Cardinal by the title of Saint Prudentia, and was appointed Archbishop of Westminster—a title which drove silly churchmen into fits, and which made even Dissenters wild. Under the Pope he is the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England, and a Prince of the Church of Rome, at which place he now principally resides. His sojourn in England is understood to be but temporary. He has published several sermons, and a few volumes, in support of transubstantiation and the other doctrines of the church of which he is such an ornament. But his literary reputation is principally based on the series of lectures to which I have already referred.
The Cardinal has no great love for our age, and little love for England, if we are to judge by his epistle to his clergy on the Indian Mutiny. In a sermon on the Social and Intellectual State of England, compared with its Moral Condition, published in 1850, he asks, ‘Are we convinced that the real moral tone of society in every part is on the increase? Is it not notorious that crimes, and crimes even that were unknown among us a few years ago—that deeds of violence which not even the hot passionate blood of the
South is here to palliate—that such crimes as these are increasing in the great masses of our population? Is it not well known that the relations of the family are sadly isolated, and that multitudes live without a consciousness of their sacred nature? Are we improving the people in regard to these things? Are we doing anything to convince them more thoroughly, and upon true Church grounds, of their great duty to God, to society, to their families, and to themselves? I fear we must answer no; and I will say boldly that there are reasons why it should be so. There are immense obstacles in the religious institutions of the country to this being possible—because it is not in their power to come home to the feelings, to the affections of the poor. They raise not up any who devote themselves to them—who sacrifice themselves for them—who find a higher reward than man can give in making themselves servants of the servants of God. And what is the visible result of this? That any great institutions which make us think that we are acting so powerfully on the masses, reach not to the very depths of the miseries which have to be probed, and which have to be healed. We are content with raising the position
of the artizan, with making him more intelligent, with providing him with the means of education, with instructing him in his leisure hour to store his mind with knowledge. All this is good, and yet the institutions that work upon that class have not of their own nature a direct moral tendency.’ All this may be true or not, yet it is clear that the institutions which the Cardinal would recommend, equally fail, so far as morality is concerned. A Protestant is not less moral than a Catholic. The population of England is as moral as that of France. Roman Catholic Ireland can boast no superiority over Protestant Scotland. Luther has not to answer for all the sins of the world.
THE REV. DOCTOR WOLFF.
There are some people who maintain the Wandering Jew to be a myth. I believe the contrary—that he exists amongst us, and that he is known to men as Dr. Wolff. I hope the Hon. Mrs. Norton will make a note of this. It is a fact of which she ought to be aware, as should
Dr. Croly, and especially Dumas, otherwise his wondrous tale will be incomplete. Yes, Dr. Wolff is the Wandering Jew—not the melancholy personage of the poet and the novelist, but a fat jolly Jew, for whom ‘the law having a shadow of good things to come’ has ceased to exist, and to whom, if I may imagine by his portly presence and unctuous face, the good things have already come. We may look long ere we see in his countenance
‘the settled gloom
The fabled Hebrew wanderer bore,
That dared not look beyond the tomb,
That might not hope for peace before.’
On the contrary, all seems peace within and without, so far as Dr. Wolff is concerned. Had he any inward sorrow, had he been borne down by its agony, had the accents of despair been ever on his lip, and its terror ever glancing from his eye, he would have been a very different man. Nevertheless, the Dr. is the Wandering Jew, but in reality, and not in romance; he becomes a Christian, marries a lady of title, and becomes a clergyman of the English Church. Nominally, he is not of the London Pulpit. He has a local habitation and a name, but he is of no
place. He is of an unsettled race. I have no doubt but that he preaches as much out of his own church as in it, and that he has as much right to be included in the London Pulpit as in any other. At this time his voice is often heard in London. It really is surprising that the Bishop, or some admiring friend, such as Mr. Henry Drummond, has never given him a metropolitan charge, or built him a chapel somewhere in the vicinity of the Clapham sect. One would have thought he would have done as well, at any rate, as Mr. Ridley Herschell, than whom he is a great deal more interesting, and not half so heavy. What is the Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews about? What is Exeter Hall thinking of? Is Dr. Wolff too fat for sentiment? Must female youthful piety lavish its tenderness on a younger man? Does a converted Jew cease to be interesting, the same as common Evangelical curates, when their hair gets grey or their heads bald? Must a converted Jew, too, lose his charms as he gains flesh, as any ordinary Adonis of pious tea-tables? Alas! alas! I fear these questions are to be answered in the affirmative. Woman is woman everywhere,