Newman and the Immaculate Conception

Blessed Pope Pius IX's proclamation of the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception, issued on December 8, 1864, would, like his re-establishment of the hierarchy in England and the First Vatican Council's declaration of Papal Infallibility, provoked reactions in England, politically and theologically.

Two years after the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, which Catholics celebrate today by going to Mass--and easing the usual Friday penitence!--Reverend Doctor E.B. Pusey wrote a public letter to the other great survivor of Newman's "defection", John Keble: An Eirenicon, responding to then Archdeacon Henry Manning's public letter to Pusey, The Workings of the Holy Spirit in the Church of England", in which Manning denied that the Church of England was protected from error the way the Catholic Church is. Pusey mentions the recently proclaimed doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary (declared by Pope Pius IX in 1854: "We declare, pronounce and define that the doctrine which holds that the Blessed Virgin Mary, at the first instant of her conception, by a singular privilege and grace of the Omnipotent God, in virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of mankind, was preserved immaculate from all stain of original sin, has been revealed by God, and therefore should firmly and constantly be believed by all the faithful.") and examines it in a historical context.

Father John Henry Newman then answered Pusey with A Letter Addressed to the Rev. E. B. Pusey, D.D. on Occasion of his Eirenicon, in which he defended the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, starting with the commonly held doctrine that our first parents, Adam and Eve, were without Original Sin, filled with supernatural grace. Mary, the Mother of God is the Second Eve: her obedience and cooperation with God undoes Eve's disobedience:

She holds, as the Fathers teach us, that office in our restoration which Eve held in our fall:—now, in the first place, what were Eve's endowments to enable her to enter upon her trial? She could not have stood against the wiles of the devil, though she was innocent and sinless, without the grant of a large grace. And this she had;—a heavenly gift, which was over and above and additional to that nature of hers, which she received from Adam, a gift which had been given to Adam also before her, at the very time (as it is commonly held) of his original formation. This is Anglican doctrine, as well as Catholic; it is the doctrine of Bishop Bull. He has written a dissertation on the point. He speaks of the doctrine which "many of the Schoolmen affirm, that Adam was created in grace, that is, received a principle of grace and divine life from his very creation, or in the moment of the infusion of his soul; of which," he says, "for my own part I have little doubt." Again, he says, "It is abundantly manifest from the many testimonies alleged, that the ancient doctors of the Church did, with a general consent, acknowledge, that our first parents in the state of integrity, had in them something more than nature, that is, were endowed with the divine principle of the Spirit, in order to a supernatural felicity."

Now, taking this for granted, because I know that you and those who agree with you maintain it as well as we do, I ask you, have you any intention to deny that Mary was as fully endowed as Eve? is it any violent inference, that she, who was to co-operate in the redemption of the world, at least was not less endowed with power from on high, than she who, given as a help-mate to her husband, did in the event but cooperate with him for its ruin? If Eve was raised above human nature by that indwelling moral gift which we call grace, is it rash to say that Mary had even a greater grace? And this consideration gives significance to the Angel's salutation of her as "full of grace,"—an interpretation of the original word which is undoubtedly the right one, as soon as we resist the common Protestant assumption that grace is a mere external approbation or acceptance, answering to the word "favour," whereas it is, as the Fathers teach, a real inward condition or superadded quality of soul. And if Eve had this supernatural inward gift given her from the first moment of her personal existence, is it possible to deny that Mary too had this gift from the very first moment of her personal existence? I do not know how to resist this inference:—well, this is simply and literally the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. I say the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is in its substance this, and nothing more or less than this (putting aside the question of degrees of grace); and it really does seem to me bound up in the doctrine of the Fathers, that Mary is the second Eve.

