"Eminent Victorians"

[fiefoe]

It remains rather incomprehensible to me how weighty theological questions used to plague very smart and serious men. Cardinal Manning's biography doesn't shed much light on that puzzle. I guess in Chinese history, we get to read a lot about strange and brutal doings of the emperors, and that's proof enough of the arbitrariness of higher authorities.

• There is no passage in Scripture, Manning pointed out, relating to the coming of Christ more explicit and express than those foretelling Antichrist.
• 'They say I am ambitious,' he noted in his Diary, 'but do I rest in my ambition?'
• This Prince of the Church might have passed as a leader of the Salvation Army.
• Careful priests and conscientious secretaries wondered what the world was coming to when they saw labour leaders.. and land-reformers... being ushered into the presence of his Eminence.
• The impression was more acute than lasting.

The author's tone seems to change radically when he gets to Miss Florence Nightingale. Awestruck?

• Now demons, whatever else they may be, are full of interest. And so it happens that in the real Miss Nightingale there was more that was interesting than in the legendary one
• To do her duty in that state of life unto which it had pleased God to call her! {i.e., to marry.}
• After such premises, it seems hardly more than a matter of course that her letter, in which she offered her services for the East, and Sidney Herbert's letter, in which he asked for them, should actually have crossed in the post. Thus it all happened, without a hitch.
• The reign of chaos and old night began to dwindle; order came upon the scene, and common sense, and forethought, and decision, radiating out from the little room off the great gallery in the Barrack Hospital.
• She ordered a Government consignment to be forcibly opened while the miserable 'Purveyor' stood by, wringing his hands in departmental agony.
• Her superhuman equanimity would, at the moment of some ghastly operation, nerve the victim to endure, and almost to hope.
• ... the serenity of high deliberation in the scope of the capacious brow, the sign of power in the dominating curve of the thin nose, and the traces of a harsh and dangerous temper—something peevish, something mocking, and yet something precise—in the small and delicate mouth.
• he would starve her into submission; and he actually ordered that no rations of any kind should be supplied to her. He had already tried this plan with great effect upon an unfortunate medical man whose presence in the Crimea he had considered an intrusion; but he was now to learn that such tricks were thrown away upon Miss Nightingale.

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