Born 15th July 1808 at Totteridge, Hertfordshire, from Harrow passed in 1827 to Balliol College, Oxford, and, after taking a classical first in 1830, was in 1832 elected a fellow of Merton. An eloquent preacher and a High Churchman, but not a contributor to the “Tracts for the Times,” in 1833 he became rector of Woollavington and Graffham, Sussex, and in 1840 Archdeacon of Chichester. In 1833 he had married Caroline Sargent, a lady whose sisters married Samuel and Henry Wilberforce; she died in 1837. On 6th April 1851, deeply moved by the “Gorham Judgment,” he joined the Church of Rome. He studied two years in Rome, in 1857 founded the congregation of the Oblates of St. Charles Borromeo at Bayswater, London; and in 1865 succeeded Cardinal Wiseman as Archbishop of Westminster. At the Œcumenical Council of 1870 Manning was one of the most zealous supporters of the infallibility dogma; and, named cardinal in 1875, he continued a leader of the Ultramontanes. He was a member of the Royal Commissions on the Housing of the Poor (1885) and on Education (1886), and took a prominent part in temperance and benevolent movements. Before his secession he published several volumes of powerful sermons; amongst his later writings are discussions of the temporal power, infallibility, the Vatican Council, Ultramontanism, the “Four Great Evils of the Day” (1871), “Internal Mission of the Holy Ghost” (1875), “The Catholic Church and Modern Society” (1880), “Eternal Priesthood” (1883), “Characteristics” (1885), and “Towards Evening” (1889). He died 14th January 1892, and was buried at Kensal Green. See Life by E. S. Purcell (2 vols. 1896).

Personal

  He is a tall thin personage, some sixty-two years of age. His face is bloodless—pale as a ghost, one might say. He is so thin as to look almost cadaverous. The outlines of the face are handsome and dignified. There is much of courtly grace and refinement about the bearing and gestures of this pale, weak, and wasted man. He wears a long robe of violet silk, with some kind of dark cape or collar, and has a massive gold chain round his neck, holding attached to it a great gold cross. There is a certain nervous quivering about his eyes and lips, but otherwise he is perfectly collected and master of the occasion. His voice is thin, but wonderfully clear and penetrating. It is heard all through this great hall—a moment ago so noisy, now so silent. The words fall with a slow, quiet force, like drops of water. Whatever your opinion may be, you cannot choose but listen.

  No other great man is more accessible than the Cardinal. Through no rooms are ushered men of more various opinions than through these great halls, Italian in their spaciousness, all English in their chilliness. And yet a certain dignity and grandeur seem to haunt them and surround also their spare, even emaciated tenant.

  He is a man of dignified and graceful manners, with what I should call, though I hardly know on what grounds, a mediæval countenance, austere but gentle, and some qualities which have deservedly given him a personal influence, as well as an ecclesiastical pre-eminence, in the church to which he was converted, though there is one party in it to which he is anything but acceptable. Indeed, it has been said by a cynical member of that church that the greatest misfortune it has suffered in this century was the death of Mrs. Manning.

  Before Mr. Gladstone paid much attention to the Debating Society, the leader of our house was Manning (the present Cardinal and Archbishop). Besides possessing great natural talents, he was, I think, having been at first intended for a different career, rather older than his average contemporaries. He would always have been in the ascendent, but his greater maturity, as might have been expected, increased that ascendency. He possessed a fine presence, and his delivery was effective. These qualities, joined to an impressive and somewhat imposing manner, enabled him to speak as one having authority, and drew into his orbit a certain number of satellites who revolved round him, and looked up to him, with as much reverence as if he had been the actual Pope, instead of only an embryo Cardinal. Their innocent adulation led him into his most obvious weakness, an assumption of omniscience which now and then overshot itself.

  In the pulpit, his spare figure and keen face seem all aglow with the fire of his words—perfectly simple words, but showing wonderful knowledge and mastery of human nature. When he drives home a sentence, he has an expressive habit of clinching the rail of the pulpit with both hands, throwing himself back at arm’s-length as he throws his words forward, which is as affective as it is peculiar. Since his entrance into the Roman Catholic Church in 1851, he has published more than thirty volumes and pamphlets, beginning with “The Grounds of Faith,” mostly in defence of the Church, and he has also been prominent and efficient in the many movements for temperance reform and the uplifting of the people in the metropolis.

