St. James's Hall, London, is primarily a place for concerts and singers, as Exeter Hall is. But, like its venerable predecessor, St. James's Hall has come to be identified with political meetings of a certain class. Exeter Hall, a huge, gaunt, unadorned, and dreary room in the Strand, is resorted to for the most part as the arena and platform of ultra-Protestantism. St. James's Hall, a beautiful and almost lavishly ornate structure in Piccadilly, is commonly used by the leading Roman Catholics of London when they desire to make a demonstration. There are political classes which will use either place indifferently; but Exeter Hall has usually a tinge of Protestant exclusiveness about its political expression, while the ceiling of the other building has rung alike to the thrilling music of John Bright's voice, to the strident vehemence of Mr. Bradlaugh, the humdrum humming of Mr. Odger, and the clear, delicate, tremulous intonations of Stuart Mill. But I never heard of a Roman Catholic meeting of great importance being held anywhere in London lately, except in St. James's Hall.

Let us attend such a meeting there. The hall is a huge oblong, with galleries around three of the sides, and a platform bearing a splendid organ on the fourth. The room is brilliantly lighted, and the mode of lighting is peculiar and picturesque. The platform, the galleries, the body of the hall alike are crowded. This is a meeting held to make a demonstration in favor of some Roman Catholic demand—say for separate education. On the platform are the great Catholic peers, most of them men of lineage stretching back to years when Catholicism was yet unsuspicious of any possible rivalry in England. There are the Norfolks, the Denbighs, the Dormers, the Petres, the Staffords; there are such later accessions to Catholicism as the Marquis of Bute, whose change created such a sensation, and Lord Robert Montagu, who "went over" only last year. There are some recent accessions of the peerage also—Lord Acton, for instance, head of a distinguished and ancient family, but only lately called to the Upper House, and who, when Sir John Acton, won honorable fame as a writer and scholar. Lord Acton not many years ago started the "Home and Foreign Review," a quarterly periodical which endeavored to reconcile Catholicism with liberalism and science. The universal opinion of England and of Europe declared the "Home and Foreign Review" to be unsurpassed for ability, scholarship, and political information by any publication in the world. It leaped at one bound to a level with the "Edinburgh," the "Quarterly," and the "Revue des Deux Mondes." But the Pope thought the Review too liberal, and intimated that it ought to be suppressed; and Lord Acton meekly bowed his head and suppressed it in all the bloom of its growing fame. Some Irish members of Parliament are on the platform—men of station and wealth like Munsell, men of energy and brains like John Francis Maguire; perhaps, too, the handsome, brilliant-minded O'Donoghue, with his picturesque pedigree and his broken fortunes. But in general there is not a very cordial rapprochement between the English Catholic peers and the Irish Catholic members. Of all slow, cold, stately Conservatives in the world, the slowest, coldest, and stateliest is the English Catholic peer. Only the common bond of religion brings these two sets of men together now and then. They meet, but do not blend. In the body of the hall are the middle-class Catholics of London, the shopkeepers and clerks, mostly Irish or of Irish parentage. In the galleries are swarming the genuine Irishmen of London, the Paddies who are always threatening to interrupt Garibaldian gatherings in the parks, and who throw up their hats at the prospect of any "row" on behalf of the Pope. The chair is taken by some duke or earl, who is listened to respectfully, but without any special fervor of admiration. The English Catholics are undemonstrative in any case, and Irish Paddy does not care much about a chilly English peer. But a speaker is presently introduced who has only to make his appearance in front of the platform in order to awaken one universal burst of applause. Paddy and the Duke of Norfolk vie with each other; the steady English shopkeeper from Islington is as demonstrative as any O'Donoghue or Maguire. The meeting is wide awake and informed by one spirit and soul at last.

The man who has aroused all this emotion shrinks back almost as if he were afraid of it, although it is surely not new to him. 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; and, indeed, you want only to listen and see. For this is the foremost man in the Catholic Church of England. This is the Cardinal Grandison of Disraeli's "Lothair"—Dr. Henry Edward Manning, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, successor in that office of the late Cardinal Wiseman.

