VI. Cardinal Wiseman

(Dublin Review, April 18G5.)

A TWOFOLD debt of filial piety forbids our opening this number with any other topic than that which will long be uppermost in the minds of the Catholics of Eng land. The greatest event since the restoration of the Catholic Hierarchy has in these last days fallen upon us. Nicholas Wiseman, the first Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, has passed to his eternal rest. His departure closes a period which will ever be associated with his name.

We say a debt of filial piety, because he was the chief pastor and spiritual father of the whole flock in England; and we say a twofold debt, because, in addition to the relation all alike owed to him as Catholics, we, who have endeavoured to sustain the Dublin Review, of which he was a joint founder, and from its outset conspicuously the ablest and most illustrious supporter, owe to his memory a kind of domestic piety, a special reverence and affection. It is a joy to us to remember that our last number closed, as if by a presentiment, with a slight outline of his mission in England. In the present we shall refer only to his relation to the Dublin Revieiv, and to the circumstances which have made his death and burial a worthy and proportionate end to such a mission.

And first of the Dublin Review. The purposes for which it was founded have been so beautifully and so modestly set forth by the Cardinal's own hand, that we cannot refrain from quoting at length:

' It was in IHM that the idea of commencing a Catholic quarterly was first conceived by the late learned and excellent Mr. Quin, who applied to the illustrious O'Connell and myself to join in the undertaking. I was in England only for a short time, and saw the difficulty of connecting myself with an enterprise so far removed from my permanent residence in Home. Still I saw the importance of such an organ of Catholic principles and sen timents, and gladly consented to become a member of this little association. The first number appeared in May 1KHJ, before I k-ft this country. The two gentlemen with whom I was associated wore laymen: the one living in the very whirlpool of existing politics; the other a man of letters, with a prospect, I believe, of receiving an important foreign employment from Government; both were sincerely attached to their faith and Church. I considered myself as associated to represent the then-logical and religious elements in the journal, and to secure to its pages soundness of doctrine. It was understood to be a condition of this association that no extreme political views should be introduced into the Review; and this condition has, in most trying times, been faithfully observed.

A few years of separation virtually, and afterwards deatli most really, sundered this bond; and I find myself the only survivor of those who began an undertaking that has grown to some magnitude — looking back tlirough thirty-three volumes, or sixty - seven numbers, of a periodical work, undertaken for a great pur pose, and having to account for my share of responsibility in it, and answer whether I have remained faithful to its first principles and steady to its object.

\Yhile obeying the suggestions of others, by preparing the present publication, I have had ample opportunity of examining this question; and I trust I may be indulged if I make such observations upon it as may throw light upon the papers here reprinted.

The moment when I was invited to join in this new Review appeared to me most critical and interesting. Three years before had begun to manifest themselves the germs of that wonderful movement which, originating at Oxford, was destined to pervade and agitate the Anglican Establishment, till it should give up many of its most loving and gifted sons to the Catholic Church; peculiar circumstances, allusion to which will be found in a note in vol. ii. pp. (.).'5 and 102, had made me at Home previously acquainted with the rise and progress of this great religious revolution; and I had been surprised, on visiting England in 1835, to find how little attention it had yet excited among Catholics, though many Tracts for the Tunes had already appeared, and Dr. "Whately had sung out to their writers, " Tcndiinus in Latiuin." It was, indeed, impossible for any one to foresee what might be the final results of so new and strange a commotion in the hitherto stagnant element of the State religion. Even now, after twenty years, and notwithstanding the many great conse quences which have already issued from it, its activity is not exhausted. The impulse given by the first Tract still urges on the body which it struck; and it will roll forward for a long time to come, while fragments detach themselves, and run before it, towards the goal which we pray it may all attain. But even in that first bud of the rising power it was impossible for a calm and hopeful eye not to see new signs in the religious firmament, which it became a duty to observe, unless one wished to incur the Divine reproach, addressed to those who note not the providential warn ings and friendly omens of the spiritual heavens. For Catholics to have overlooked all this, and allowed the wonderful phenomenon to pass by, not turned to any useful purpose, but gazed at, till it died out, would have been more than stupidity, it would have been wickedness. To watch its progress, to observe its phases, to influence, if possible, its direction, to move it gently towards complete attainment of its unconscious aims; and, more over, to protest against its errors, to warn against its dangers, to provide arguments against its new mode of attack, and to keep lifted up the mask of beauty under which it had, in sincerity, covered the ghastly and soulless features of Protestantism, — these wrere the duties which the new Review undertook to perform, or which, in no small degree, it was expressly created to discharge. And the necessity of attending to these new duties formed the strongest inducement to myself to undertake its theological direction.

