Page:Eminent Victorians.djvu/77

Rh Manning was put at its head. Unfortunately no portion of the body of St. Charles could be obtained for the new community, but two relics of his blood were brought over to Bayswater from Milan. Almost at the same time the Pope signified his appreciation of Manning's efforts by appointing him Provost of the Chapter of Westminster—a position which placed him at the head of the Canons of the diocese.

This double promotion was the signal for the out-break of an extraordinary intestine struggle, which raged without intermission for the next seven years, and was only to end with the accession of Manning to the Archbishopric. The condition of the Roman Catholic community in England was at that time a singular one. On the one hand the old repressive laws of the seventeenth century had been repealed by liberal legislation, and on the other a large new body of distinguished converts had entered the Roman Church as a result of the Oxford Movement. It was evident that there was a "boom" in English Catholicism, and, in 1850, Pius IX. recognised the fact by dividing up the whole of England into dioceses, and placing Wiseman at the head of them as Archbishop of Westminster. Wiseman's encyclical, dated "from without the Flaminian Gate," in which he announced the new departure, was greeted in England by a storm of indignation, culminating in the famous and furibund letter of Lord John Russell, then Prime Minister, against the insolence of the "Papal Aggression." Though the particular point against which the outcry was raised—the English territorial titles of the new Roman bishops—was an insignificant one, the instinct of Lord John and of the English people was in reality sound enough. Wiseman's installation did mean, in fact, a new move in the Papal game; it meant an advance, if not an aggression—a quickening in England of the long dormant energies of the Roman Church. That Church has never had the reputation of being an institution to be trifled with; and, in