G. Ward,
was to be placed under the control of the Oblates of St. Charles.
The Oblates did not attempt to conceal the fact that one of their
principal aims was to introduce the customs of a Roman Seminary
into England. A grim perspective of espionage and tale-bearing,
foreign habits, and Italian devotions opened out before the
dismayed eyes of the Old Catholics; they determined to resist to
the utmost; and it was upon the question of the control of St.
Edmund's that the first battle in the long campaign between
Errington and Manning was fought.
Cardinal Wiseman was now obviously declining towards the grave. A
man of vast physique--'your immense', an Irish servant used
respectfully to call him--of sanguine temperament, of genial
disposition, of versatile capacity, he seemed to have engrafted
upon the robustness of his English nature the facile, child-like,
and expansive qualities of the South. So far from being a Bishop
Blougram (as the rumour went) he was, in fact, the very
antithesis of that subtle and worldly-wise ecclesiastic. He had
innocently looked forward all his life to the reunion of England
to the See of Peter, and eventually had come to believe that, in
God's hand, he was the instrument destined to bring about this
miraculous consummation. Was not the Oxford Movement, with its
flood of converts, a clear sign of the Divine will? Had he not
himself been the author of that momentous article on St.
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