Book VII. 1874-1880

Book VII. 1874-1880Chapter I. Retirement From Leadership. (1874-1875)“ἐγὼ μὲν, ὧναξ, πρεσβύτερός τε ἤδη εἰμὶ καὶ βαρὺς ἀείρεσθαι; σὺ δέ τινα τῶνδε τῶν νεωτέρων κέλευε ταῦτα ποιέειν.”—Herodotusiv. 150.“I am too old, O king, and slow to stir; so bid thou one of the younger men here do these things.”A member of the great government of 1868, in a letter to one of his family, gave an account of the final meeting of the cabinet:—Feb. 17, 1874.—I doubt—he says—whether I ever passed a more eventful evening than yesterday. The whole cabinet was assembled. We resolved after full discussion of pros and cons, and some slight difference of opinion, to resign at once. After which came the startling announcement that Gladstone would no longer retain the leadership of the liberal party, nor resume it, unless the party had settled its differences. He will not expose himself to the insults and outrages of 1866-8, and he has a keen sense of the disloyalty of the party during the last three years. He will sit as a private member and occasionally speak for himself, but he will not attend the House regularly, nor assume any one of the functions of leader. He does this not from anger, but because he says that it is absolutely necessary to party action to learn that all the duties and responsibilities do not rest on the leaders, but that followers have their obligations too. As a consequence of this Cardwell retires to the House of Lords.[pg 498]He will not take the leadership, nor will he consent to serve under any one but Gladstone. He is too old, he says. Lowe protests against the anarchical experiment, and talks of Hartington as leader. As neither Lowe, nor Bright, nor Goschen, nor Forster is in a position to act as leader, it may come to this, so that the liberal front benches of the two Houses will be entirely remodelled.309Here is Mr. Gladstone's own account, written twenty-three years later, and confirmed by all other accessible papers of the moment:—I was most anxious to make the retirement of the ministry the occasion of my own. I had served for more than forty years. My age—65—was greater than that of Sir Robert Peel at his retirement in 1846, or at his death in 1850, and was much beyond that at which most of the leading commoners of the century had terminated their political career, together with their natural life. I felt myself to be in some measure out of touch with some of the tendencies of the liberal party, especially in religious matters. Sir A. Clark, whom I consulted, would give me on medical grounds no encouragement whatever. But I deeply desired an interval between parliament and the grave. In spite of the solicitations of my friends I persisted. For 1874 there was a sort of compromise“without prejudice.”As having a title to some rest I was not a very regular attendant, but did not formally abdicate.Reasons For WithdrawalHe found specific reasons for withdrawal in the state of the party (Feb. 12):—1. The absence of any great positive aim (the late plan [budget] having failed) for which to co-operate. 2. The difficulty of establishing united and vigorous action in the liberal party for the purposes of economy. 3. The unlikelihood of arriving at any present agreement respecting education.In another fragment of the same date, he says:—I do not forget that I am in debt to the party generally for kindness, indulgence, and confidence, much beyond what I have[pg 499]deserved. Deeming myself unable to hold it together from my present position in a manner worthy of it, I see how unlikely it is that I should hereafter be able to give any material aid in the adjustment of its difficulties. Yet if such aid should at any time be generally desired with a view to arresting some great evil or procuring for the nation some great good, my willingness to enter into counsel for the occasion would follow from all I have said. But always with the understanding that as between section and section I could not become a partisan, and that such interference even in the case of its proving useful would entail no obligation whatever on those accepting it, and carry with it no disturbance of any arrangement subsisting at the time.The situation proved, as Lowe had foreseen, an anarchic experiment. Mr. Gladstone went up to London for the session, and followed his ordinary social course:—March 9, 1874.—Off at 4.45 to Windsor for the fête. We dined at St. George's Hall. I was presented to the Duchess of C. by the Queen, and had a few kind words from H.M. 11.—Archbishop Manning, 9-11. It is kind in him to come, but most of it is rather hollow work, limited as we are. 16.—Dined at Marlborough House. A civil talk with Disraeli. 20.—FinishedVivian Grey. The first quarter extremely clever, the rest trash.May 15.—Emperor of Russia's reception at 3.15. He thanked me for my conduct to Russia while I was minister. I assured his Majesty I had watched with profound interest the transactions of his reign, and the great benefits he had conferred upon his people. He hoped the relations of the two countries would always be good.... Dined at Marlborough House. Stafford House ball afterwards. The emperor complained of the burden and late hours of evening entertainments. Princess of Wales so nice about her picture. D[israeli] complained of my absence, said they could not get on without me. 20.—Dined at the F.O. to meet the emperor. It was very kind of Derby. Much work at Hawarden in arranging books and papers.The House of Commons is hardly attractive to an irregular and perfunctory attendant; and Mr. Gladstone's thoughts[pg 500]all turned to other fields. To Mrs. Gladstone he wrote early in April:—The anti-parliamentary reaction has been stronger with me even than I anticipated. I am as far as possible from feeling the want of the House of Commons. I could cheerfully go there to do a work; but I hope and pray to be as little there as possible, except for such an aim. In London I think we were too much hustled to speak leisurely or effectually of the future. It will open for us by degrees. I shall be glad when the matter of money, after all a secondary one, is disentangled, but chiefly because it seems to put pressure upon you. I spoke to Stephen about these matters on Saturday; he was kind, reasonable, and in all ways as satisfactory as possible. There is one thing I should like you to understand clearly as to my view of things, for it is an essential part of that view. I am convinced that the welfare of mankind does not now depend on the state or the world of politics; the real battle is being fought in the world of thought, where a deadly attack is made with great tenacity of purpose and over a wide field, upon the greatest treasure of mankind, the belief in God and the gospel of Christ.In June Sir Stephen Glynne died,—“a dark, dark day.”