am twenty-one,” said a young lady whom he was trying to convert.

“But can you promise to live so long?” was the searching rejoinder.

In Manning’s belief, the Roman Church was the one oracle of truth and the one ark of salvation; and his was the faith which would compass sea and land, sacrifice all that it possessed, and give its body to be burned, if it might by any means bring one more soul to safety.  If he could win a single human being to see the truth and act on it, he was supremely happy.  To make the Church of Rome attractive, to enlarge her borders, to win recruits for her, was therefore his constant effort.  He had an ulterior eye to it in all his public works—­his zealous teetotalism, his advocacy of the claims of labour, his sympathy with the demand for Home Rule; and the same principle which animated him in these large schemes of philanthropy and public policy made itself felt in the minutest details of daily life and personal dealing.  Where he saw the possibility of making a convert, or even of dissipating prejudice and inclining a single Protestant more favourably towards Rome, he left no stone unturned to secure this all-important end.  Hence it came that he was constantly, and not wholly without reason, depicted as a man whom in religious matters it was impossible to trust; with whom the end justified the means; and whose every act and word, where the interests of his Church were involved, must be watched with the most jealous suspicion.