It is no wonder that the Irishmen at the meeting are enthusiastic about Archbishop Manning. An Englishman of Englishmen, with no drop of Irish blood in his veins, he is more Hibernian than the Hibernians themselves in his sympathies with Ireland. A man of social position, of old family, of the highest education and the most refined instincts, he would leave the Catholic noblemen at any time to go down to his Irish teetotallers at the East End of London. He firmly believes that the salvation of England is yet to be accomplished through the influence of that religious devotion which is at the bottom of the Irish nature, and which some of us call superstition. He loves his own country dearly, but turns away from her present condition of industrial prosperity to the days before the Reformation, when yet saints trod the English soil. "In England there has been no saint since the Reformation," he said the other day, in sad, sweet tones, to one of wholly different opinions, who listened with a mingling of amazement and reverence. No views that I have ever heard put into living words embodied to anything like the same extent the full claims and pretensions of Ultramontanism. It is quite wonderful to sit and listen. One cannot but be impressed by the sweetness, the thoughtfulness, the dignity, I had almost said the sanctity of the man who thus pours forth, with a manner full of the most tranquil conviction, opinions which proclaim all modern progress a failure, and glorify the Roman priest or the Irish peasant as the true herald and repository of light, liberty, and regeneration to a sinking and degraded world.

Years ago, Henry Edward Manning was one of the brilliant lights of the English Protestant Church. Just twenty years back he was appointed to the high place of Archdeacon of Chichester, having also, according to the manner in which the English State Church rewards its dignitaries, more than one other ecclesiastical appointment at the same time. Dr. Manning had distinguished himself highly during his career at the University of Oxford. His father was a member of the House of Commons, and Manning on starting into life had many friends and very bright prospects. Nothing would have been easier, nothing seemingly would have been more natural than for him to tread the way so plainly opened before him, and to rise to higher and higher dignity, until at last perhaps the princely renown of a bishopric and a seat in the House of Lords would have been his reward. But Dr. Manning's career was cast in a time of stress and trial for the English State Church. I have described briefly in a former article the origin, growth, and effects of that remarkable movement which, beginning within the Church itself and seeking to establish loftier claims for her than she had long put forward, ended by convulsing her in a manner more troublous than any religious crisis which had occurred since the Reformation. Dr. Manning's is evidently a nature which must have been specially allured by what I may be allowed to call the supernatural claims put forward on behalf of the Church of England. He was of course correspondingly disappointed by what he considered the failure of those claims. As Coleridge says that every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist, so it may perhaps be said that every man is born with a predisposition to lean either on natural or supernatural laws in the direct guidance of life. I am not now raising any religious question whatever. What I say may be said of members of the same sect or church—of any sect, of any church. One man, as faithful and devout a believer as any, is yet content to go through his daily duties and fulfil his career trusting to his religious principles, his insight, and his reason, without requiring at every moment the light of spiritual or supernatural guidance. Another must always have his world in direct communion with the spiritual, or it is no world of faith to him. Now it is impossible to look in Dr. Manning's face without seeing that his is one of those sensitive, spiritual, I had almost said morbid natures, which can find no endurable existence without a close and constant communion with the supernatural. Keble, Newman, Time and the Hour, called out for the assertion of the claim that the Church of England was the true heir of the apostolic succession. Such a nature as Manning's must have delightedly welcomed the claim. But the mere investigation sent, as I have already explained, one Newman to Catholicism and the other to Rationalism. Dr. Manning, too, felt compelled to ask himself whether the Church could make good its claim, and whether, if it could not, he had any longer a place within its walls. The change does not appear to have come so rapidly to fulfilment with him as with John Henry Newman. Dr. Manning seems to me to have a less aggressive temperament than his distinguished predecessor in secession. There is more about him of the quietist, of the ecstatic, so far as religious thought is concerned, while it is possible that he may be a more practical and influential guide in the mere policy of the church to which he belongs. There is an amount of scorn in Newman's nature which sometimes reminds one of Pascal, and which I have not observed in Dr. Manning or in his writings. I cannot imagine Dr. Manning, for example, pelting Charles Kingsley with sarcasms and overwhelming him with contempt, as Dr. Newman evidently delighted to do in the famous controversy which was provoked by the apostle of Muscular Christianity. I suppose therefore that Dr. Manning clung for a long time to the faith in which he was bred. But his whole nature is evidently cast in the mould which makes Roman Catholic devotees. He is a man of the type which perhaps found in FÉnelon its most illustrious example. I think it is not too much to say that to him that light of private judgment which some of us regard as man's grandest and most peculiarly divine attribute, must always have presented itself as something abhorrent to his nature. I am judging, of course, as an outsider and as one little acquainted with theological subjects; but my impression of the two men would be that Dr. Newman joined the Roman Catholic Church in obedience to some compulsion of reason, acting in what must seem to most of us an inscrutable manner, and that Dr. Manning never would have been a Protestant at all if he had not believed that the Protestant Church was truly all which its rival claims to be.