  I was with him at Oxford; and I hope I may still reckon him as a friend, though on one subject, and that a momentous one, we are, alas, and ever must be, far apart. We have met but once since his secession to Rome; but that was enough to show that our affection for each other had not died out.

  Ecce sacerdos magnus,—that is the conclusion to which from every point we come when we review the various aspects of Manning’s life and work. Whatever we find, either to praise or perhaps to blame, it is always the characteristic of a great and good priest. Those to whom the idea of the Catholic priesthood is altogether unwelcome, and who regard it as the very incarnation of evil on this earth, can hardly be expected therefore to admire a man who was always and before all things a priest.

  A noble figure was his on the platform, and in the pulpit; but where he was at his best and greatest was in his own armchair…. What his own life of devotion was, that he wished the lives of all his clergy to be. Beautiful and inspiring were the addresses he gave them—then was a time when his Master’s name was on his lips at every breath, as it was always in his heart. Between no man’s words and acts was there ever so complete a parity. He denied himself the indulgences he ceded to others. The cigarette, which has penetrated everywhere, even into a convent during a “ladies’ retreat,” got no entrance into the Archbishop’s House. The cigar was a waste and indulgence beyond words; and though he had been an athlete at Harrow he did not like his clergy to care for sports. “I do not like a priest to run after a piece of leather,” he said, with characteristic summariness of thought and speech, when he heard of a clerical football player. Yet he took a five-bar gate when he went to Ushaw College in the sixties…. His manners with ladies were always charming; and his bow, when he took off the hat of more than Quaker brim, was a homage the most gracious ever made. It was not often that he permitted himself a mere compliment; when he did so it was only because a neat phrase carried him away…. The most humble of men, he was not without an imperiousness all his own, which well became him…. In his own outwardly way he loved the world and all the people in it. He did not want to die; but none was ever so submissive to the summons. “When you hear I have taken to my bed, you can order my coffin,” he said to me; “in that I shall be like Lord Beaconsfield.” Wearily and reluctantly he climbed the stone stairs for the last time, just after signing a business letter to the Vatican in the Italian. He had economised time at Balliol by learning while he shaved. He had borne the burden of a long day; and he leaves a memory that must illustrate those who come after him in the work which remains for them to do.

  People who only saw the Cardinal at a distance, especially when they were so violently anti-Papist as not to be able to discern the man on account of his vestments, have often marvelled and have been dismayed at the enthusiastic love and admiration I have always been proud to profess for Cardinal Manning. If they only knew what the man was to those who knew him they would never even so much as think of his clothes. Human hearts all aglow with love and sympathy are not so plentiful in this world that we can afford to pass them by because they beat behind a Roman cassock…. I never knew a man so weighted with grave affairs of church who always found time to write his own letters and to see his visitors. I have been at the palace as early as ten o’clock in the morning and as late as nine o’clock at night. I never found him hurried or flurried or driven for time. Over and over again, when, after talking for an hour or an hour and a half, I rose to go he would insist upon my sitting down again. “I have not said my say yet,” he would say. And so the conversation would begin again. He was always fresh, always interested about everything, and always eager to hear the latest news. He listened to everything, and enriched everything from his inexhaustible store of anecdote and incident. What a memory he had! He seemed to have heard everything and, until the last few months, to have forgotten nothing. As a gossip, in the highest sense of that much-abused word, I never knew his equal. He was never dull, never prosy, never at a loss for a humorous story or an apt retort. Catholic friends tell me that the Cardinal could pose magnificently as the prince of the Church. To me he never “put on side” in any shape or form. He was as simple as General Gordon, as healthy as a schoolboy, and as fond of fun and as merry as any man I ever met.

  I remember, on the first vacation from Oxford that I spent at Chichester, seeing the Archdeacon for the first time—his grand head, bald even then, his dignified figure in his long white surplice, occupying the Archdeacon’s stall in the Cathedral. His face was to me some first dim revelation of the meaning of the supernatural in man. I have never forgotten it, I see him as vividly now in my mind’s eye as when I first beheld him.