At the same time, Catholics had begun to recover from that first torpor which benumbs, for a time, the limbs just freed from frtt.-rs. Signs of a more active circulation had shown themselves: communities were springing up; schools were beginning to be multiplied; new missions were opened; churches, upon a scale of si/e and of embellishment previously unknown, were contem plated or begun; and the people vcre evidently manifesting more interest in our religion, and a more fair disposition to hear and judge it justly. It seemed the favourable moment to strike another chord, and stir up a spirit yet slumbering, but ready to awake.

The Catholic religion as she is in the fulness of her growth, with the grandeur of her ritual, the beauty of her devotions, the variety of her institutions, required to be made more known to many who had never seen her other than she had been reduced by three hundred years of barbarous persecution.

It was therefore with a strong desire, and a sincere determination, to make the Dublin Review the organ and the promoter of Catholic progress, within and without; it was with a conscientious resolution that its theology should belong to the present day — that is, should treat of living questions and existing controversies — should grapple with real antagonists, wrestle with tangible errors, that I agreed to turn from studies long pursued and ardently cherished to the anxious care- and desultory occupation involved in the direction of such a publication. Works not only long contemplated, but for which materials had been gathered with diligence, were given up at this period, in consequence of time and attention being more required for passing events and current literature.

I cannot, indeed, without ingratitude, reject the consolations received from effects attributed to them; for I fear that my readers will wonder sometimes at finding wants mentioned now so well supplied, and feelings suggested long become so familiar, that the very memory of our deficiencies has faded away. More than half a generation has passed by since those passages were written which now describe an unknown state of tilings. And if their words had some inlluence in producing the change, their power lay in this alone — that they were sincere, cordial, and affectionate descriptions of realities often witnessed by the writer, deeply admired and tenderly loved; they were words of truth and of charity, which ever bear with them their own evidences and convictions, straight to the minds of all.

That the many imperfections of so miscellaneous a collection may be elaborately investigated and severely handled, I am fully ]>n-pared to expect. I have long ceased to anticipate fair dealing from those who look upon me as an enemy, and think it their duty to treat me as such. Custom, however, inures us to this; and I trust I shall have patience to bear it to the end. And nothing helps one more to this than a consciousness that no bitterness of thought, or personal rancour, or desire to wound, has guided one's own pen or intentions. Should any words of mine suggest a different impression, I shall sincerely regret it.

With these words of peace, I take leave of my courteous reader; wishing him from above all grace and blessing, as I bid him to implore for me all mercy and forgiveness.

Easter MDCCCLIII.'

But it is not our purpose now to say more of this special bond which binds us to his memory. We do so only out of veneration and gratitude, and of a deep sense of the service rendered in these last thirty years to the Catholic Church in England by the Dublin Review, and therefore hy him who was by far its chief ornament and strength. In the last two years since it passed into other hands the declining health of our lamented Cardinal compelled him to postpone again and again the kind and encouraging promises he made to us of contributions from his pen. No line written by him has therefore appeared in it; and though most kindly watched and approved by him, this Keview has had no other relation to or dependence on our most eminent pastor. And here we leave this subject, adding only one word. If at the end of our labours the second series of the Dublin Revieiv should yield from all the hands which may contribute to it three volumes of essays worthy to stand afar off by those of Cardinal Wiseman for beauty, variety, learning, freshness, originality, and, above all, for pure solid Catholic doctrine and high filial devotion to Koine, we shall hope that

15G CARDINAL WISEMAN.

we have not failed in the trust which he has bequeathed to us.

We have said that the withdrawal from us not only of the foremost man of the Catholic Hierarchy in Eng land, hut one of the chief lights of the Sacred College, and therefore of the Church throughout the world, is an event which closes a period. It does so. The man chosen for the restoration of the Hierarchy, and its first organic development, is gone.

