The Times Great Victorian Lives. Ian Brunskill

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СКАЧАТЬ Roman Catholic Church, and with such success, that the Roman Catholics of the metropolis presented him with a gold medal, commemorative of their gratitude and of their high regard for his talents and acquirements. These ‘Lectures’ were speedily followed by a ‘Treatise on the Holy Eucharist,’ which occasioned a theological controversy with Dr. Turton, the late Bishop of Ely, and by another work, in two volumes, entitled ‘Lectures on the Connexion between Science and Revealed Religion.’ In the Lent of the year 1837, when he happened to be in Rome, he delivered four lectures on the ‘Offices and Ceremonies of Holy Week,’ which were afterwards given to the world as a separate publication.

      In 1840 the late Pope Gregory XVI increased the number of his Vicars Apostolic in England from four to eight, and Dr. Wiseman was appointed coadjutor to the late Bishop Walsh, then Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District, being at the same time elevated to the Presidency of St. Mary’s College, Oscott, near Birmingham. While there he took the deepest interest in the theological movement at Oxford which is associated with the names of Dr. Newman and Dr. Pusey, and which has furnished Rome with such an abundant store of recruits. In 1848, on the death of Bishop Griffiths, Dr. Wiseman became Pro-Vicar-Apostolic of the London district, and subsequently was nominated coadjutor to Dr. Walsh, cum jure successionis on the translation of that prelate to London. Bishop Walsh survived his translation but a short time, and on his death, in 1849, Bishop Wiseman succeeded him as Vicar Apostolic.

      The next stage in Dr. Wiseman’s life is that which, as it has been more controverted than any other, so also is that by which his name will be longest remembered. In August, 1850, Bishop Wiseman was summoned to Rome to the ‘threshold of the Apostles,’ by his Holiness Pope Pius IX, who on the 29th of the following September issued his celebrated ‘Apostolical Letter,’ re-establishing the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales, at the same time issuing a ‘Brief’ elevating Dr. Wiseman to the ‘Archbishopric of Westminster.’ In a private consistory, held the following day, the new ‘Archbishop’ was raised by the Sovereign Pontiff to the dignity of a Cardinal Priest, the ancient church of St. Pudentiana, at Rome, in conformity with the ecclesiastical custom, being selected by him as his title. His Eminence was the seventh Englishman who has been elevated to the hat of a Cardinal since the Reformation, his predecessors in this respect having been Cardinal Pole, Cardinal Allen, Cardinal Howard, Cardinal York, Cardinal Weld and Cardinal Acton.

      The name of Cardinal Wiseman was well known in that portion of the literary world which interests itself in controversy, as one of the most frequent and able contributors to the Dublin Review, of which he was for some years the joint editor. Among other productions of his pen which appeared in that periodical we may name his Strictures on the High Church Movement in Oxford, which were reprinted by the Catholic Institute about 20 years ago for circulation in a cheap form, under the attractive title of High Church Claims. His Eminence’s Essays and Contributions to the Dublin Review were collected and published, with a preface by the author, in 3 volumes 8vo. in 1853. It is also understood that he contributed to the Penny Cyclopaedia the article which treats on the ‘Catholic Church.’ Among the best known of his Eminence’s other controversial and miscellaneous publications are his Fabiola, a tale of the Early Christians; his Reminiscences of the Four last Popes; A Letter on Catholic Unity, addressed to the late Earl of Shrewsbury; A Letter to the Rev. J. H. Newman, on the Controversy relating to the Oxford Tracts for the Times; and A Letter addressed to John Poynder, Esq., upon his Work entitled ‘Popery in Alliance with Heathenism.’ To these must be added his Appeal to the Reason and Good Feeling of the People of England, respecting the Papal aggression, in which he endeavoured to prove that the matter at issue was merely a question relating to the internal and spiritual organization of the English Roman Catholics and in no sense a temporal measure, or one which involved any practical assault on the freedom of Protestants.

      To the London world and to the public at large Cardinal Wiseman’s name was rendered most familiar by his frequent appearance upon the platform as a public lecturer upon a wide range of subjects connected with education, history, art and science; and in this capacity his Eminence always found an attentive and eager audience, even among those who were most conscientiously opposed to his spiritual claims and pretensions, and who most thoroughly noted him as ‘Archbishop of Westminster.’

      The illness of which his Eminence has died has been of long standing, and when he left England for Rome in the Spring of 1860, there were many of his friends who feared that they would see his face no more. But he lived to return to England, and to recover some portion of his former health. It is almost superfluous to add that his Eminence’s loss will be severely felt among the English Roman Catholics, both lay and clerical, as he was nearly the only member of their body who had earned for himself a wide and lasting reputation for ability and learning.

      Given the continuing antipathy to Roman Catholicism in England and indeed the furore which had greeted the announcement of Wiseman’s appointment to the newly created see of Westminster, this obituary offers a surprisingly sympathetic commentary on his achievement. In the eighteenth century the religious lives of the small body of English Catholics had been regulated by Vicars Apostolic. Plans to create a series of new dioceses to cope with increasing numbers of the faithful were formulated in the late 1840s but had to be shelved due to legal problems in England and to the eviction of Pius IX from his see by the short-lived Roman Republic. On 7 October 1850, however, Wiseman was able to issue a florid pastoral letter ‘from out the Flaminian Gate’ announcing the new hierarchy and his own elevation to be both Cardinal and Archbishop of Westminster and asserting that ‘Catholic England has been restored to its orbit in the ecclesiastical firmament’. Popular, and official, wrath was stirred by the supposed presumption of the Vatican in usurping the title of ‘Westminster’, the seat of British Government, hence The Times’s patronising adoption here of apostrophes for Wiseman’s dignity and see. On 22 October 1850 an editorial in the same newspaper had greeted the appointment as ‘one of the grossest acts of folly and impertinence which the court of Rome has ventured to commit since the crown and people of England threw off its yoke’.

       ABRAHAM LINCOLN

       American statesman: ‘a singular depth of insight.’

      15 APRIL 1865

       The News of the Assassination in New York (from our Special Southern Correspondent)

      IT MAY SAFELY be affirmed that in the history of mankind no civilized capital ever wore the aspect which, upon the receipt of the ghastly tidings of this morning, New York at this hour presents. There was excitement, doubtless, in Paris when Henry I of Navarre fell before Ravaillac’s dagger, – in London when Mr. Perceval yielded his life to a maniac’s bullet, – in Rome when Cardinal Rossi fell slaughtered in the public streets; but what facilities had Paris, London, or Rome for thrilling in an instant the public heart and brain compared with those which the diffusive penny press and swiftly recurring telegrams of America place at this hour at the disposal of New York? Or was there ever a nation so sensitively plastic to the impress of great national sentiments as the keenly sentient, mercurial, quick witted population which, in wild bewilderment, surges and sways through the thronging streets now under my gaze? Last night the people of this great city went to bed, lulled by their cheerful optimism, reckoning of the rebellion as already a thing of the past, little heeding difficulties, social, financial, and economical, which might well make a statesman stand aghast; believing that Abraham Lincoln and William H. Seward were the chief apostles of the revived American Union, which is described in a work recently published as synonymous with the new Heaven and the new Earth. This morning they woke to the stunning consciousness that in the night the shadow of a great and ghastly crime had passed over the land; that assassination, sudden and unlooked for, executed with remorseless cruelty, but intrepid effrontery, had engraven its hideous tale upon that page which records four years of horrors СКАЧАТЬ