It is indeed to me a most strange phenomenon that so many learned and devout men stumble at this doctrine; and I can only account for it by supposing that in matter of fact they do not know what we mean by the Immaculate Conception; and your Volume (may I say it?) bears out my suspicion. It is a great consolation to have reason for thinking so,—reason for believing that in some sort the persons in question are in the position of those great Saints in former times, who are said to have hesitated about the doctrine, when they would not have hesitated at all, if the word "Conception" had been clearly explained in that sense in which now it is universally received. I do not see how any one who holds with Bull the Catholic doctrine of the supernatural endowments of our first parents, has fair reason for doubting our doctrine about the Blessed Virgin. It has no reference whatever to her parents, but simply to her own person; it does but affirm that, together with the nature which she inherited from her parents, that is, her own nature, she had a superadded fulness of grace, and that from the first moment of her existence. Suppose Eve had stood the trial, and not lost her first grace; and suppose she had eventually had children, those children from the first moment of their existence would, through divine bounty, have received the same privilege that she had ever had; that is, as she was taken from Adam's side, in a garment, so to say, of grace, so they in turn would have received what may be called an immaculate conception. They would have then been conceived in grace, as in fact they are conceived in sin. What is there difficult in this doctrine? What is there unnatural? Mary may be called, as it were, a daughter of Eve unfallen. You believe with us that St. John Baptist had grace given to him three months before his birth, at the time that the Blessed Virgin visited his mother. He accordingly was not immaculately conceived, because he was alive before grace came to him; but our Lady's case only differs from his in this respect, that to her the grace of God came, not three months merely before her birth, but from the first moment of her being, as it had been given to Eve.

But it may be said, How does this enable us to say that she was conceived without original sin? If Anglicans knew what we mean by original sin, they would not ask the question. Our doctrine of original sin is not the same as the Protestant doctrine. "Original sin," with us, cannot be called sin, in the mere ordinary sense of the word "sin;" it is a term denoting Adam's sin as transferred to us, or the state to which Adam's sin reduces his children; but by Protestants it seems to be understood as sin, in much the same sense as actual sin. We, with the Fathers, think of it as something negative, Protestants as something positive. Protestants hold that it is a disease, a radical change of nature, an active poison internally corrupting the soul, infecting its primary elements, and disorganizing it; and they fancy that we ascribe a different nature from ours to the Blessed Virgin, different from that of her parents, and from that of fallen Adam. We hold nothing of the kind; we consider that in Adam she died, as others; that she was included, together with the whole race, in Adam's sentence; that she incurred his debt, as we do; but that, for the sake of Him who was to redeem her and us upon the Cross, to her the debt was remitted by anticipation, on her the sentence was not carried out, except indeed as regards her natural death, for she died when her time came, as others [Note 5]. All this we teach, but we deny that she had original sin; for by original sin we mean, as I have already said, something negative, viz., this only, the deprivation of that supernatural unmerited grace which Adam and Eve had on their first formation,—deprivation and the consequences of deprivation. Mary could not merit, any more than they, the restoration of that grace; but it was restored to her by God's free bounty, from the very first moment of her existence, and thereby, in fact, she never came under the original curse, which consisted in the loss of it. And she had this special privilege, in order to fit her to become the Mother of her and our Redeemer, to fit her mentally, spiritually for it; so that, by the aid of the first grace, she might so grow in grace, that, when the Angel came and her Lord was at hand, she might be "full of grace," prepared as far as a creature could be prepared, to receive Him into her bosom.

James Hope-Scott and Henry Manning

While I'm at the Spiritual Life Center today here in Wichita to present on "St. Thomas More: Conscience and Martyrdom" and "Blessed John Henry Newman: Conscience and Conversion", it's appropriate that I mention two contemporaries of Blessed John Henry Newman who were born on July 15.

Henry Manning was born on July 15 in 1808, James Hope (he added the -Scott later) in 1812.

Henry Cardinal Manning, the second Archbishop of Westminster, is one of the famous converts who became Catholic through the influence of Newman in the Oxford Movement. He and Newman had a rather contentious relationship during their Catholic years. The story of his conversion is told in David Newsome's The Parting of Friends: The Wilberforces and Henry Manning.

James Hope-Scott, on the other hand, was a most faithful friend and defender of Newman. He was a barrister and represented Newman during the Achilli trial. More on his life from the Catholic Encyclopedia:

