But this was not all;
with age, he seemed to acquire what was almost a new fervour, an
unaccustomed, unexpected, freeing of the spirit, filling him with
preoccupations which he had hardly felt before. 'They say I am
ambitious,' he noted in his Diary, 'but do I rest in my
ambition?'
No, assuredly he did not rest; but he worked now with no arriere
pensee for the greater glory of God. A kind of frenzy fell upon
him.
Poverty, drunkenness, vice, all the horrors and terrors of our
civilisation
seized upon his mind, and urged him forward to new fields of
action and
new fields of thought. The temper of his soul assumed almost a
revolutionary
cast. 'I am a Mosaic Radical,' he exclaimed; and, indeed, in the
exaltation
of his energies, the incoherence of his conceptions, the
democratic
urgency of his desires, combined with his awe-inspiring aspect
and his venerable age, it was easy enough to trace the mingled
qualities of the patriarch, the prophet, and the demagogue. As,
in his soiled and shabby garments, the old man harangued the
crowds of Bermondsey or Peckham upon the virtues of Temperance,
assuring them, with all the passion of conviction, as a final
argument, that the majority of the Apostles were total
abstainers, this Prince of the Church might have passed as a
leader of the Salvation Army. His popularity was immense,
reaching its height during the great Dock Strikes of 1889, when,
after the victory of the men was assured, Manning was able, by
his persuasive eloquence and the weight of his character, to
prevent its being carried to excess.
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