The Hierarchy now passes under the ordinary condition of the Church in all other lauds. The pastors who rule over it will be surely and wisely chosen for its guidance; hut the period of its restoration, with all its throes and trials, is past.

This eventful period of fifteen years both opened and closed with a popular movement, exceptional in its character and extent. It opened with a tempest; it closed with a great mourning. It is strange that the same man should have been the object and the centre of both. Fifteen years of open manly bearing, fifteen years of unspotted life and of high Christian virtues, have sufficed to win the confidence, admiration, and sympathy of the English people. Conspicuous as he was in the dignity of his name, he was almost unseen by his personal retirement and quietness of life. Except in the ecclesiastical acts which compelled him to speak or appear as Archbishop and Metropolitan, no man ever lived more unobtrusively, or less exposed himself to public gaze. When invited to any act which would instruct or give pleasure to the English people, no man was ever more prompt and kindly.

And yet this is the man who, from 1850 to 1860, was described habitually by many who never saw him, or never heard so much as a word from his lips, in terms and titles which, if we could, we would not re produce. We shall freely use our privilege to say that if the leading articles of the chief newspapers which in those ten years described his Eminence the late Cardinal — his opinions, his pastorals, his pretensions, his aims, and we know not what — were reprinted in parallel columns with the leading articles of those same papers during the last six weeks, we should have before us a strange memorial of human infirmity, but no strange example of English honesty and truth.

It would be no unkindly admonition to anonymous writers if we were to reprint them, and many would be wiser men for it. We remember a case in point. During the excitement of the Papal aggression, all the bishops of the Establishment in succession denounced the Catholic Hierarchy. A quiet person with scissors cut out and pasted together the chief flowers and formulas of episcopal vituperation. They were then distributed into categories, and graduated according to their in tensity. They were something like the gamut — a slender provision of few notes, but capable of almost endless combination. ' Unwarranted, aggressive, usurping;' * insolent, intolerable, anti-Christian;' 'anti-Christian, usurping, and insolent;' ' insolent, intolerable, and aggressive.' It began like a symphony of Beethoven, with a single deep note; then two, then one again, then a chord, then a complication and a volume of sound. When once printed in order, and set before educated men, no comment was needed. The experiment has not been tried again. So we believe it was with the late illustrious Cardinal. He was a Roman Catholic; he was a Cardinal; he came from the Pope of Rome; he was born in Spain; he was Irish by race; he was an Archbishop in England without our leave, and head of an Episcopate not known to the Crown. He must be designing, crafty, overbearing, superstitious, unEnglish, covetous, grasping, ambitious, ignorant of England, an alien — the paid envoy of a foreign sovereign. It needed no proof, no evidence, no sign: all was certain as day. So for ten years men wrote of him in public, spoke of him in private, and, worst of all, believed of him, without caring or wishing to know better. What has wrought the change? From time to time he was seen and heard. Here and there, first one, then another, came across him. Kindly sympa thising words were caught up from his lips; charitable and secret actions got abroad. It was felt, and there fore found, that the man had a heart, and could feel for others as well as be wounded — could show kindness as well as suffer unkindness.

Then came a period which conciliated for him much generous feeling — the last five years of almost continual suffering. It was well known that a mortal malady had struck him; and much sympathy from all parts of England, and from the least likely persons, was manifested towards him. Men of all religious opinions — clergymen of the Church of England, Dissenting ministers — wrote to him or to his friends, enclosing prescrip tions, and expressing their kindly regard. A great appreciation was shown for the life which ten years before was threatened by public danger. It was during these five years of declining strength, and while those about him advised that he should unbend his mind in all possible ways, that he gave the lectures on art, on industry, on self-cultivation, on architecture, and the like, which have made his name and the memory of his presence dear to a multitude in London, and in many of our larger towns, where a few years ago he was carried about in effigy. Highly honourable all this to the great heart and mind of Cardinal Wiseman, and honourable also to the English people. Englishmen may misunderstand each other for a time — perhaps for a long time; but we hardly know an example in which the most violent antipathies and animosities have not been at last lived down. Sometimes men who have been railed upon and assaulted on every side for years have won to themselves an equal respect and benevolence in their latter days. The only exception we know to this is where the popular odium is just, and the man worthy of it. And yet even in this extreme case there is about the people of England a natural compassion, and a readiness to condone or to be blind to faults which sometimes absolves even the unworthy. But in the case of great men and good men, who suffer for fidelity to their principles, without, perhaps, yielding a shade of opposition to their principles, Englishmen, at least, are just and kindly. They give and take; and as they claim to think for themselves in religion, so they granted willingly to our great and large-hearted Cardinal the unmolested profession of his Tridentine and Ultrarnon-