third son of the Honourable Sir Alexander Hope, G.C.B., who was fourth son of John, second Earl of Hopetoun, a Scottish title dating from 1703. His mother was third and youngest daughter of George Brown of Ellerton, Roxburghshire. During early childhood his home was the Military College at Sandhurst, where his father was in command. Afterwards he went abroad with his parents, staying in succession at Dresden, Lausanne, and Florence, and thus gaining a mastery of the German, French, and Italian tongues. In 1825 he entered Eton, whence, in 1828, he matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford. After a visit to Paris in 1829 he went into residence at Oxford the same year. The degree of B.A. he took in 1832, coming out in the fourth class in literis humanioribus. Next year he was elected a Fellow of Merton. In 1835 he gave up his intention of entering the ministry of the Established Church, and began to study law under conveyancers, his call to the bar at the Inner Temple taking place in 1838. Meanwhile, in the latter year he graduated B.C.L. at Oxford, proceeding D.C.L. in 1843. In 1838, after publishing anonymously in pamphlet form a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, he saw through the press Gladstone's work entitled "The State considered in its Relations with the Church". Next year he and Roundell Palmer (the future Earl of Selborne) projected "The History of Colleges". In 1840, at Newman's request, Hope wrote in "The British Critic", a review, later published separately, of Ward's translation of "The Statutes of Magdalen College, Oxon." The same year, as junior counsel for the capitular bodies petitioning against the Ecclesiastical Duties and Revenues Bill, he delivered the remarkably able speech which moved Brougham to exclaim, "That young man's fortune is made." In 1840, moreover, he was appointed Chancellor of the Diocese of Salisbury, which post he held until 1845. About the same time he took part in the foundation of Glenalmond College, in Perthshire, for the education of the Scottish Episcopal youth. In 1840-41 he spent some eight months in Italy, Rome included, in company with his close friend Edward Louth Badeley. On his return he became, with Newman, one of the foremost promoters of the Tractarian movement at Oxford. His next publication was a pamphlet against the establishment of the Anglo-Prussian Protestant See of Jerusalem, of which a second edition appeared in 1842. In 1849 and 1850 there came the Gorham trial and judgment, and in the latter year the agitation against the so-called "Papal Aggression". These events finally determined him upon the course of joining the Catholic Church, into which, together with Archdeacon Manning, he was received in London in 1851 by the Jesuit Father Brownhill.

In 1852 he managed Newman's defence in the libel action brought against him by Achilli, and in 1855 he conducted the negotiations which ended in Newman's accepting the rectorship of the Catholic University of Ireland. As to Hope's professional work, within a few years of his call he devoted himself wholly to parliamentary practice, in which his success and emoluments became prodigious. This was the palmy period of railway construction, and eventually he became standing counsel to almost every railway in the realm. In 1849 he was appointed Q.C., with a patent of precedence.

How he came to change his name:

His first wife, whom he married in 1847, was Charlotte Harriet Jane Lockhart, only daughter of John Gibson Lockhart and granddaughter of Sir Walter Scott. She soon followed her husband into the Catholic Church. A year later he became tenant of Abbotsford to his brother-in-law, and on the latter's death, in 1853, its possessor in right of his wife, thereupon assuming the name of Hope-Scott. Not long afterwards he added a new wing to Sir Walter's mansion. In 1855 he bought the Highland estate of Dorlin, whereupon he built a new house, selling the whole to Lord Howard of Glosson in 1871. In 1858 he had to mourn the loss of his wife, who died in childbed, the newborn child dying shortly after, and Walter Michael, his infant son and heir, before the close of the year. His second wife, whom he wedded in 1861, was Lady Victoria Alexandrina Fitzalan- Howard, eldest daughter of the fourteenth Duke of Norfolk, of whose children Hope-Scott had been left guardian. In 1867 he had the honour of a visit from Queen Victoria at Abbotsford, and in the same year he bought a villa at Hyères, in Provence. Like her predecessor, his second wife died in childbed in 1870, after giving birth to James Fitzalan Hope, now (1909) M.P. Hope- Scott never overcame the grief and shock entailed by this last bereavement. He now withdrew from his profession, surviving his dead wife but little more than two years, and dying in 1873. His funeral sermon was preached by his old and intimate friend Cardinal Newman in the same Jesuit church of Farm Street in which, two and twenty years back, Hope-Scott had made his submission to the Catholic Church. His charities and benefactions were wellnigh boundless. It is reckoned that from 1860 onwards he spent £40,000 in hidden charity. Among his innumerable good works, he built at a cost of £10,000 the Catholic church at Galashiels, near Abbotsford, and he was the chief benefactor of St. Margaret's Convent, at Edinburgh, wherein he lies buried.

More about him at Abbotsford here.

