We study the regularization and renormalization of the Yang–Mills theory in the framework of the manifestly invariant formalism, which consists of a higher covariant derivative with an infinitely many Pauli–Villars fields. Unphysical logarithmic divergence, which is the problematic point on the Slavnov method, does not appear in our scheme, and the well-known value of the renormalization group functions are derived. The cancellation mechanism of the quadratic divergence is also demonstrated by calculating the vacuum polarization tensor of the order of Λ0 and Λ-4. These results are the evidence that our method is valid for intrinsically divergent theories and is expected to be available for the theory which contains the quantity depending on the space–time dimensions, like supersymmetric gauge theories.