The Sun.
London, England, 1865-01-13 00:00:00

Apologia pro vita sua. Of Cardinal Wiseman, Dr.
Newman there spoke, it may be remembered, in
terms eminently significant, of his being, in truth,
facile princeps among his co-religionists. Speaking
of what he regards as the harmonious continuity of
Cardinal Wiseman's career, the Reviewer takes
occasion, in' the course of this paper in the cur-
rent number of the Dublin to remark as follows :
It is full of interest to trace out the early working of a
mind which for the last five-and-twenty years has partly
been mixed up with all the great movements which have
restored the Catholic Church in England, and partly has
led and directed them as their head and chief. We seem
to see in them the germs of what we now see in its matu-
rity. And the bearing of it upon our present state is so
intimate and direct, that we cannot refrain from notic-
ing it somewhat more fully. The first feature which
strikes us in all that has come from the pen of the Cardinal
Archbishop of Westminster, from his first volume of Lec-
tures to his Pastoral of last summer, is its perfect same-
ness. We do not see anywhere the changes, precipitations,
the alternate advances and retreats, the modifications and
uncertainty of judgment which characterize the public life
and published writings of so many men of acknowledged
learning and power. A certain steadfast growth always
expanding itself from one centre, and always homogeneous
and identical with its past, is the character of the writer's
mind, Few men have written more variously : works on
the Syriac language, on Catholic Doctrine, on Polemical
Theology, on the Evidence of the Fathers, on Art, Taste,
History, Biography, Reminiscences of Pontiff; Poetry ;
works of pure imagination ; essays on the most miscella-
neous subjects ; and yet in their great variety one mind
pervades all, and one spirit quickens all—the mind and
spirit of a true Christian and an ultramontane Catholic.
From first to last there is no wavering, no uncertainty, no
minimizing of the doctrines and laws of the Church. It
is seldom that such a sameness can be found through a life
so long, and so externated by both words and writings.
This seems to be the peculiar benefit of a Catholic forma-
tion. And perhaps few men in England, at this day, have
had it more completely. Born in Catholic Spain, reared
at Ushaw, educated in Rome, where all his early life was
spent, the Cardinal has never known what it is to have a
mutilated faith or an incoherent theology. To the twenty
years spent in Rome must be ascribed the peculiar large-
ness of apprehension as to the office and action of the Catho-
lic Church, which has marked his whole career. Looking
back upon it, who can doubt that it was the providential
formation for the mission which awaited him in England ?
There are two things which Rome does for a priest, and
which we believe no other place can do in the same de-
gree. The one is to expel from the mind the national,
local, personal prejudices derived from race, education,
social usage, family tradition, and to give it a breadth, com-
prehensiveness, and variety in its appreciations of the
Church, her mind, her instincts, her organization, her re-
ligious orders, her devotions. Rome, as the focus of the
Universal Church, contains in germ all that exists through-
out Catholic Unity. There, as S. Cyprian says, " the
Sacerdotal Unity takes its rise," and from thence every re-
ligious order derives itself ; to it all refer—there the secular
and religious clergy live in an unity which arises only from
a consciousness of their reciprocal needs and duties, and
that the perfection of each depends on the other ; there,
too, all nations have their churches. " The nations of the
redeemed," as S. John writes, "walk in the light of the
Jerusalem of the New Law." Any one who has lived in
Rome will have received an impression of the unity, and
universality of the Church, and of the diversity of her
spiritual creations, which will for life govern his judgment,
and suggest a multitude of undertakings by which the
the spirit and action of Rome may be reproduced in
all parts of the world. Witness the last fourteen years in

the Diocese of Westminster.
Apart, however, completely, from the importance
appertaining to him by reason of his ecclesiastical
character, Cardinal Wiseman occupies, no doubt, a
conspicuous position in the eyes of Protestant
England, not only by reason of the scope and
depth of his ripe and rare scholarship, but beyond
that, by reason of his being a man of undoubted
genius—as evidenced by his exquisite tale of
FABIOLA—a tale in which his vivifying imagi-
nation has created a soul under the ribs of death
in the vast and awful solitude of the Catacombs.