  No man was ever wittier than Manning’s brother-in-law, Bishop Wilberforce; no man less humorous. Manning had no wit, but a vast deal of humour. And it was his peculiar genius that, while he noted the way of the world with ready observation and dexterous look, marking its amusements, follies, sins, together with all that is great and good in it, he never laid aside his religious character, because in that was his life. Upon various sides of his nature he resembled both his friends, Lord Beaconsfield and Mr. Gladstone: he was both subtle and sincere…. He was the indefatigable official, the untiring ruler of a great diocese, the unfailing friend of all philanthropic and national movements: he had relations with the world upon all sides, and was well in touch with his contemporaries. But the man himself remained unknown, save to his immediate friends; no one could anywhere read the story of his soul. No poems, no sermons, no personal revelations, full of yearning and affection, and sorrow and faith, gave him a place in the hearts of strangers; instead, they only knew a few hard, external facts, nothing intimate, nothing spiritual, nothing “psychological.” And so, Manning was the organiser, the man of practical policy, the ecclesiastic of administrative genius; the world almost forgot the man in the archbishop.

  When a young lady had the audacity to tell him, “But, your Eminence, I like going to balls,” his characteristic answer was, “Better not, my child.” His whole leaning was toward counsels of perfection, and he died when he did because he absolutely refused to take stimulants lest his tempted children should thereby feel themselves ever so slightly loosened from their pledge; and for these and other most unpopular causes he “bore the reproach” with a certain pathetic severity. And little by little, year by year, the ascetic old man, who went about on ordinary occasions like “a shabby curate,” won upon his own recalcitrant people, and upon the outer English world. They came to understand his point of view, which was that if a man saw a good thing he was to strive after it utterly regardless of human respect; and if he saw a bad thing he was to fling himself against it; and if he was clear about a text of Scripture it was to be obeyed in all its length and breadth. His natural fastidiousness never stopped him for an instant. To the repentant woman he simply said, “Go and sin no more;” the drunken man he took literally into Archbishop’s House and set him on his feet again.

  All England paid not only a tribute of respect on the day of his Funeral, but grieved, it is not too much to say, almost with one heart at the passing-away of Cardinal Manning. His fellow-countrymen recognised with one accord that England had lost in him one of the greatest and noblest of its sons. The world was all the poorer by the death of a large-hearted philanthropist, a friend of the oppressed, a father of the poor. The Church, too, and not in England only, was all the poorer by the loss of one of her most faithful sons and servants; an unflinching champion of her rights, temporal and spiritual; a holy and ascetic prelate, inspired in word and deed by faith, spiritual fervour, and the love for souls. English life, already dull enough, was all the duller by the passing-away from the stage which he had so long and so gracefully filled of a unique and picturesque personality.

  From the time that Manning became an Archdeacon he never lost sight of the possibility of a Bishopric. He was quite in earnest about renouncing the world, but the world for some time liked him all the better for the elegant unearthliness of his aspect. He was knowing in horseflesh and he told good stories, and his health required him to spend his winters with his half-sister in Cadogan-place. Meanwhile his views were becoming more advanced; he was moving by a route of his own in the same direction as the Tractarians. He was an ally rather than a disciple. He was beginning to find that the witness of the undivided Church covered much that would have shocked the Reformers. But like Rose, and unlike the Tractarians, he had a high and hopeful opinion of the Church of England as a working institution.

  His intentions were often excellent; but he never got anything quite right. He wanted to help on the cause of temperance; but it may be doubted how far he did it any good by his well-meant exaggerations. He plunged into the furious controversies connected with the dock strike, without having taken the trouble to acquaint himself with the position of the dock proprietors, whom he believed to be rolling in riches when they were very much more than half ruined. He always took a superficially kind, gushing view of things, and his public utterances about social matters, as recorded by his biographer, are melancholy enough.

