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66 took occasion, in conveying his congratulations to his friend, to make some illuminating reflections upon the great event. "My policy throughout," he wrote, "was never to propose you directly to the Pope, but to make others do so; so that both you and I can always say that it was not I who induced the Holy Father to name you, which would lessen the weight of your appointment. This I say, because many have said that your being named was all my doing. I do not say that the Pope did not know that I thought you the only man eligible; as I took care to tell him over and over again what was against all the other candidates; and in consequence he was almost driven into naming you. After he had named you, the Holy Father said to me, 'What a diplomatist you are, to make what you wished come to pass!'

"Nevertheless," concluded Monsignor Talbot, "I believe your appointment was specially directed by the Holy Ghost."

Manning himself was apparently of the same opinion. "My dear Child," he wrote to a lady penitent, "I have in these last three weeks felt as if our Lord had called me by name. Everything else has passed out of my mind. The firm belief that I have long had that the Holy Father is the most supernatural person I have ever seen has given me this feeling more deeply still. I feel as if I had been brought, contrary to all human wills, by the Divine Will, into an immediate relation to our Divine Lord."

"If indeed," he wrote to Lady Herbert, "it were the will of our Divine Lord to lay upon me this heavy burden, He could have done it in no way more strengthening and consoling to me. To receive it from the hands of His Vicar, and from Pius IX., and after long invocation of the Holy Ghost, and not only without human influences, but in spite of manifold and powerful human opposition, gives me the last strength for such a cross."