“My brother-in-law,”wrote Mr. Gladstone at a later date,“was a man of singular refinement and as remarkable modesty. His culture was high and his character one of deep interest. His memory was on the whole decidedly the most remarkable known to me of the generation and country. His life, however, was retired and unobtrusive; but he sat in parliament, I think, for about fifteen years, and was lord-lieutenant of his county.”I thank you much—Mr. Gladstone said to the Duke of Argyll—for your kind note. Your sympathy and that of the duchess are ever ready. But even you can hardly tell how it is on this occasion needed and warranted. My wife has lost the last member of a family united by bonds of the rarest tenderness, the last representative of his line, the best of brothers, who had ever drawn closer to her as the little rank was thinned. As for me, no one can know what our personal relations were, without knowing[pg 501]the interior details of a long family history, and efforts and struggles in common carried on through a long series of years, which riveted into the closest union our original affection. He was a very rare man, but we grieve not for him; he sleeps the sleep of the just. The event is a great one also to the outward frame of our life here.310Ecclesiastical DebateIn the same letter he says it is most painful to him to be dragged into ecclesiastical turmoil, as for example by the Scotch patronage bill, which he considers precipitate, unwise, and daring, or the bill directed against the endowed schools commissioners, of whom his brother-in-law, Lord Lyttelton, was one. In the last case he acted as a leader of an organised party, but in the more important instance of a bill devised, as Mr. Disraeli said, to put down ritualism, his dissent from most of those around him fulfilled all the anticipations that had pointed to retirement. The House was heartily in favour of the bill, and what is called the country earnestly supported it, though in the cabinet itself at least four ministers were strenuously hostile. Mr. Gladstone writes to his wife a trenchant account of his vigorous dealing with a prominent colleague who had rashly ventured to mark him for assault. He sent word to the two archbishops that if they carried a certain amendment he should hold himself“altogether discharged from maintaining any longer the establishment of the church.”He wrote to Lord Harrowby when the recess came:—I think, or rather I am convinced, that the effecteitherof one or two more ecclesiastical sessions of parliament such as the last, or of any prolonged series of contentious proceedings under the recent Act, upon subjects of widespread interest, will be to disestablish the church. I do not feel the dread of disestablishment which you may probably entertain: but I desire and seek so long as standing ground remains, to avert, not to precipitate it.To another correspondent—Individually I have serious doubts whether the whole of the penal proceedings taken in this country with respect to church[pg 502]matters from the day of Dr. Hampden downwards, have not done considerably more harm than good. There is no doubt at all that all the evils, of whatever kind, at which they were aimed, exist at this moment among us in a far more aggravated shape than when they began.... My object and desire has ever been and still is, to keep the church of England together, both as a church and as an establishment. As a church, I believe she is strong enough, by virtue of the prayer-book, to hold together under all circumstances; but as an establishment, in my opinion, she is not strong enough to bear either serious secession or prolonged parliamentary agitation.Finally, in a letter dated from Whittinghame (Nov. 17)—There are already too many causes of demoralisation operating upon the House of Commons. If it is also to become a debased copy of an ecclesiastical council, all the worst men and worst qualities of the worst men will come to the front, and the place will become intolerable.Even any member of parliament who shares none of Mr. Gladstone's theology, may sympathise to the full with his deep disgust at theologic and ecclesiastical discussions as conducted in that secular air. We can easily understand how detestable he found it, and how those discussions fortified his sense of estrangement from the ruling sentiments of the parliamentary party of which he was still the titular leader.Of course the whigs, always for keeping a parliamentary church in its proper place, disliked his line. Liberals like Thirlwall read his speeches“with great pain and suspicion,”and declared their confidence to be shaken. Hardly any section was completely satisfied. His mind in the autumn and winter of 1874 was absorbed, as we shall see within a few pages, in an assault upon the decrees of the Vatican Council of 1870. This assault, as he told Lord Granville (Dec. 7, 1874), while tending“to hearten”the party generally, was against his resumption of formal leadership, because it widened the breach with the Irishmen in the House of Commons. Apart from this there were many questions, each with a group of adherents to a special view, but incapable of being pursued by common and united action. He[pg 503]ran through the list in writing to Lord Granville. It has historic interest:—1. Extension of the suffrage, with redistribution of seats abreast or in the rear. 2. Disestablishment in Scotland, England. 3. Land laws. 4. Retrenchment. 5. Colonial policy, territorial extension of the empire. 6. Reform of local government taxation. 7. Secular education. 8. Undenominational education. 9. Irish affairs. On no one of these is there known to exist a plan desired by the entire party, or by any clear and decisive majority of it.On the whole, he was persuaded that neither the party generally nor the country desired another period of active reforms, even if he were fit to conduct them. Besides this he confessed his“apprehension that differences would spring up, and great shrinking from any breach with the party, and a determination, often expressed, never, if he could help it, to lead one branch of it against another.”In many forms he carried Lord Granville with him round the circle of his arguments. He once sent his points on half-a-dozen scraps of paper. Granville playfully replied,“I should like to treat them as old Lord Bessborough used to treat his playing-cards when luck was adverse—tear them up into small bits and toss them in the fire.”Nothing shook him, not even Mrs. Gladstone's misgivings. To her he wrote from Carlton House Terrace on the eve of the session of 1875:—Now for the grave matter about the leadership. I have had much conversation