All this was grossly overstated.  Whatever else Cardinal Manning was, he was an English gentleman of the old school, with a nice sense of honour and propriety.  But still, under a mass of calumny and exaggeration, there lay this substratum of truth—­that he who wills the end wills the means; and that where the interests of a sacred cause are at stake, an enthusiastic adherent will sometimes use methods to which, in enterprises of less pith and moment, recourse could not properly be had.

Manning had what has been called “the ambition of distinctiveness.”  He felt that he had a special mission which no other man could so adequately fulfil, and this was to establish and popularize in England his own robust faith in the cause of the Papacy as identical with the cause of God.  There never lived a stronger Papalist.  He was more Ultramontane than the Ultramontanes.  Everything Roman was to him divine.  Italian architecture, Italian vestments, the Italian mode of pronouncing ecclesiastical Latin were dear to him, because they visibly and audibly implied the all-pervading presence and power of Rome.  Rightly or wrongly, he conceived that English Romanism, as it was when he joined the Roman Church, was practically Gallicanism; that it minimized the Papal supremacy, was disloyal to the Temporal Power, and was prone to accommodate itself to its Protestant and secular environment.  Against this time-serving spirit he set his face like a flint.  He believed that he had been divinely appointed to Papalize England.  The cause of the Pope was the cause of God; Manning was the person who could best serve the Pope’s cause, and therefore all forces which opposed him were in effect opposing the Divine Will.  This seems to have been his simple and sufficient creed, and certainly it had the merit of supplying a clear rule of action.  It made itself felt in his hostility to the Religious Orders, and especially the Society of Jesus.  Religious Orders are extra-episcopal.  The Jesuits are scarcely subject to the Pope himself.  Certainly neither the Orders nor the Society would, or could, be subject to Manning.  A power independent of, or hostile to, his authority was inimical to religion, and must, as a religious duty, be checked, and, if possible, destroyed.  Exactly the same principle animated his dealings with Cardinal Newman.  Rightly or wrongly, Manning thought Newman a half-hearted Papalist.  He dreaded alike his way of putting things and his practical policy.  Newman’s favourite scheme of establishing a Roman Catholic college at Oxford, Manning regarded as fraught with peril to the faith of the rising generation.  The scheme must therefore be crushed and its author snubbed.

I must in candour add that these differences of opinion between the two Cardinals were mixed with and embittered by a sense of personal dislike.  When Newman died there appeared in a monthly magazine a series of very unflattering sketches by one who had lived under his roof.  I ventured to ask Cardinal Manning if he had seen these sketches.  He replied that he had, and thought them very shocking; the writer must have a very unenviable mind, &c., and then, having thus sacrificed to propriety, after a moment’s pause he added, “But if you ask me if they are like poor Newman, I am bound to say—­a photograph.”