At his funeral, Newman praised him for his "tender conscience", his generosity, his talents and gifts as a barrister and advocate, and then concluded:

O happy soul, who hast loved neither the world nor the things of the world apart from God! Happy soul, who, amid the world's toil, hast chosen the one thing needful, that better part which can never be taken away! Happy soul, who, being the counsellor and guide, the stay, the light and joy, the benefactor of so many, yet hast ever depended simply, as a little child, on the grace of thy God and the merits and strength of thy Redeemer! Happy soul, who hast so thrown thyself into the views and interests of other men, so prosecuted their ends, and associated thyself in their labours, as never to forget still that there is one Holy Catholic Roman Church, one Fold of Christ and Ark of salvation, and never to neglect her ordinances or to trifle with her word! Happy soul, who, as we believe, by thy continual almsdeeds, offerings, and bounties, hast blotted out such remains of daily recurring sin and infirmity as the sacraments have not reached! Happy soul, who, by thy assiduous preparation for death, and the long penance of sickness, weariness, and delay, has, as we trust, discharged the debt that lay against thee, and art already passing from penal purification to the light and liberty of heaven above!

And so farewell, but not farewell for ever, dear James Robert Hope Scott! He is gone from us, but only gone before us. It is for us to look forward, not backward. We shall meet him again, if we are worthy, in "Mount Sion, and the heavenly Jerusalem," in "the company of many thousands of angels, the Church of the first-born who are written in the heavens," with "God, the Judge of all, and the spirits of the just made perfect, and Jesus, the Mediator of the New Testament, and the blood which speaketh better things than that of Abel."

G.K. on G.F. Watts

G.K. is of course G.K. Chesterton (Gilbert Keith); G.F. Watts is George Frederick Watts, the Victorian era artist. The G.K. and Frances Chesterton facebook page (on August 29, 2016) featured a long quote from his book about G.F. Watts, published in 1904. Chesterton introduces his remarks about the painting by noting that the observer will at first think it misnamed:

His first thought, of course, would be that the picture was called Despair; his second (when he discovered his error in the catalogue), that it has been entered under the wrong number; his third, that the painter was mad. But if we imagine that he overcame these preliminary feelings and that as he stared at that queer twilight picture a dim and powerful sense of meaning began to grow upon him—what would he see? He would see something for which there is neither speech nor language, which has been too vast for any eye to see and too secret for any religion to utter, even as an esoteric doctrine. Standing before that picture, he finds himself in the presence of a great truth. He perceives that there is something in man which is always apparently on the eve of disappearing, but never disappears, an assurance which is always apparently saying farewell and yet illimitably lingers, a string which is always stretched to snapping and yet never snaps. He perceives that the queerest and most delicate thing in us, the most fragile, the most fantastic, is in truth the backbone and indestructible. He knows a great moral fact: that there never was an age of assurance, that there never was an age of faith. Faith is always at a disadvantage; it is a perpetually defeated thing which survives all its conquerors. The desperate modern talk about dark days and reeling altars, and the end of Gods and angels, is the oldest talk in the world: lamentations over the growth of agnosticism can be found in the monkish sermons of the dark ages; horror at youthful impiety can be found in the Iliad. This is the thing that never deserts men and yet always, with daring diplomacy, threatens to desert them. It has indeed dwelt among and controlled all the kings and crowds, but only with the air of a pilgrim passing by. It has indeed warmed and lit men from the beginning of Eden with an unending glow, but it was the glow of an eternal sunset.

Here, in this dim picture, its trick is almost betrayed. No one can name this picture properly, but Watts, who painted it, has named it Hope. But the point is that this title is not (as those think who call it "literary") the reality behind the symbol, but another symbol for the same thing, or, to speak yet more strictly, another symbol describing another part or aspect of the same complex reality. Two men felt a swift, violent, invisible thing in the world: one said the word "hope," the other painted a picture in blue and green paint. The picture is inadequate; the word "hope" is inadequate; but between them, like two angles in the calculation of a distance, they almost locate a mystery, a mystery that for hundreds of ages has been hunted by men and evaded them. And the title is therefore not so much the substance of one of Watts' pictures, it is rather an epigram upon it. It is merely an approximate attempt to convey, by snatching up the tool of another craftsman, the direction attempted in the painter's own craft. He calls it Hope, and that is perhaps the best title. It reminds us among other things of a fact which is too little remembered, that faith, hope, and charity, the three mystical virtues of Christianity, are also the gayest of the virtues. Paganism, as I have suggested, is not gay, but rather nobly sad; the spirit of Watts, which is as a rule nobly sad also, here comes nearer perhaps than anywhere else to mysticism in the strict sense, the mysticism which is full of secret passion and belief, like that of Fra Angelico or Blake. But though Watts calls his tremendous reality Hope, we may call it many other things. Call it faith, call it vitality, call it the will to live, call it the religion of to-morrow morning, call it the immortality of man, call it self-love and vanity; it is the thing that explains why man survives all things and why there is no such thing as a pessimist.