with Granville and Cardwell, and I am going to see Hartington, also Goschen, to-morrow. My letter is rewritten and improved, but I am obliged to stand to my conclusion, for many reasons. Among them the church reason is one of the most serious, and the other the undefined and prolonged character of the service if now undertaken. This, while arguing and deprecating, they admit I think to a great extent. Our old colleagues are inclined to come up on Thursday if they can, and this will be rather to hear than to debate. Hartington will succeed. I am indeed sorry that you and I have not been able to take the same view of this important subject, but you know that[pg 504]I am acting on convictions very long entertained, and will I am sure believe that I have probed myself deeply, and used all the means in my power to get at a right conclusion. Nay, I think you will be more reconciled, when I tell you that Granville did not really see his way either to a nominal leadership, or to making any arrangement by which I could after a short time with some certainty have escaped. I saw Clark last night and this morning; he gives an excellent account of me and makes it impossible for me to plead health as my reason.The drama went rapidly forward:—Jan. 12.—I find that the agreement made yesterday that I should meet my former colleagues on Monday will require me to remain until this day, though after a pretty busy morning the pressure is less. I have, however, to preside in the evening at the meeting of the Metaphysical Society, and to listen, though I hope nothing more, to a tough discussion. Manning, I am sorry to say, will be there. His pamphlet is at length going to press, and will extend he says to 150 pages. Newman is not out yet.11 Carlton House Terrace, Jan. 14, '75.—This great affair is nearly arranged. My old colleagues all submit under protest; and I shall be free. An article in theTimesthis morning is undisguisedly aimed at getting rid of me; but it does not express any of their feelings. We have had a morning at Granville's; Halifax, Granville, Cardwell, Hartington, Aberdare, Forster, Carlingford, Stansfeld, Selborne, Goschen, Lowe, Kimberley,—in short all, I think, except Argyll and Bright. There was argument and exhortation, and much kindness. My letter to Granville will be accompanied by a short reply from him expressing difference of opinion and regret. They are afraid of being blamed by the party if they seem to show indifference.The Queen thanked Mr. Gladstone for communicating to her his resolution of retiring from the more active duties of parliamentary life. She was not entirely unprepared for it after what he told her himself last year.“She knows that his zeal and untiring energy have always been exerted with the desire of advancing the welfare of the nation and[pg 505]maintaining the honour of the crown, and she thanks him for his loyal assurances of support on all occasions when it may become necessary.”Bright And Other ColleaguesThe Duke of Argyll wrote“sincerely to congratulate”him upon his withdrawal. Bright on the other hand (Jan. 17) said he could not applaud, yet he would not blame: Mr. Gladstone's course seemed so unfortunate if not disastrous to the great public interests committed to him:—For myself, says Bright, if I could have foreseen either the result of the election of last year, or your retirement from the conduct of the party, I should certainly have withdrawn from parliament, where now I seem to have quite as little of duty or of a mission as you have. The front opposition bench is full of discord, and when you are not there full of jealousy, and I find myself without any particular attraction to any particular part of the House. However, I will not complain; some door of escape may open for me, and I can become a spectator as you are proposing to be.I hope on some occasion I may have the chance of seeing you when you come to town. I have had so much pleasure in your friendship, and have gained so much from it, that I would fain hope it need not cease now, when our association will necessarily be less frequent than it has been of late years. Whether you come back to the political field or turn wholly to study and to literature, I am sure you will be usefully employed, and I hope that nothing but blessing may rest upon all your labours.The feeling among liberals in the country was of deep dismay. Some of the whigs doubtless found solace in the anticipation that a new middle party might be formed, with“a recovery of the old liberal position demolished for the time by John Mill, Gladstone, and Cobden.”311But this was limited to a narrow circle.“All sunshine is gone out of politics,”was a general phrase. The news was compared by one correspondent to Gelon's message to the Greeks, that the spring was taken out of their year.312An organ of the stiff nonconformists said,313“Against his government we felt that we had a great grievance; for himself,[pg 506]the nonconformists of this country have long cherished a loyalty more fervent, we are inclined to imagine, than that with which he has been regarded by any other section of the community. He, beyond all other modern statesmen, with perhaps here and there a doubtful exception, gave us the impression of a man who regarded politics as a part of Christian duty.”And the same writers most truly added,“We do not know what the English people have done for Mr. Gladstone that can be compared for a moment with what Mr. Gladstone has done for them. Claims on him we have none. He has far more than discharged any debt that he could have owed to the nation.”These words are a just remonstrance against the somewhat tyrannical conventions of English public life.When the session began, he wrote to Mrs. Gladstone (Feb. 15):“I came down to the House and took my seat nearly in the same spot as last year, finding Bright my neighbour, with which I was very well pleased. Granville and Hartington both much preferred my continuingonthe front bench to my going elsewhere.”Lord Hartington, strongly encouraged against his own inclinations by Mr. Gladstone, accepted a thankless and unpromising post, and held it with honour and credit for five difficult years to come.[pg 507]Chapter II. Vaticanism. (1874-1875)Let no susceptibilities, puritan, protestant, anglican, or other, be startled if we observe that Rome is, and may long be, in some important respects, the centre of the Christian world. It is indeed a centre which repels as well as attracts; which probably repels even more than it attracts; but which, whether repelling or attracting, influences.