  That which struck one most on first getting to know Cardinal Manning well, some ten years ago, when serving with him, for nearly three years, on the Royal Commission on Education, and on further acquaintance also, was, I think, his extraordinary charm of manner and fascination of personality. He had the art, very rare, unfortunately—possessed to a marked degree by the late Lord Houghton—of taking the trouble and having the power of quickly putting at their ease men far younger than himself. His sense of humour was high, his own humour dry and expressive; his conversation vivacious and entertaining. His stately bearing, his beautifully cut features, his extraordinary ascetic look, his prominent forehead, his lustrous, deep-set eyes, his tightly-shut mouth, his dress, his age, his record, made a combination which was at once picturesque, strikingly interesting, and remarkably impressive…. On my first visits, I was conducted no further, by the old butler who was then alive, than to the inner of the two reception rooms. Almost immediately the Cardinal would appear from the side door leading from his private room; his beretta in his hand, his crimson skull cap on his head, a gold cross on his breast; his Cardinal’s dress, effective and becoming, but untidy, even at times almost ragged, a button here or there undone or gone. Then, in the sparsely, almost meanly furnished but well-warmed room, seated each on one side of the fire or the fireplace, we would discuss the rights and wrongs of a labour dispute, and the ethics of the labour question; or, if his mood were different, the problems of life, or some more trivial and topical subject—religion or theology, never…. Then, as our intimacy grew, I was admitted, when I went alone, to the inner sanctum; where, screened off from the draught, he sat in the middle of the room opposite the fire in an easy chair. On each hand of him an enormous, untidy, and ever-rising heap of books, pamphlets, magazines, papers and letters, apparently in inextricable confusion; but from which he always seemed able to unearth any particular paper or book of which he spoke, or to which he wished to refer. His abstemiousness was remarkable; and his ascetic-looking and emaciated features were witness to the fact…. He wrote a beautiful, fine, small, distinct hand…. To me he had a sort of personal magnetism; a personal magnetism that I have only myself experienced with reference to one other man—Parnell.

  Cardinal Manning was not only one of the noblest minds I have ever met, but one of the most patient and forgiving, through the restraint he knew how to put upon his natural feelings. He was also one of the most tender-hearted and charitable of men. I will also add that I always found him to be one of the most generous and forbearing. Though I was in most complete sympathy with him in most matters, there were others on which we took totally different views; and he would characterise these differences in his own playfully caustic way, as was his wont; but he bore them without any interruption of friendship. He was always to me as a father.

  I have tried to tell the story of his life: that long effort in the direction of truth, that heroic sacrifice of all that is dear to man, that passion for certitude which cast him at the feet of the infallible Church and, in that Church, at the feet of the Vicar of Jesus Christ, the incorruptible guardian of the deposit of faith. I have tried to tell also of that noble attempt to bring mankind to the Church, and to give to the Church consciousness of its mission of enfranchisement, of consolation and of salvation for society as well as for the individual. In the presence of that grand figure, made up of austerity and love, of asceticism and of charity, in the presence of the memory of that man who loved power, but only to devote it to the noblest of uses, the word that involuntarily rises to the lips to sum up all that history is that Scripture: Ecce sacerdos magnus; his was truly the soul of a priest.

  It seemed to me as if a great cause, rather than any individual man, was that which drew out the strongest ardours of Manning’s nature. He might easily have preferred the interests of a great friend to his own; but he would certainly have preferred that of a great cause to that of either self or friend. His human affections concentrated themselves on a few, while to the many beyond these he gave respect rather than admiration and a helpful and benevolent regard rather than ardent sympathies. The intensity of his nature, however, could not be doubted by any one who had seen him in church at prayer. His stillness was one that seemed as if it could not have been shaken if the church had caught fire.

  Cardinal Manning, then, was, before and beyond all things, an ecclesiastical statesman—and an ecclesiastical statesman of a high order: a Churchman cast in the heroic mould of St. Gregory VII. And William of Malmesbury’s description of the Pontiff applies equally well to the Cardinal:—“Vir apud Deum felicis gratiæ et apud homines austeritatis fortassis nimiæ.” He was essentially a man of action; and it was in matters of ecclesiastical polity that his great gifts found their proper sphere: his imperious will, his clear intellect, his strong purpose…. He had the defects of his qualities—his great qualities. But I do not understand how any man who had the privilege of intercourse with him could doubt his faith unfeigned, his deep devotion, his spotless integrity, his indomitable courage, his singleness of aim, his entire dedication of himself to the cause which he, in his inmost soul, believed to be the only cause worth living for. “The purity of his heart, the sanctity of his motives, no man knowing him can question,” Archdeacon Hare bore witness when lamenting his secession. This testimony is true.

General

  Archbishop Manning’s pastoral letter to his clergy on the first council, “The Vatican and its Definitions,” to which are appended the two constitutions the council adopted—the one the “Constitutio de Fide Catholica,” and the other the “Constitutio Dogmatica Prima de Ecclesia”—the case of Honorius, and the Letter of the German bishops on the council, though containing little that is new to our readers, is a volume which is highly valuable in itself, and most convenient to every Catholic who would know the real character of the council and what is the purport of its definitions. Few members of the council were more assiduous in their attendance on its sessions or took a more active part in its deliberations than the illustrious Archbishop of Westminster, and no one can give a more trustworthy account of its dispositions or of its acts…. The character of the book and of the documents it contains renders any attempt by us either to review it or to explain it alike unnecessary and impertinent. The pastoral is addressed officially by the Archbishop to his clergy.

