Rome, an amiable correspondence
took place between Mr. Gladstone and him. "How sad it is for us both"--this
was Mr. Gladstone's starting-point--"considering our personal relations,
that we should now be in this predicament, that the things which the one
looks to as the salvation of faith and church, the other regards as their
destruction."

To Mr. Odo Russell, now the informal agent of the British government in
Rome, the prime minister wrote:--

It is curious that Manning has so greatly changed his character.
When he was archdeacon with us, all his strength was thought to
lie in a governing faculty, and in its wise moderation. Now he is
ever quoted as the _ultra_ of ultras, and he seems greatly to have
overshot his mark. The odds seem to be that the child yet unborn
will rue the calling of this council. For if the best result
arrive in the triumph of the fallibilitarians, will not even this
be a considerable shock to the credit and working efficacy of the
papal system? You must really be _all_ eyes and ears, a very Argus
in both organs, until the occasion has gone by.

As for the issue of the council, Acton, having Mr. Odo Russell in
agreement with him, from the first conveyed to Mr. Gladstone his opinion
that the pope would prevail.

The only hope in my mind, said Mr. Gladstone in reply, is that
there may be a real minority, and that it may speak plainly. A few
bold men would easily insure themselves a noble immortality. But
will _any_ have the courage? The Italian government have one and
only one method in their hands of fighting the pope: and that is
to run, against nomination from Rome, the old and more popular
methods of choosing bishops by clerical election, with the
_approbation of the flock_.(316) Unless they resort to this they
can do nothing.

All the accounts from Rome, he tells Lacaita (Jan. 2, 1870), are
as bad as possible. For the first time in my life, I shall now be
obliged to talk about popery; for it would be a scandal to call
the religion they are manufacturing at Rome by the same name as
that of Pascal, or of Bossuet, or of Ganganelli. The truth is that
ultramontanism is an anti-social power, and never has it more
undisguisedly assumed that character than in the Syllabus.

(M162) The French government wrote despatches of mild protest but said
nothing of withdrawing their garrison. Mr