—-Gladstone(1875).IOne question, as the reader by this time well knows, living deepest in Mr. Gladstone's heart and mind from his first book in 1838 onwards, was the relation of the churches to modern society. English statesmen are wont to be either blind to the existence of such a question, or else they seek an easy refuge from it in a perfunctory erastianism, sometimes intellectually refined, sometimes a little brutish, but always shallow. In all the three great branches of Christianity, the Latin, the Greek or orthodox, the protestant, Mr. Gladstone's interest was incessant, sincere, and profound. It covered their theology, their organisation, their history and principles of growth, the bearings of their system upon individual character and social well-being all over Europe. He was one of the very few public men capable of discerning that the fall of the temporal power of the pope marked a more startling change and a profounder crisis in human history, than the unification of Italy, the unification of Germany, the reconstructed republic in France, perhaps even than the preservation of the American union. He knew the force of ideas in the world; he realised the vast transformations that had in their succession swept over the minds of men since cardinal dogmas had been established; he comprehended the motion in[pg 508]articles of faith, as men made their“voyagings through strange seas of thought”; he was alive to the fact that moral crises brought on by change in intellectual outlook and temperature, are of deeper concern than questions of territory, or dynasty, or form of government. The moral crisis is what reaches furthest and matters most. A movement of the first magnitude was accentuated by Pius IX., when by the Syllabus of 1864 he challenged modern society in all its foundations, its aims, its principles, in the whole range of its ideals. Some called this daring ultimatum the gravest event since the French uprising in 1789. The Syllabus prepared the way for a more elaborately organised operation on behalf of papal authority. The train was secretly laid for a grand reaction, a grand re-installation of the Christian faith.314The Two SchoolsThe pope had been despoiled of territory, his sway within the walls of Rome itself was in constant danger, his most powerful protector north of the Alps had been weakened and humiliated by protestant Prussia. He was now to be compensated for his calamities by a majestic demonstration of his hold upon the spiritual allegiance of millions of adherents in every portion of the habitable globe. The twentieth ecumenical council assembled in St. Peter's at Rome on December 8, 1869. In this gathering of catholic prelates from both hemispheres, two antagonistic schools confronted one another. The ultramontanes held that the revolutionary welter and confusion of the modern world could only be healed by solemn affirmation of the principle of sovereign authority lodged in an infallible pope, with absolute power to define by that apostolic authority what ought to be held as articles of faith or morals. The assumptions, the standards, the ruling types of the modern age, they boldly encountered with rigid iteration of maxims of old time, imposing obedience and submission to a fixed social order and a divinely commissioned hierarchy. Inflexibility was to be the single watchword by which the church could recover a world that, from Naples even to Mexico, seemed to be rapidly drifting away from her. The[pg 509]opposing school took other ground. Perhaps they saw that supremacy is one thing, and infallibility another thing quite different. The liberal catholics did not contest the dogma of papal infallibility; they questioned the expediency of its proclamation; they were for associating ideas of religion with ideas of liberty; they were not for extending the domain of miracle and the supernatural.Then as in the old historic councils, influence of race and nation had decisive effects. It could not be otherwise in what was in essence a conflict between a centralised doctrinal authority on the one hand, and the inextinguishable tendency towards national churches on the other. The Italian bishops went with the pope. The Germans, as of old they had been for emperor against priest, were now on the side of freedom against what certain of them did not hesitate to call tyranny and fraud. Some of the ablest of the French were true to Gallican tradition and resisted the decree. Among the most active and uncompromising of all the ultramontane party was our English Manning.315IIAt the end of November 1869, Acton had written to Mr. Gladstone from Rome.“Your letter is a very sad one,”Mr. Gladstone answered.“I feel as deep and real an interest in the affairs of other Christian communions as in my own; and most of all in the case of the most famous of them all, and the one within which the largest number of Christian souls find their spiritual food.”Before Manning left for 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[pg 510]thought to lie in a governing faculty, and in its wise moderation. Now he is ever quoted as theultraof 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 bealleyes 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 willanyhave 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 theapprobation of the flock.316Unless 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.Issue Of The CouncilThe French government wrote despatches of mild protest but said nothing of withdrawing their garrison. Mr. Gladstone and Lord Clarendon were for informing the Roman court that they were cognizant of the French despatches, and approved of their tenour. The Queen and the cabinet, however, were entirely averse to meddling with the council,[pg 511]and nothing was done officially. This did not prevent Mr. Gladstone from telling Archbishop Manning what impediments would be placed in the way of Irish legislation by the state of English feeling as to the Syllabus and other papal proceedings.“Myfeelings and convictions,”he says (April 16),“are as you well know decidedly with your‘opposition,’which I believe to be contending for the religious and civil interests of mankind against influences highly disastrous and menacing to both. But the prevailing opinion is that it is better to let those influences take their course, and work out the damage which they will naturally and surely entail upon the see of Rome and upon what is bound to it.”In parliament there was an utter aversion to the Roman policy, and he gives instances, noting even a change of opinion about the Irish land bill.