  The literary works of Henry Edward, Cardinal of Westminster, constitute a longer list than people outside the Catholic Church might be inclined to suppose, although any visitor to London who remembers his brilliant and interesting dark face, will readily accord to him a place among the intellectual men of the day. The Cardinal’s book on “The Internal Mission of the Holy Ghost” contains a generous share of reason and truth, and will strike all its readers as an enlightened and intellectual production. Its style is sweet and easy to follow, and its divisions are interesting and apposite.

  The publication during his lifetime of the history of his Anglican days was laid aside at the Cardinal’s wish. Up to the time of his serious illness in the winter of ’88–9 the Cardinal was, I may say, eager for its publication. Afterwards his mind changed on the subject, caused in part no doubt, by the depression due to his illness; in part, to that nervous apprehension, which was one of the most characteristic elements in the Cardinal’s mind, of the results of any work or action appertaining to things Catholic, in which he had not a guiding or controlling hand. Love of power has often been attributed to the Cardinal. “His finger is in every man’s pie.” And so it was; not from love of power; but from an intense fear that others would make a mess of it. No Catholic movement, ecclesiastical or lay; no work, secular or religious, he was firmly persuaded in his own mind, would be safe or free from blunders or bungling, unless it were in his own hands. Conscious of his own capacity and skill, he mistrusted, perhaps somewhat overmuch, the capacity or skill of others. Hence, perhaps not unnaturally, the unpopularity, limited indeed to the more active-minded among the clergy and laity, which attached itself to the Cardinal in the earlier days of his ecclesiastical rule.

  It is more uncertain, though, whether Manning “made a mark on the religious history of his country greater, perhaps, than that made by Newman.” Manning was more prominent, he made a greater show; but, perhaps, not a greater mark, perhaps not a religious mark at all. It is too soon to judge of these things, or of these men; all we can say is that, without Newman, Manning would have had much less to work upon, and much more to contend against…. We have heard much lately of Manning’s victories, and little of his failures; perhaps the most conspicuous and disastrous of all his failures was the Catholic University of Kensington. He failed to provide the Catholic youth with a university of their own; he employed all his influence to thwart Newman’s wiser conception, that all that is best in Oxford might be made their own, to the great advantage of Oxford and of themselves. It might be truer to say in conclusion, that Manning’s “mark” is not so clear in religion as in philanthropy. It was when he put aside his Catholicism, and met his countrymen upon the common ground of good works, that he had most influence. There we are all proud of him; there we can admire him without reserve. But to see him a Radical in London, and a reactionary in Rome, is almost as distressing as to see Mr. Stead teaching the Pope how to be infallible. It is true that Roman Catholicism increased enormously in London under Manning’s rule; but before we can decide the question of Manning’s influence in religion, we must ascertain what proportion that increase bears to the general increase of the people at large, of the other dissenting bodies, and of the Church of England.

  A man and his style are inseparable; and Manning wrote always with a certain stately beauty, a grave and chastened simplicity, measured and academic. But he had no modern ingenuities. In these days, Addison and the Augustan writers seem deplorably uningenious: they never tortured a thought into contortions; they were simple and unashamed. Manning was no more afraid of a truism than Sophocles or Horace; truisms are probably the truest truths, the best attested in the world. But the word indicates our longing for some new thing; and he who will invert a truism into a paradox passes for the happiest and most refreshing of wits.

  He was not, like Newman, a blend of high and distinguished poetic imagination, dialectical acumen, and historical learning. He was not carried away by the rush of the Oxford Movement; he had always lived well outside it. He was not influenced by intimate friends; he hardly seems to have had the genius of intimate friendship. Nor was he deceived by his own rhetoric or that of others; no man had more distrust of rhetoric and rhetoricians. His own speeches, sermons, and writings were cold, austere, correct, and methodical. It was not poetry then that led Manning to Rome, nor art, nor erudition, nor the spirit of romance, nor friendship, nor self-deluding eloquence, nor was it love of the past.