Chesterton analyzes both the allegorical paintings and the many portraits of famous literary men and others by Watts. Watts produced the 1882 portrait of Cardinal Henry Manning, seen here as the cover illustration for an edition of Strachey's Eminent Victorians. Chesterton finds fault with Watts' portraiture, however, commenting:

He makes all his portraits too classical. It may seem like a paradox to say that he makes them too human; but humanity is a classis and therefore classical. He recurs too much to the correct type which includes all men. He has, for instance, a worship of great men so complete that it makes him tend in the direction of painting them all alike. There may be too much of Browning in his Tennyson, too much of Tennyson in his Browning. There is certainly a touch of Manning in his John Stuart Mill, and a touch of the Minotaur in many of his portraits of Imperial politicians. While he celebrates the individual with a peculiar insight, it is nevertheless always referred to a general human type.

Chesterton thinks Watts has gone too far in depicting Manning's ascetism and its results:

The portrait of Cardinal Manning is worth a further and special notice, because it is an illustration of the fact to which I have before alluded: the fact that while Watts in one sense always gets the best out of his sitters, he does not by any means always get the handsomest out of them. Manning was a singularly fine-looking man, even in his emaciation. A friend of mine, who was particularly artistic both by instinct and habits, gazed for a long time at a photograph of the terrible old man clad in those Cardinal's robes and regalia in which he exercised more than a Cardinal's power, and said reflectively, "He would have made his fortune as a model." A great many of the photographs of Manning, indeed almost any casual glimpses of him, present him as more beautiful than he appears in Watts' portrait. To the ordinary onlooker there was behind the wreck of flesh and the splendid skeleton the remains of a very handsome English gentleman; relics of one who might have hunted foxes and married an American heiress. Watts has no eyes for anything except that sublime vow which he would himself repudiate, that awful Church which he would himself disown. He exaggerates the devotionalism of Manning. He is more ascetic than the ascetics; more Catholic than Catholicism. Just so, he would be, if he were painting the Sheik-el-Islam, more Moslem than the Mohammedans. He has no eyes but for ideas.

Project Gutenberg of Australia has made the text of Chesterton's book on Watts available online, including 32 works of Watts, both allegories and portraits.

Happy Birthday to Henry Cardinal Manning

Henry Edward Manning, future Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, was born on July 15, 1808. Although influenced in some ways by John Henry Newman and the Oxford Movement to become a Catholic in 1851, Manning did not always appreciate Newman's personality, theology, or influence among English Catholics.

Cited on The Victorian Web, Lawrence Poston (from his book The Antagonist Principle: John Henry Newman and the Paradox of Personality. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2014) comments on the conflicts between Henry Cardinal Manning and John Henry Cardinal Newman:

Newman's vexed relationship with Henry Manning was not the least of the products of his Catholic years. Over the last century, Manning, on the whole (and with the exceptions of such balanced scholars as David Newsome and James Pereiro) has had a bad press. He was doubtless much that he has been accused of being—ambitious, devious, and politically motivated—and he has earned a reputation for equivocation, particularly in interpreting Newman's actions to the hierarchy. Certainly temperament had much to do with their differences. Manning was a well-informed man and no mean theologian. But he was a man of the world, not a cloistered university don, and his practical experience as an archdeacon in the Church of England had shown his capacity to manage men. He was an accomplished bureaucrat who moved naturally in the complexities of Vatican politics; Newman was not. Both men craved power, but Manning through authority, Newman through influence. Yet Manning was no stranger to the joys and sorrows of the human condition. The loss of his wife in the years before his own reception into the Roman Catholic Church was a source of continuing sorrow throughout his life, though he did not make a public display of his bereavements, and his intervention in the London Dock Strike (1889) demonstrated a political pragmatism quite beyond Newman's ken.