“What I have described is no matter of speculation. I know it by actual and daily touch. I am glad you have moved me to state it in some detail. It is to me matter of profound grief, especially as regards land in Ireland.”To Lord Acton:—Of all the prelates at Rome, none have a finer opportunity, to none is a more crucial test now applied, than to those of the United States. For if there, where there is nothing of covenant, of restraint, or of equivalent between the church and the state, the propositions of the Syllabus are still to have the countenance of the episcopate, it becomes really a little difficult to maintain in argument the civil rights of such persons to toleration, however conclusive be the argument of policy in favour of granting it. I can hardly bring myself to speculate or care on what particular day the foregone conclusion is to be finally adopted. My grief is sincere and deep, but it is at the whole thing, so ruinous in its consequences as they concern faith. In my view, the size of the minority, though important, is not nearly so important as the question whether there will be a minority at all.There was a minority. In a division taken at a late stage, 451 composed the majority, 88 resisted, and 62 were for a new examination. Then the minority turned their backs on Rome; and on July 18 the definition of infallibility[pg 512]was acclaimed in St. Peter's in presence of the pope by 533 against 2.Mr. Gladstone is very glad when Clarendon instructs Mr. Russell to turn his back on the festivities at Rome.“The whole proceeding has been monstrous, and it will hereafter become one of the laughing-stocks of history. The fanaticism of the middle ages is really sober compared with that of the nineteenth century.”“The proclamation of Infallibility,”he said to Bishop Moriarty,“I must own I look upon as the most portentous (taking them singly), of all events in the history of the Christian church.”IIIThe next day, as we know, war was declared by France against Germany, the French garrison left Rome, and on September 20 the Italians marched in.A month before the war broke out, Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Clarendon:“I would avoid any official support of the Italian application to France for the evacuation of Rome, by saying that this country had always abstained from mixing in that question; and that we were the more induced to persevere in that policy from being well convinced that the French government is perfectly aware that in this country the occupation of any part of the pontifical territories by French troops is regarded with regret, pain, and disapproval. Further, that those who most strongly entertain these sentiments, are generally the persons who most highly value, and have most striven to promote, the good understanding between France and England.”The occupation of Rome by the Italian government brought upon Mr. Gladstone various demands and movements from different parts of the country. His cabinet agreed that the proper course was to decline all interference with a view to the restoration of the temporal power, though they accepted the task of promoting, by means of friendly representations, arrangements to secure the pontiff's freedom and becoming support. Then some of his presbyterian friends asked him why he should even do so much as this, when he would take no such steps for the moderator of the free church. Now[pg 513]consider, Mr. Gladstone replied:“the pope is a sovereign who was in lawful possession of large revenues, and who had charged himself with the support of a body of cardinals, ministers, nuncios, servants, and guards out of those revenues. He has been dispossessed, not for any fault of his own, but because clerical dominion was deemed intolerable. In the maintenance of the pope and his court, followers and agents, six millions of our fellow-subjects or thereabouts are deeply interested; and they are making demands upon us which we are forced to decline. But I should for one be ashamed to deny that there are the strongest equitable claims upon the Italian government growing out of the past state of things; that in these equitable claims the six millions I speak of have a real interest and share; and as the matter is international, and they have nolocus standiwith the Italian government, it is our part so far to plead their cause if need be.”IVVisit To MunichFour years elapsed before Mr. Gladstone was in a position to follow up his strong opinions on the injury done, as he believed, to human liberty by the Vatican decrees. But the great debate between ultramontanes and old catholics was followed by him with an interest that never slackened. In September 1874 he went to Munich, and we can hardly be wrong in ascribing to that visit the famous tract which was to make so lively a stir before the end of the year. His principal object was to communicate with Dr. Döllinger, and this object, he tells Mrs. Gladstone, was fully gained.“I think,”he says,“I have spent two-thirds of my whole time with Dr. Döllinger, who is indeed a most remarkable man, and it makes my blood run cold to think ofhisbeing excommunicated in his venerable but, thank God, hale and strong old age. In conversation we have covered a wide field. I know no one with whose mode of viewing and handling religious matters I more cordially agree.... He is wonderful, and simple as a child.”“I think it was in 1874,”Döllinger afterwards mentioned,“that I remember Gladstone's paying me a visit at six o'clock[pg 514]in the evening. We began talking on political and theological subjects, and became, both of us, so engrossed with the conversation, that it was two o'clock at night when I left the room to fetch a book from my library bearing on the matter in hand. I returned with it in a few minutes, and found him deep in a volume he had drawn out of his pocket—true to his principle of never losing time—during my momentary absence.”317“In the course of a walk out of Munich in the travelling season of 1874,”Mr. Gladstone wrote sixteen years later,“Dr. Döllinger told me that he was engaged in the work of retrial through the whole circle of his Latin teaching and knowledge. The results were tested in his proceedings at Bonn, when he attempted to establish aformula concordiaeupon the questions which most gravely divided Christendom.”318Among other topics Mr. Gladstone commended to his mentor the idea of a republication in a series, of the best works of those whom he would call the Henotic or Eirenic writers on the differences that separate Christians and churches from one another. He also read Pichler on the theology of Leibnitz, not without suspicion that it was rather Pichler than Leibnitz. But neither Leibnitz nor Pichler was really in his mind.After the session of 1874, when the public ear and mind had been possessed by the word Ritualism, he had as usual sought a vent in a magazine article for the thoughts with which he was teeming.319He speaks with some disdain of the question whether a handful of the clergy are or are not engaged in“an utterly hopeless and