1GO CARDINAL WISEMAN.

tane principles. We say this was honourable on both sides, because we do not venture to argue from the change of feeling towards the late lamented Cardinal that English public opinion has approximated to his tenets; and all the world is witness how, as one of the public notices of him truly said, ' he had never changed the colour of one feather in his Ultramontanism.' First, then, we would remark upon the almost unanimous ex pression of admiration, respect, and sympathy, and we must say of English national pride, which has shown itself in the last two months around the closing days of this great man.

We pass over the exceptions, and very few they arc, from this veneration to his greatness, on which such nameless aspersions cannot cast so much as a momentary shade. We should dishonour him by defending him.

Still less shall we notice expressions here and there, well intended so far as good-will, but neither true nor just. We forget the mistakes for the sake of the intention.

But of the great majority of the notices which have appeared in the public papers we can but have one feeling. They were honourable both to the subject and to the writers; and they give proof that the people of Eng land can respect and even love sincerity, reality, and consistency in those who arc most opposed to their opinions.

We read in this fact certain great counsels very wholesome to us all, most of all to those who, being still young, have the happiness of a long life before them, in which to serve God and His Church in England.

CARDINAL WISEMAN. 1G1

The life and death of Cardinal Wiseman may teach us that compromise is not the way to win the English people. Englishmen do not understand compromise. They do not understand a man being in earnest except for what he believes to be true. And they still less understand his playing fast and loose with what he affirms that he believes. They perfectly understand his fighting for it. To give and take hard knocks for it is logic to them. There is philosophy and theology in honest manly fight. It is to most of us, if not a proof that our adversary is right, at least a pledge that he is sincere.

Again, the respect and affection which have sur rounded the last days of the Cardinal are a proof that the highest and strongest principles in faith may be combined with the most kindly and benevolent bearing. We believe we may say that among the English Pro testants he has not left an enemy. We can confidently say from our own personal knowledge of facts that he has left a multitude of friends and friendly hearts.

His great career, beginning in storm and ending in so much calm, teaches us all this sure and salutary lesson, that unpopular truth always in the end prevails over popular illusions; and they who have the courage to stand for it, and are not afraid when they enter into the cloud, shall assuredly come forth from it before the end, as the sun which is over their heads.

But even these spontaneous expressions of respect and benevolence did not prepare us for the events which passed from the 15th to the 23d of February last. As soon as it was known that all that remained to VOL. i. M us of our great Cardinal Archbishop lay arrayed in his pontifical vestments in the humble and modest dwelling where his latter years were passed, immediately a multitude of people began to assemble. For days the crowd was so great that many, after long waiting, went away without so much as entering the door of the house. Not only Catholics, who were drawn by faith and by charity once more into the presence of the form which they knew so well, but many of those who are unhappily ' not of this fold,' asked admittance with the greatest desire and respect. We doubt whether there has been any * lying in state' which has awakened such heart felt sorrow, or drawn together a greater concourse through so many days.

But this public mourning was only in its beginning. On the evening before the day of the burial the solemn dirge was to be sung in the pro-cathedral of S. Mary's, Moorfields. The coffin was then removed to that place. It is said that thirty thousand persons on that day went through the church by the bier, passing out by the door of the house attached to the cathedral. The multitudes were so great that it was impossible to allow them to kneel or to linger. Persons were placed by the bier to touch the coffin with their rosaries and the like, and to press them onwards. But even this did not prepare for the next day. We have no powers of description; and the subject has been already exhausted. The outline, and even the minutest detail, of that great day of public mourning has been recorded by the Protestant papers of England. The Mass of solemn requiem, none who saw and heard it will ever forget. It was in solemnity, grandeur, and pathos all that the burial of a great pastor and prince of the Church of God ought to be.