To Newman's principle of personality Manning posed the antagonist principle of bureaucracy as a way of containing gifted but excitable individuals who might disrupt ecclesiastical due process. Manning had small sympathy for theories of development, and even less interest in the role of the laity, whom he famously dismissed as fit for hunting and fishing* but not for theological disputation [sic]. He was decisive where Newman was hesitant, but a virtue of his limitations as well as a consequence of his power was that he found it easier to eschew grudges. As John Page has noted, Newman's intellectual response to the papal claims was indirect, veering and tacking, in short (to take a term from Ian Ker)unscholastic, because his personality was "careful, tolerant, and given to second thoughts" (Page 421), while his historical method elevated inference over logic. His argument in counseling troubled Catholics was that confession did not demand adherence to a specific definition de fide as long as they had made an active avowal of faith in the Church's teaching. This would have struck Manning as worse than hairsplitting; it was a failure of loyalty and indeed of nerve.

More deeply, the two men held different beliefs on how one comes to religious faith. Newman's Grammar of Assent . . . was the product of a patient mind disentangling, over many years, the intricate processes by which individuals come to belief: how the reason cooperates, through the accumulation of probabilities, in the task of finding certitude. Manning’s idea of certainty (not the same as Newman's "certitude") amounted to a rejection of the Butlerian theory of probability that Newman had embraced years before, and Manning's interpretation of the Catholic position was that right reason "leads us to the fact of a Divine Teacher; but thenceforward His voice, and not our balancing of probabilities, will be the formal motive of the faith." The Church's witness was not only "human and historical" but "supernatural and divine." Thus, "My faith terminates no longer in a cumulus of probabilities, gathered from the past, but upon the veracity of a Divine Power guiding me with His presence" (Manning 75-76). This standard, enunciated three years before the appearance of the Grammar of Assent, was surely behind Manning’s belief that Newman had never really left off being an Anglican at heart. [218-19]

*While Manning might have agreed with this dismissal, I think that Poston has attributed this comment incorrectly. Monsignor George Talbot wrote to Manning, after Newman had written his famous article in The Rambler on "Consulting the Laity in Matters of Doctrine":

What is the province of the laity? To hunt, to shoot, to entertain? These matters they understand, but to meddle with ecclesiastical matters they have no right at all, and this affair of Newman is a matter purely ecclesiastical…. Dr. Newman is the most dangerous man in England, and you will see that he will make use of the laity against your Grace.

When Newman was beatified in 2010 Robert Gray wrote in The Spectator, comparing and contrasting Manning and Newman:

Newman and Manning did have one thing in common: they had both been born into evangelical families. At Oxford, however, Newman soon came to detest the smugness and vulgarity of those who claimed intimate converse with the Almighty. More pertinently, he apprehended that an ill-defined mishmash of individual enlightenment, pious sentiment and good works could never stand against the secularising tendencies of the times.

If Christianity were to survive (and Newman was quite prepared to concede that it might not), Christians must have firmly and objectively fixed propositions into which to fasten their mental hooks. In a word, they required dogma, which could only be delivered by a divinely appointed Church.

To the young Henry Manning, preaching the Word to a rustic congregation at Lavington in Sussex, such teaching appeared as manna in the desert. How infinitely more satisfying, for a temperament attracted to power, to stand before his humble flock as a successor of the Apostles than as a mere expositor of biblical texts.

Yet while Manning followed Newman in theology, he retained throughout his life an evangelical sympathy for the outcast. Newman, on the other hand, was in general far too obsessed by the eternal drama to bestow much time or notice upon the sufferings of this world.

Read the rest there, especially as Gray comments on all the good work Henry Manning did as Archbishop of Westminster:

His first duty, he judged, was to the Irish in London, in danger of being lost to the Church in the slums of the capital. By the time of his death in 1892 more than 10,000 extra places had been provided in parish elementary schools. He also succeeded, with the help of his friend William Gladstone, in extricating thousands of Catholic children from Protestant workhouses, so that by 1884 not a single one was left therein.

At the same time he developed orphanages and reformatories for neglected children. After the Education Act of 1870, he raised funds to ensure that Catholic schools did not fall under the rule of godless local boards of education. Later he played an important role in establishing the principle that denominational, or ‘voluntary’ schools should be financed from the rates on the same basis as board schools.

Whereas the Oxford Movement converts who followed Newman into the Catholic Church may be measured in hundreds, those whom Manning saved for Rome must be numbered in tens of thousands. Catholic intellectuals, however, have rarely found the Archbishop’s social labours as compelling as Newman’s exquisite disquisitions on the nature of faith or on the evolution of his religious opinions.

That last comment is echoed by the author of the CTS Biography of Cardinal Manning, pictured above, as I've posted before.