visionary effort to Romanise the church and people of England.”At no time, he says, since the sanguinary reign of Mary has such a scheme been possible. Least of all, he proceeds, could the scheme have life in it“when Rome has substituted for the proud boast ofsemper eadema policy of violence and change in faith; when she has refurbished and paraded anew every[pg 515]rusty tool she was fondly thought to have disused; when no one can become her convert, without renouncing his moral and mental freedom, and placing his civil loyalty and duty at the mercy of another; and when she has equally repudiated modern thought and ancient history.”If these strong words expressed his state of mind before he went abroad, we may readily imagine how the Bavarian air would fan the flame.Though Dr. Döllinger himself—“so inaccessible to religious passions”—was not aware of the purpose of his English friend, there can be little doubt that Mr. Gladstone returned from Munich with the same degree of internal ferment as that which had possessed his mind on his return from Naples three-and-twenty years before. In October he writes to Lord Acton from Hawarden:—What you have said on the subject of ultramontanism and of the mode in which it should be handled, appears to me to be as wise and as good as is possible. It is really a case for hitting hard, but for hitting the right men. In anything I say or do on the subject, I would wish heartily and simply to conform to the spirit of your words. But I feel myself drawn onwards. Indeed some of your words help to draw me. The question with me now is whether I shall or shall not publish a tract which I have written, and of which the title would probably be,“The Vatican Decrees in their bearing on Civil Allegiance: a Political Expostulation.”I incline to think that I ought to publish it. If it were in your power and will to run over here for a night or two I should seek to profit by your counsel, and should ask you to read as much of thems.as your patience would endure. A more substantial attraction would be that I could go over much of my long and interesting conversations with Döllinger.VPublication Of The PamphletThe pamphlet320appeared in November, and was meant for an argument that the decree of infallibility aimed a deadly blow at the old historic, scientific, and moderate school; it was a degradation of the episcopal order; it carried to its furthest point that spirit of absolutist centralisation, which[pg 516]in its excesses is as fatal to vigorous life in the church, as in the state; it overthrew the principle not even denied by the council of Trent in the sixteenth century, that the pope and his judgments were triable by the assembled representatives of the Christian world.Thrice in history it seemed as if the constitutional party in the church was about to triumph: at the council of Constance in the fifteenth century; in the conflict between the French episcopate and Innocentxi.in the days of Bossuet; and thirdly, when Clementxiv., exactly a hundred years before now, dealt with the Jesuits and“levelled in the dust the deadliest foes that mental and moral liberty have ever known.”From July 1870 all this had passed away, and the constitutional party had seen its death-warrant signed and sealed. The“myrmidons of the apostolic chamber”had committed their church to revolutionary measures. The vast new claims were lodged in the reign of a pontiff, who by the dark Syllabus of 1864 had condemned free speech, a free press, liberty of conscience, toleration of nonconformity, the free study of civil and philosophic things independently of church authority, marriage unless sacramentally contracted, and all definition by the state of the civil rights of the church.The Pamphlet“It has been a favourite purpose of my life,”Mr. Gladstone said,“not to conjure up, but to conjure down, public alarms. I am not now going to pretend that either foreign foe or domestic treason can, at the bidding of the court of Rome, disturb these peaceful shores. But although such fears may be visionary, it is more visionary still to suppose for one moment that the claims of Gregoryvii., of Innocentiii., and of Bonifaceviii.have been disinterred in the nineteenth century, like hideous mummies picked out of Egyptian sarcophagi, in the interests of archæology, or without a definite and practical aim.”What, then, was the clear and foregone purpose behind the parade of all these astonishing reassertions? The first was—by claims to infallibility in creed, to the prerogative of miracles, to dominion over the unseen world—to satisfy spiritual appetites, sharpened into reaction and made morbid by“the levity of the destructive speculations so widely current, and the notable hardihood of the[pg 517]anti-Christian writing of the day.”This alone, however, would not explain the deliberate provocation of all the“risks of so daring a raid upon the civil sphere.”The answer was to be found in the favourite design, hardly a secret design, of restoring by the road of force when any favourable opportunity should arise, and of re-erecting, the terrestrial throne of the popedom,“even if it could only be re-erected on the ashes of the city, and amidst the whitening bones of the people.”And this brings the writer to the immediate practical aspects of his tract.“If the baleful power which is expressed by the phraseCuria Romana, and not at all adequately rendered in its historic force by the usual English equivalent‘Court of Rome,’really entertains the scheme, it doubtless counts on the support in every country of an organised and devoted party; which, when it can command the scales of political power, will promote interference, and while it is in a minority, will work for securing neutrality. As the peace of Europe may be in jeopardy, and as the duties even of England, as one of its constabulary authorities, might come to be in question, it would be most interesting to know the mental attitude of our Roman catholic fellow-countrymen in England and Ireland with reference to the subject; and it seems to be one on which we are entitled to solicit information.”Too commonly the spirit of the convert was to be expressed by the notorious words,“a catholic first, an Englishman afterwards”—words that properly convey no more than a truism,“for every Christian must seek to place his religion even before his country in his inner heart; but very far from a truism in the sense in which we have been led to construe them.”This, indeed, was a new and very real“papal aggression.”For himself, Mr. Gladstone said, it should not shake his allegiance to“the rule of maintaining equal civil rights irrespectively of religious differences.”Had he not given conclusive indications of that view, by supporting