Dr. Manning in fact did not leave the Church. The Church left him. He had misunderstood it. It became revealed at last as it really is, a church founded on the right of private judgment, and Manning was appalled and turned away from it. Something that may almost be called accident brought home to his mind the true character of the Church to which he belonged. Many readers of "The Galaxy" may have some recollection of the once celebrated Gorham case in England—a case which I shall not now describe any further than by saying that it raised the question whether the Church of England can prescribe the religion of the State. Had the Church the right to decide whether certain doctrine taught by one of its clergy was heretical, and to condemn it if so declared? In England, Church and State are so bound up together, that it is practically the State and not the Church which decides whether this or that teaching is heresy or true religion. A lord chancellor who may be an infidel, and two or three "law lords" who may be anything or nothing, settle the question in the end. We all remember the epigram about Lord Chancellor Westbury, the least godly of men, having "dismissed Hell with costs," and taken away from the English Protestant "his last hope of damnation." The Gorham case, twenty years ago, showed that the Church, as an ecclesiastical body, had no power to condemn heresy. This, to men like Stuart Mill, appears on the whole a satisfactory condition of things so long as there is a State Church, for the plain reason which he gives—namely, that the State in England is now far more liberal than the Church. But to Dr. Manning the idea of the Church thus abdicating its function of interpreting and declaring doctrine was equivalent to the renunciation of its right to existence. He strove hard to bring about an organized and solemn declaration and protest from the Church—a declaration of doctrine, a protest against secular control. He became the leader of an effort in this direction. The effort met with little support. The then Bishop of London did indeed introduce a bill into the House of Lords for the purpose of enacting that in matters of doctrine, as distinct from questions of mere law, the final decision should rest with the prelates. Dr. Manning sat in the gallery of the House of Lords on that memorable night. The Bishop of London wholly failed. The House of Lords scouted the idea of liberal England tolerating a sort of ecclesiastical inquisition. Every one admitted the anomalous condition in which things then were placed; but few indeed would think of enacting a dogma of infallibility in favor of the bishops of the Church. Lord Brougham spoke against the bill with what Dr. Manning himself admits to be plain English common sense. He said the House of Lords through its law peers could decide questions of mere ecclesiastical law, and the decisions would carry weight and authority; but neither peers nor bishops could in England decide a question of doctrine. Suppose, he asked, the bishops were divided equally on such a question, where would the decision be then? Suppose there was a very small majority, who would accept such a decision? Or even suppose there was a large majority, but that the minority comprised the few men of greatest knowledge, ability, and authority, what value would attach to the judgment of such a majority? The bill was a hopeless failure. Dr. Manning has himself described with equal candor and clearness the effect which the debate had upon him. He mentally supplemented Lord Brougham's questions by one other. Suppose that all the bishops of the Church of England should decide unanimously on any doctrine, would any one receive the decision as infallible? He was compelled to answer, "No one." The Church of England had no pretension to be the infallible spiritual guide of men. Were she to raise any such pretension, it would be rejected with contempt by the common mind of the nation. Hear then how this conviction affected the man who up to that time had had no thought but for the interests and duties of the English Church. "To those," he has himself told us, "who believed that God has established upon the earth a divine and therefore an unerring guardian and teacher of his faith, this event demonstrated that the Church of England could not be that guardian and teacher."

While Dr. Manning was still uncertain whither to turn, the celebrated "Papal aggression" took place. Cardinal Wiseman was sent to England by the Pope, with the title of Archbishop of Westminster. All England raged. Earl Russell wrote his famous "Durham Letter." The Lord Chancellor Campbell, at a public dinner in the city of London, called up a storm of enthusiasm by quoting the line from Shakespeare, which declares that

Protestant zealots in Stockport belabored the Roman Catholics and sacked their houses; Irish laborers in Birkenhead retorted upon the Protestants. The Government brought in the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill—a measure making it penal for any Catholic prelate to call himself archbishop or bishop of any place in England. Let him be "Archbishop Wiseman" or "Cardinal Wiseman, Archbishop of Mesopotamia," as long as he liked—but not Archbishop of Westminster or Tuam. The bill was powerfully, splendidly opposed by Gladstone, Bright, and Cobden, on the broad ground that it invaded the precincts of religious liberty; but it was carried and made law. There it remained. There never was the slightest attempt made to enforce it. The Catholic prelates held to the titles the Pope had given them; and no English court, judge, magistrate, or policeman ever offered to prevent or punish them. So ludicrous, so barren a proceeding as the carrying of that measure has not been known in the England of our time.