  It is no disparagement to Leo XIII to say that had Manning become Pope his reign would have been only a degree less brilliant than Leo’s own. At the death of Pius IX he was the idol of the English-speaking Catholic world and its only real representative in Rome. Moreover, Manning had outgrown his diocese and his nation, and even the Sacred College, even Leo XIII in the first days of his pontificate, could not compare with Manning in world-wide fame. He had become the world’s Cardinal. It crowded his doors, bringing every cause and every theory that man’s restless brain can invent, for approval and blessing. His delight was to be with the children of men, and their delight was to be with him; and prudence of the clerical sort stood mourning in the street while the motley procession went in and out of the Cardinal’s doors, undisturbed, unchecked, until that day when it followed him weeping to his grave. Let us stop here. This is the Manning the world knew: the gracious, noble, exalted figure, whose native dignity the world’s honors could never obscure, and to whom a world turned with confidence and love.

  Manning was a vigorous administrator, a man of policies and methods, who was determined to have work done in his own way; but he was not always as careful as he ought to have been about the means he used. His early inclination to politics was a real expression of nature, for his aptitudes were for the service of the State rather than the Church, and he loved and served the Church as if it were a State. He had the ambition that place satisfied, and that could not be happy without place; power he loved more than fame, and if he sometimes gained it by ignoble arts, he yet used it for more noble ends. He was a man success improved; and when the temptations which appealed to his lower instincts were removed, he showed in his age some of those finer qualities of nature and character which we miss in his strong and aggressive manhood.

  Great as Manning undoubtedly was, it may be doubted whether, when the great historian of the future enumerates the leaders of thought and men of action of the nineteenth century, Manning will be found among them. His indecision, his dislike of facing a danger boldly, betray a mind that would stoop to almost any shift rather than lose the good opinion of those who looked up to him. His was a character that lacked generosity.

  Nothing will ever persuade me that Cardinal Manning intended his diaries, of which he said, “No eye but yours has ever seen this,” to be printed in full and sold to the public within four years of his death. They contain matters too sacred, too secret, too personal. That Cardinal Manning intended his diaries to be read by his biographer—such parts as he had not erased—as a guide to accurate judgment in estimating motives, and to enable him to see the inner life of the man whose public life especially he was to portray, is no doubt true. But that he ever intended his spiritual struggles and confessions, the record of his own impressions, criticisms, and judgments on men and measures, many of them still in the process of solution, together with private and personal letters and notes dealing with the faults, real or imaginary, of others, and with matters the most contentious, to be gathered together and launched back on to the stormy sea he has left behind, the moment he had himself set foot upon the eternal shore, is simply inconceivable…. Those who knew the Cardinal well, knew that he had two moods of character. One of great caution and self-restraint when he spoke or wrote for the public. Measure and prudence were then dictated by a high sense of responsibility. Another, of singular freedom and playfulness of speech, when he thoroughly unbent with those whom he trusted in private. Hyperbole, epigram, paradox, lightened with a vein of humour, of sympathy, or of indignation, according to the subject of the moment, entered not only into his daily conversation, but into many a note and record of impressions, jotted down in the last years of his life. These notes, I know with certainty, were never intended for publication any more than private letters dealing with men’s characters.

  Intelligent, skilful, versatile he was in the highest degree; cultivated, too, with a knowledge of all that a highly educated man ought to know; dexterous rather than forcible in theological controversy; an admirable rhetorician, handling language with something of that kind of art which Roman ecclesiastics most cultivate, and in their possession of which the leading Tractarians showed their affinity to Rome, an exact precision of phrase and a subtle delicacy of suggestion. Newman had it in the fullest measure. Dean Church had it, with less brilliancy than Newman, but with no less grace and dignity. Manning equalled neither of these, but we catch in him the echo. He wrote abundantly and on many subjects, always with cleverness and with the air of one who claimed to belong to the âmes d’élite, yet his style never attained the higher kind of literary merit. There was no imaginative richness about it, neither were there the weight and penetration that come from sustained and vigorous thinking. Similarly, with a certain parade of references to history, and to out-of-the-way writers, he gave scant evidence of solid learning. He was an accomplished disputant in the sense of knowing thoroughly the more obvious weaknesses of the Protestant (and especially of the Anglican) position, and of being able to contrast them effectively with the external completeness and formal symmetry of the Roman system. But he never struck out a new or illuminative thought; and he seldom ventured to face—one could indeed sometimes mark him seeking to elude—a real difficulty.