Henry Edward Manning

“ God works through the politics and actions of men. They are instruments in His hands, and over all their powers there is a will and a control which directs and restrains them. God works through the combinations of rulers, whether they will or no; and brings about His ends by the most adverse and unlikely means. There is nothing in the present danger of the Holy See which has not often been before. Its existence in the world is a perpetual miracle: divinely founded, it has been divinely preserved. The power of the Pontiff forms an exception in the history of the world. ”

“ Moreover, to the priesthood is committed the office of making the revelation of God an authoritative reality among men. Priests are teachers, guides, and judges; they are in constant contact and in perpetual conflict with the world. The more like they are to their Master, the more hated they must be; the more faithfully they bear witness against the world which crucified Him, the more they inherit the scandal and the enmity of the Cross. It is inevitable. A holy priesthood must be hated by the world. It is false to say that the priesthood is hated for the sins of priests. ”

“ If through our pride or blindness we do so, God will not be mocked. We have been sowing the wind, and shall reap the whirlwind. When we have preached the gospel of sedition to all nations, then shall the end come. Already the warnings are upon us. There are forerunners on the horizon, and storms below it. There are agencies which elude control and discovery; secret and sudden combinations which threaten us where we seem strongest and safest. We have dallied with the evils which only threatened others, and they have now recoiled upon ourselves. ”

“ Men are not at liberty to violate these laws. They have no right to be disobedient, unjust, untruthful, impure. The will has no right of liberty to infringe these laws at choice. It is this yoke of faith and law, imposed upon the intelligence and the will, that galls and irritates the world.
So, again, the Church is a more explicit object of their enmity, because it is to the Church that God has committed the custody and the execution of His truth and law. The Church—as witness, teacher, and judge—contradicts and offends the spirit of licence to the quick. ”

“ It holds up as a standard to be honoured, if not to be imitated, by all, a life of counsels, and a state of perfection, the most contrary and mortifying to the world and to the flesh; obedience, poverty, and chastity: 'extinct virtues' which are still so vigorous in the members of the Church and in religious Orders throughout the Christian world, that they must needs be cut down and rooted out by spoliation, prohibition, dissolution, and endless contempt.
But there is yet another object of the world's enmity more visible and more within its reach. ”

“ It will not indulge either tyranny or rebellion, oppression or sedition. It will not sanction the despotism of parents nor the disobedience of children. It will not suffer unrebuked the scandals of public immorality or the licence of private vice. It is a censor of our lives, and an inexorable judge not only of what we do, but even of what we are. And this is all the more galling, because of the standard of morals it holds up before the world. It is not content to teach the bare letter of the Ten Commandments. ”

“ It is not more certain that the Catholic Church spreads visibly over the earth than that an anti-Christian conspiracy of infidelity and revolution spreads in secret under the Christian world. These two systems are in presence of each other. Hitherto the Christian order has maintained its supremacy. How long it shall endure, God only knows. So long as there is a Christian world, the temporal power of the Pontiffs will be sustained by its conscience and its instincts; when the temporal power is dissolved the Christian world will be dissolved with it. ”

“ First, this enmity, it is directed against the revelation of Christianity, as such, which, by making known the truth, has limited the licence of the human reason. The revelation that there is one God has narrowed the liberty of the human intelligence. No man is at liberty to think that there are many Gods, or that there is no God. Polytheism and Atheism are not only follies, but sins. In like manner, by revealing the Incarnation of His Son, God has imposed another limit on the freedom of the human reason. No man is at liberty to say that God is not incarnate. ”

“ The influence of this country for good or for evil, for order or for disorder, is great. As a Christian and an Englishman I deplore the licence of nameless writing and irresponsible speech, which, for the last twenty years, throughout the whole Pontificate of Pius IX., has encouraged and stimulated the anti-Christian revolutions of the Continent. We have among us public voices which make themselves heard far and wide. And they, too, have preached the gospel of sedition. ”

“ Always threatened, but always safe—as the Apostle says: 'We suffer persecution, but are not forsaken; we are cast down, but we perish not: always bearing about in our body the mortification of Jesus, that the life also of Jesus may be made manifest in our bodies. For we who live are always delivered unto death for Jesus' sake: that the life also of Jesus may be made manifest in our mortal flesh.' (2 Cor. iv. 9-11.) The Pontiffs have thereby represented to the world the union of weakness and power. ”

“ Our Lord has prepared us for the hostility which is everywhere about us. 'If the world hate you, know ye that it hated Me before you;' and that, in proportion to our separation from the world. 'If you had been of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.' Now, of this we have a signal example. There are two persons whose names are in almost daily contrast. ”

“ And, lastly, we are warned against 'addressing prayers to her as the Intercessor between God and man.' But here, once more, we have no difference. 'The Intercessor' here must mean, if it mean anything, 'the Intercessor of redemption.' The Catholic Church does not believe the Blessed Mother of God to be the Intercessor between God and man. She did not shed her blood for the redemption of the world. Against such a portent of heresy we protest even more intensely than the protesters. ”

“ No line of kings has ever survived such vicissitudes—their lines have been broken, and their dynasties have passed away. But the line of the Pontiffs is indefectible, and their throne has always been restored. To be protected by the power of Christian nations—first by one, then by another—has always been their providential lot. It could not be otherwise. The Divine Founder of the Church has so disposed it that His kingdom should not be numbered among the nations ”

“ There seems to be a delight in recounting his dangers and humiliations, in predicting his downfall, in encouraging his enemies, in justifying their actions, in bidding Godspeed to their conspiracies, and glorying over their violence. If things turn in his favour, there is disappointment and irritation; if they go against him, there is exultation and joy. ”

“ Primacy of honour and supremacy of jurisdiction over the universal Church, in virtue of the power of the keys given to Peter and his successors, is indeed a truth, for which all Catholics would lay down their lives. ”

“ It traces mankind to a progenitor among the least graceful and most grotesque of creatures, and affirms that thought is phosphorus, the soul a name for the complex of nerves, and, if I rightly understand its mysteries, that our moral sense is a secretion of sugar. ”

“ And so of every revealed truth, of the Church, of the Seven Sacraments, as also of every known truth of every kind; the liberty of the human reason to dispute at will is restrained by being elevated to the light of knowledge. Nevertheless men resent this as a bondage. ”

“ They are concentrated upon the Vicar of Jesus Christ, who most nearly represents Him to the world. All the enmities against the Divine truth and the Divine law, against the Church and its morality, against religious orders and the priesthood, fall at once upon the chief witness for the revelation of Christianity, the Head of the Church, the guardian of morality, and the protector of the priesthood. ”

“ But to save you from the vices and the abuses which destroyed the ancient republic, do not suffer among you patricians, nor knights, nor cardinals, nor prelates, nor bishops, nor priests, nor monks, nor vestals. Be you all citizens. ”

“ His spiritual power needs no human aid. Neither kings nor emperors have been able to arrest nor have presumed to patronise it. His temporal power has subsisted for a thousand years by a continuous intervention of Divine Providence. It has never possessed a military force able to cope with the weakest temporal prince. ”