Cardinal Wiseman was an able and a discreet man. He was calm, plausible, powerful. He was very earnest in the cause of his Church, but he seemed much more like a man of the world than Newman or Dr. Manning. There was little of the loftily spiritual in his manner or appearance. His bulky person and swollen face suggested at the first glance a sort of Abbot Boniface; he was, I believe, in reality an ascetic. The corpulence which seemed the result of good living was only the effect of ill health. He had a persuasive and an imposing way. His ability was singularly flexible. His eloquence was often too gorgeous and ornamental for a pure taste, but when the occasion needed he could address an audience in language of the simplest and most practical common sense. The same adaptability, if I may use such a word, was evident in all he did. He would talk with a cabinet minister on terms of calm equality, as if his rank must be self-evident, and he delighted to set a band of poor school children playing around him. He was a cosmopolitan—English and Irish by extraction, Spanish by birth, Roman by education. When he spoke English he was exactly like what a portly, dignified British bishop ought to be—a John Bull in every respect. When he spoke Italian at Rome he fell instinctively and at once into all the peculiarities of intonation and gesture which distinguish the people of Italy from all other races. When he conversed in Spanish he subsided into the grave, somewhat saturnine dignity and repose of the true Castilian. All this, I presume, was but the natural effect of that flexibility of temperament I have attempted to describe. I had but slight personal acquaintance with Cardinal Wiseman, and I paint him only as he impressed me, a casual observer. I am satisfied that he was a profoundly earnest and single-minded man; the testimony of many whom I know and who knew him well compels me to that conviction. But such was not the impression he would have left on a mere acquaintance. He seemed rather one who could, for a purpose which he believed great, be all things to all men. He impressed me quite differently from the manner in which I have been impressed by John Henry Newman and by Archbishop Manning. He reminded one of some great, capable, worldly-wise, astute Prince of the Church of other generations, politician rather than priest, more ready to sustain and skilled to defend the temporal power of the Papacy than to illustrate its highest spiritual influence.

The events which brought Cardinal Wiseman to England had naturally a powerful effect upon the mind of Dr. Manning. It was the renewed claim of the Roman Church to enfold England in its spiritual jurisdiction. For Dr. Manning, who had just seen what he regarded as the voluntary abdication of the English Church, the claim would in any case have probably been decisive. It "stepped between him and his fighting soul." But the personal influence of Cardinal Wiseman had likewise an immense weight and force. Dr. Manning ever since that time entertained a feeling of the profoundest devotion and reverence for Cardinal Wiseman. The change was consummated in 1851, and one of the first practical comments upon the value of the Ecclesiastical Titles Act was the announcement that a scholar and divine of whom the Protestant Church had long been especially proud had resigned his preferments, his dignities, and his prospects, and passed over to the Church of Rome. I cannot better illustrate the effect produced on the public mind than by saying that even the secession of John Henry Newman hardly made a deeper impression.