Then began the strangest sight which England has seen for three hundred years — a funeral procession which seemed endless in length; the whole Catholic Hierarchy of England, with some hundreds of thepriesthood, conducting the remains of their Archbishop and Metropolitan to the grave. Along the whole line of road from the cathedral, for four or five miles, a crowd of people of every class and condition stood closely to gether on either side of the street. The greatest order, silence, and respect prevailed. As the funeral car passed all heads were bared. The multitude at the cemetery was still more dense. Without doubt the desire to see a great and strange pageant brought many there that day. Among the crowds there must have been many who had no special feeling of sympathy and condolence with the mourning of that funeral. Nevertheless, after all this has been said, there remains a fact which nothing can diminish, which no one has affected to explain away, which even the hostile wit nesses have recorded, that such a funeral has never been seen except in royal burials, nor in our days since the funeral of the Duke of Wellington. We do not know that any form of speech could be found to go beyond this, or to fix more vividly the facts of that day. We should not have ventured to use them. Had we done so, we should have been held up to ridicule for the exaggeration and grandiloquence of a handful aping the proportions and talking the language of a people.

But the fact was so. Date the days when any personage in England was borne forth to burial with such manifestation of— call it what you will— mourning, sympathy, respect, or bare recognition. In our life time an Anglican Bishop of London, who had been publicly known to the population of that city during a longer incumbency than the eighteen years' episcopate of Cardinal Wiseman, was carried to his grave. He was a learned, cultivated, eloquent, benevolent, exceedingly laborious, large-minded, and warm-hearted man. He was surrounded by all the traditions and circum stances with which the Church and State of England could invest him. He deserved at their hands a great and noble manifestation of affection and respect; he had served them so as we remember no other to have done. He wore himself out in their service. His last years were especially touching. Broken with faithful toil for the Anglican Church in London, he withdrew to await his end in feebleness and out of sight. We are glad in passing to bear this testimony to one whose personal memory is, and ever will be, dear to many who were parted from him. And yet when he passed to his grave the stir and business of London held on its way. He deserved another response, but it was not in the millions of London to give it. Again, two Archbishops of Canterbury have been borne to their burial. Did London rise up to meet them? Were the roads lined for miles? Were there thousands and tens of thou sands for days before Lambeth Palace?

There have been many men of great popularity, rank, and name buried in Westminster Abbey in these last twenty years. What one man has awakened— kindled, we may say— such a wide-spread sense of his death, and of his burial, as the Cardinal Archbishop of West minster?

We may now appreciate the exquisite delicacy and felicity of the following words from the leading article of the Morning Post, February 24:

' Against Roman Cardinals, Westminster and Canterbury and Lambeth are apparently closed for ever; and amid all the pomp which has characterised the present obsequies, nothing can have thrown a greater chill upon the ceremonial than the remembrance that those great shrines which were once in Catholic hands are uniformly closed, in death as in life, to the priestly emissaries of the Church of Rome. The pageant of yesterday, with all its imposing ceremonial, was the pageant of an ostracised religion.'

Why, S. Paul's and Canterbury and Westminster Abbey all together have not been able to produce, except for one great soldier, such a public mourning, which extended over ten days. The Holy Mass was, indeed, offered in an obscure Catholic cathedral, but hundreds of thousands followed all the way to a green burial-ground, hardly known by name to the upper classes of London. We say the admonition is delicate, because, translated, it means, ' Remember, we have even the graves of your fathers. You shall not even rest by them after death.' There is something intimately bland, generous, and human in this.

And it is as signally felicitous in the mouth of those who, with aH the glories of the Catholic Church in their hands, cannot surround their great, or noble, or splendid dead with a tithe of the reverence which carried the pall of the first Archbishop of Westminster.

Men may build sepulchres in Westminster Abbey, but they cannot touch the heart of a populace. It needs a higher power to do this. The same paper already quoted has unconsciously, and by an amusing inversion of its intention, exactly touched the point. It said: ' The present effort was certainly a great one for an unrecognised Church.'