in parliament as a minister since the council, the repeal in 1871 of the law against ecclesiastical titles, whose enactment he had opposed twenty years before?That the pamphlet should create intense excitement, was inevitable from the place of the writer in the public eye,[pg 518]from the extraordinary vehemence of the attack, and above all from the unquenchable fascination of the topic. Whether the excitement in the country was more than superficial; whether most readers fathomed the deep issues as they stood, not between catholic and protestant, but between catholic and catholic within the fold; whether in fastening upon the civil allegiance of English Romanists Mr. Gladstone took the true point against Vaticanism—these are questions that we need not here discuss. The central proposition made a cruel dilemma for a large class of the subjects of the Queen; for the choice assigned to them by assuming stringent logic was between being bad citizens if they submitted to the decree of papal infallibility, and bad catholics if they did not. Protestant logicians wrote to Mr. Gladstone that if his contention were good, we ought now to repeal catholic emancipation and again clap on the fetters. Syllogisms in action are but stupid things after all, unless they are checked by a tincture of what seems paradox.321Apart from the particular issue in his Vatican pamphlet, Mr. Gladstone believed himself to be but following his own main track in life and thought in his assault upon“a policy which declines to acknowledge the high place assigned to liberty in the counsels of Providence, and which upon the pretext of the abuse that like every other good she suffers, expels her from its system.”Among the names that he was never willing to discuss with me—Machiavelli, for instance—was Joseph de Maistre, the hardiest, most adventurous, most ingenious, and incisive of all the speculative champions of European reaction.322In the pages of de Maistre he might have found the reasoned base on which the ultramontane creed may be supposed to rest. He would have found liberty depicted less as a blessing than a scourge; even Bossuet denounced as a heretic with dubious chances of salvation, for his struggle on behalf of a national church against Roman centralisation; the old[pg 519]Greeks held up to odium as a race of talkers, frivolous, light, and born incorrigible dividers. In dealing with de Maistre, Mr. Gladstone would have had a foeman worthier of his powerful steel than the authors of the Syllabus, Schema, Postulatum, and all the rest of what he called the Vaticanism of 1870. But here, as always, he was man of action, and wrote for a specific though perhaps a fugitive purpose.VILabours Of The ControversyAt the end of the year the total number printed of the tract was 145,000, and of these 120,000 were in a people's edition.“My pamphlet,”he tells Lacaita,“has brought upon me such a mass of work as I can hardly cope with, and I am compelled to do all things as succinctly as possible, though my work is with little intermission from morning till night. I agree with you that the pamphlet in the main tells its own story; and I am glad there is no need to select in a hurry some one to write on the difference between papism and Catholicism.... There is no doubt that the discussion opens,i.e.makes a breach in the walls of the papal theology, and it ought to be turned to account. But I shall have enough to do with all my hands, if I am to work properly through the task I have undertaken. Not, I trust, for long, for I think another pamphlet should suffice to end it on my side. But I am vexed that Manning (as if he had been pulled up at Rome), after having announced his formal reply six weeks ago, hangs fire and now talks of delaying it.”The result, he assures Lord Granville (Nov. 25),“must be injurious to the pestilent opinions that have so grievously obtained the upper hand in that church, and to the party whichmeansto have a war in Europe for the restoration of the temporal power. To place impediments in their way has been my principal purpose.”He told Acton (Dec. 18),“When you were putting in caveats and warnings, you did not say to me,‘Now mind, this affair will absorb some, perhaps many, months of your life.’It has been so up to the present moment, and it evidently will be so for some time.”With Acton he carried on elaborate correspondence[pg 520]upon some of the questions raised by the Syllabus, notably on the effect of the pope's disciplinary judgment on anglican marriages, converting them into relations that were not marriage at all. He fears that he has conceded too much to the papal party in not treating the Syllabus asex cathedra; in allowing that the popes had been apt to claim dogmatic infallibility for wellnigh a thousand years; as to the ecumenicity of the Vatican council. Among other matters he was reading“the curious volumes ofDiscorsi di Pio IX., published at Rome, and he might find it his duty to write collaterally upon them.”This duty he performed with much fidelity in theQuarterly Reviewfor January 1875. He is active in interest about translations; keen to enlist auxiliaries in every camp and all countries; delighted with all utterances from Italy or elsewhere that make in his direction, even noting with satisfaction that the agnostic Huxley was warm in approval.“I pass my days and nights,”he tells the Duke of Argyll (Dec. 19),“in the Vatican. Already the pope has given me two months of incessant correspondence and other hard work, and it may very well last two more. Nor is this work pleasant; but I am as far as possible from repenting of it, as no one else to whom the public would listen saved me the trouble. It is full of intense interest. Every post brings a mass of general reading, writing, or both. Forty covers of one kind or another to-day, and all my time is absorbed. But the subject is well worth the pains.”The Italians, Lord Granville told him,“generally approved, but were puzzled why you should have thought it necessary.”Retorts and replies arose in swarms, including one from Manning and another from Newman. He was accused by some of introducing a BismarckianKulturkampfinto England, of seeking to recover his lost popularity by pandering to no-popery, of disregarding the best interests of the country for the sake of his own restoration to power.323I have now finished reading—he said at the beginning of February—the 20th reply to my pamphlet, They cover 1000 pages. And I am hard at work preparing mine with a good[pg 521]conscience and I think a good argument. Manning has been, I think, as civil as he could.Feb. 5.—All this morning I have had to spend in hunting up one important statement of Manning's which I am almost convinced is a gross mis-statement....Feb. 6.