THE GREAT CATHOLIC.

Tuapeka Times, Volume IV, Issue 221, 25 April 1872, Page 9

THE GREAT CATHOLIC.

A LIVING SKETCH BY JUSTIN M'CARTHJT. Archbishop Manning is a tall, thin personage, some sixty-two years of age. His face is bloodless — pale as a ghost, one mighb 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 beating 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 around his neck, holding attached to it a great gold cross. There is a 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 as;o 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 ia 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. Kn 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 sosial 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, lie {irmly 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 clay, in sad, sweeb 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 Ultra montanism. It is quite wonderful to sit and listen. One cannoc 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, and liberty, aud regeneration to a sinking and degraded world.