For an ' unrecognised Church'? Why, surely the Anglican Church is recognised in England, and yet it has never produced such a demonstration. But, perhaps, the Catholic Church is a recognised body after all, and for that reason did and can always produce a demonstration proportionate to the facts and circumstances of the event. The Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster was 11 person recognised throughout Christendom, even where the name of no Archbishop of Canterbury has been recognised for three centuries. The Catholic nations of the world knew him by name and by form, and recognised him as the chief pastor of the scattered ilock in England. They recognised too the province over which he presided as the Catholic Church in these realms, with which they have conscious unity of heart, mind, will, fortunes, sorrows, and joys. It was this world-wide recognition of the Catholic Church in Eng land which told upon London and upon England, whether they would or no. A Catholic Archbishop and a Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church may be legislated against, legally exiled, ignored, extinguished. Mergas profundo, pulchrior crenit. The world knows him, and knows nobody else in his place. His titles are ineffaceable, because his character is indelible. All the legal recognition upon earth could not create another Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster. There are two other kinds of recognition, wider and truer than the recognition of legislatures, springing from a higher and from a deeper fountain — the one is of the Church throughout the world; the other is the public consciousness of a people even in its hostility; and these two unite in the recognition of the Catholic Church and Hierarchy in England. Nevertheless, the critic was partly in the right. That day of public mourning was a wonderful event, springing from no adequate material cause. It was not got up by vote of Parliament, nor by an act of prerogative, nor by the organis ation of public agencies and public funds. It was the simple act of the metropolitan chapter and clergy of Westminster, out of their poverty, giving burial to their Archbishop. Even the dignity of Cardinal added hardly an appreciable element in the provision and order of that day. They carried him out to burial with all simplicity. The funeral array was majestic for its vastness and continuity, not for any display of unusual costliness. The car was not like the stupendous funeral throne which now lies buried under the dome of S. Paul's. It was simple, open, slender, bare; and was criticised by the Times for its meanness. We are so much the better pleased. The majesty of that burial train was altogether such as became a pastor, and a great pastor, of the Church. And as it went along it carried the hearts of a hierarchy, a priesthood, and a flock along with it. And a multitude of the English people, to whom the Catholic Church in England is as much a recognised fact as the Anglican Establishment — we refrain now willingly from saying much more which crowds upon us — stood by, or followed in kindly and reverent sympathy. There were doubtless there many who are far from us in their religious convictions, yet they have learned to recognise and to respect manliness, zeal, hard work for souls and for the poor, industry in duty, fidelity to conscience. They too could look on with kindliness. Many were there who, though not even near to the Catholic Church, have been long healed of the blindness which once made them hate or fear it. Many too whose hearts feel kindly to it as the Church of the poor; and in London eminently the Church which makes itself seen, known, felt, and trusted by multitudes of the most destitute and suffering of our people. All these, and many other classes of minds which we cannot stay to enumerate, were to be found in the great concourse which streamed along those miles of streets.

But there was, as we believe, still another senso awakened. One who passed through the crowd as a mourner said truly, ' I was convinced that, whether they knew it or not, multitudes felt that day, as they looked upon the funeral procession, " This was the old religion of England: this was once the religion of our fathers." ' They who had read the history of their country could recall memories of Pole, Wolsey, and Langton. They who were simplest saw before them the living presence of the great Catholic Church which once filled the laud. The English poor have it as a proverb, ' The Catholic religion was

CARDINAL WISEMAN. 1G9 the first religion, and it will be the List.' Its reappearance on that day in such wide-spread sympathy of men of every class preached to them on that homely prophecy. What Nicholas Wiseman had prayed, la boured, and suffered to do, he did that day more powerfully and more persuasively than ever before. He had spent his life to make the people of England know and love once more the Church of their fathers. That day was the noblest and worthiest close to such a life.

And thus we leave him, with the tribute of our grateful and loving veneration, as the dusk of evening made more purely bright the tapers around his grave: greater in its humility than all the glories of Westminster as it now is, where S. Edward, whom he loved so well, still holds his own for God and for the future. So we leave him while the Miserere is ascending to heaven, like the voice of many waters, sweet, plaintive, but strong, as the hope of the Church in England, as the truths he has taught us, and as his prayers, which ascend for us before the eternal Throne.