Dr. Manning, of course, rose to high rank in the church of his adoption. He became Roman of the Romans—Ultramontane of the Ultramontanes. On the death of his friend and leader, Cardinal Wiseman, whose funeral sermon he preached, Henry Manning became Archbishop of Westminster. Except for his frequent journeys to Rome, he has always since his appointment lived in London. Although a good deal of an ascetic, as his emaciated face and figure would testify, he is nothing of a hermit. He mingles to a certain extent in society, he takes part in many public movements, and he has doubtless given Mr. Disraeli ample opportunity of studying his manner and bearing. I don't believe Mr. Disraeli capable of understanding the profound devotion and single-minded sincerity of the man. A more singular, striking, marvellous figure does not stand out, I think, in our English society. Everything that an ordinary Englishman or American would regard as admirable and auspicious in the progress of our civilization, Dr. Manning calmly looks upon as lamentable and evil-omened. What we call progress is to his mind decay. What we call light is to him darkness. What we reverence as individual liberty he deplores as spiritual slavery. The mere fact that a man gives reasons for his faith seems shocking to this strangely-gifted apostle of unconditional belief. Though you were to accept on bended knees ninety-nine of the decrees of Rome, you would still be in his mind a heretic if you paused to consider as to the acceptance of the hundredth dogma. All the peculiarly modern changes in the legislation of England, the admission of Jews to Parliament, the introduction of the principle of divorce, the practical recognition of the English divine's right of private judgment, are painful and odious to him. I have never heard from any other source anything so clear, complete, and astonishing as his cordial acceptance of the uttermost claims of Rome; the prostration of all reason and judgment before the supposed supernatural attributes of the Papal throne. In one of the finest passages of his own writings he says: "My love for England begins with the England of St. Bede. Saxon England, with all its tumults, seems to me saintly and beautiful. Norman England I have always loved less, because, although majestic, it became continually less Catholic, until the evil spirit of the world broke off the light yoke of faith at the so-called Reformation. Still I loved the Christian England which survived, and all the lingering outlines of diocese and parishes, cathedrals and churches, with the names of saints upon them. It is this vision of the past which still hovers over England and makes it beautiful and full of the memories of the kingdom of God. Nay, I loved the parish church of my childhood and the college chapel of my youth, and the little church under a green hillside where the morning and evening prayers and the music of the English Bible for seventeen years became a part of my soul. Nothing is more beautiful in the natural order, and if there were no eternal world I could have made it my home." To Dr. Manning the time when saints walked the earth of England is more of a reality than the day before yesterday to most of us. Where the ordinary eye sees only a poor, ignorant Irish peasant, Dr. Manning discerns a heaven-commissioned bearer of light and truth, destined by the power of his unquestioning faith to redeem perhaps, in the end, even English philosophers and statesmen. When it was said in the praise of the murdered Archbishop of Paris that he was disposed to regret the introduction of the dogma of infallibility, Archbishop Manning came eagerly to the rescue of his friend's memory, and as one would vindicate a person unjustly accused of crime, he vindicated the dead Archbishop from the stigma of having for a moment dared to have an opinion of his own on such a subject. Of course, if Dr. Manning were an ordinary theological devotee or fanatic, there would be nothing remarkable in all this. But he is a man of the widest culture, of high intellectual gifts, of keen and penetrating judgment in all ordinary affairs, remarkable for his close and logical argument, his persuasive reasoning, and for a genial, quiet kind of humor which seems especially calculated to dissolve sophistry by its action. He is an English gentleman, a man of the world; he was educated at Oxford with Arthur Pendennis and young Lord Magnus Charters; he lives at York Place in the London of to-day; he drives down to the House of Commons and talks politics in the lobby with Gladstone and Lowe; he meets Disraeli at dinner parties, and is on friendly terms, I dare say, with Huxley and Herbert Spencer; he reads the newspapers, and I make no doubt is now well acquainted with the history of the agitation against Tammany and Boss Tweed. I think such a man is a marvellous phenomenon in our age. It is as if one of the mediÆval saints from the stained windows of a church should suddenly become infused with life and take a part in all the ways of our present world. I can understand the long-abiding power of the Catholic Church when I remember that I have heard and seen and talked with Henry Edward Manning.

Dr. Manning is not, I fancy, very much of a political reformer. His inclinations would probably be rather conservative than otherwise. He is drawn toward Gladstone and the Liberal party less by distinct political affinity, of which there is but little, than by his hope and belief that through Gladstone something will be done for that Ireland which to this Oxford scholar is still the "island of the saints." The Catholic members of Parliament, whether English or Irish, consult Archbishop Manning constantly upon all questions connected with education or religion. His parlor in York Place—not far from where Mme. Tussaud's wax-work exhibition attracts the country visitor—is the frequent scene of conferences which have their influence upon the action of the House of Commons. He is a devoted upholder of the doctrine of total abstinence from intoxicating drinks; and he is the only Englishman of real influence and ability, except Francis Newman, who is in favor of prohibitory legislation. He is the medium of communication between Rome and England; the living link of connection between the English Catholic peer and the Irish Catholic bricklayer. The position which he occupies is at all events quite distinctive. There is nobody else in England who could set up the faintest claim to any such place. It would be superfluous to remark that I do not expect the readers of "The Galaxy" to have any sympathy with the opinions, theological or political, of such a man. But the man himself is worthy of profound interest, of study, and even of admiration. He is the spirit, the soul, the ideal of mediÆval faith embodied in the form of a living English scholar and gentleman. He represents and illustrates a movement the most remarkable, possibly the most portentous, which has disturbed England and the English Church since the time of Wyckliffe. No one can have any real knowledge of the influences at work in English life to-day, no one can understand the history of the past twenty years, or even pretend to conjecture as to the possibilities of the future, who has not paid some attention to the movement which has Dr. Manning for one of its most distinguished leaders, and to the position and character of Manning himself.