—Manning in his 200 pages has not, I venture to say, made a single point against me. But I shall have to show up his quotations very seriously. We have exchanged one or two friendly notes. 8.—Worked on Vaticanism nearly all day and (an exception to my rule) late at night. 14.—Eight hours' work on my proof sheets. 15.—Went through Acton's corrections and notes on my proofs. 19.—Worked much in evening on finishing up my tract, Dr. Döllinger's final criticisms having arrived. He thinks highly of the work, which he observes will cut deeper than the former one, and be more difficult to deal with. By midnight I had the revises ready with the corrections. 20.—Inserted one or two references and wrote“Press”on the 2nd revises. May the power and blessing of God go with the work.The second tract was more pungent than the first, and it gave pleasure to an important minister abroad who had now entangled himself by Falk laws and otherwise in a quarrel with the papacy.“I have had a letter of thanks,”Mr. Gladstone writes to Hawarden (March 6),“from Bismarck. This pamphlet is stouter, sharper, and cheaper than the last, but is only in its eleventh thousand, I believe.”Among others who replied toVaticanismwas Dr. Newman; he appended a new postscript of four-and-twenty pages to his former answer to the first of Mr. Gladstone's pamphlets. Its tone is courteous and argumentative—far too much so to please the ultras who had the pope's ear—and without the wild hitting that Mr. Gladstone found in Manning.Newman wrote to thank him (Jan. 17, 1875) for a letter that he described as“forbearing and generous.”“It has been a great grief to me,”said Newman,“to have had to write against one whose career I have followed from first to last with so much (I may say) loyal interest and admiration. I had known about you from others, and had looked at you with kindly curiosity, before you came up to Christ Church, and from the time that you were launched into public life,[pg 522]you have retained a hold on my thoughts and on my gratitude by the various marks of attention which every now and then you have shown me, when you had an opportunity, and I could not fancy my ever standing towards you in any other relation than that which had lasted so long. What a fate it is, that now when so memorable a career has reached its formal termination [retirement from leadership], I should be the man, on the very day on which it closed, to present to you amid the many expressions of public sympathy which it elicits, a controversial pamphlet as my offering.”But he could not help writing it, he was called upon from such various quarters; and his conscience told him that he who had been in great measure the cause of so many becoming catholics, had no right to leave them in the lurch, when charges were made against them as serious as unexpected.“I do not think,”he concluded,“I ever can be sorry for what I have done, but I never can cease to be sorry for the necessity of doing it.”VIIChange Of AbodeThis fierce controversial episode was enough to show that the habit and temperament of action still followed him in the midst of all his purposes of retreat. Withdrawal from parliamentary leadership was accompanied by other steps, apparently all making in the same direction. He sold the house in Carlton House Terrace, where he had passed eight-and-twenty years of work and power and varied sociability.“I had grown to the house,”he says (April 15),“having lived more time in it than in any other since I was born, and mainly by reason of all that was done in it.”To Mrs. Gladstone he wrote (Feb. 28):—I do not wonder that you feel parting from the house will be a blow and a pang. It is nothing less than this to me, but it must be faced and you will face it gallantly. So much has occurred there; and thus it is leaving not the house only but the neighbourhood, where I have been with you for more than thirty-five years, and altogether nearly forty. The truth is that innocently and from special causes we have on the whole been housed better than according to our circumstances. All along Carlton House[pg 523]Terrace I think you would not find any one with less than £20,000 a year, and most of them with, much more.He sold his collection of china and his Wedgwood ware.324He despatched his books to Hawarden. He can hardly have resolved on retirement that should be effective and complete, or else he must have arranged to quit the House of Commons. In his diary he entered (March 30, 1875):—Views about the future and remaining section of my life. In outline they are undefined but in substance definite. The main point is this: that setting aside exceptional circumstances which would have to provide for themselves, my prospective work is not parliamentary. My ties will be slight to an assembly with whose tendencies I am little in harmony at the present time; nor can I flatter myself that what is called the public out of doors is more sympathetic. But there is much to be done with the pen, all bearing much on high and sacred ends, for even Homeric study as I view it, is in this very sense of high importance; and what lies beyond this is concerned directly with the great subject of belief.To Mrs. Gladstone he wrote (May 19, 1875):“I am feeling as it were my way towards the purposes of the rest of my life. It will I dare say clear by degrees. For the general business of the country, my ideas and temper are thoroughly out of harmony with the ideas and temper of the day, especially as they are represented in London.”The movement of negation had been in full swing for a dozen years before the force and weight of it had, amid the stress and absorption of daily business, reached his inner mind. In May 1872, in a speech as member of the council of King's College—“averse from, and little used to platform speaking,”as he described himself to Manning—he used some strong language about those who promulgate as science what is not science and as religion what is not religion; but he took care to sever himself from the recent Roman decrees, which“seemed much to resemble the proclamation of a[pg 524]perpetual war against the progress and the movement of the human mind.”325In December 1872, he caused a marked sensation by an address at Liverpool, in which he spoke of Strauss's book onNew and Old Belief.326He had become a member of the metaphysical society, where eminent representatives of every faith and of no faith discussed every aspect of the foundations of human creeds. He was of too masculine and energetic a cast of mind to feel mere shock as he listened to Huxley, Tyndall, Clifford, Harrison, firmly arguing materialism or positivism or agnosticism or other unhistoric forms. That his whole soul was energetically oppugnant, I need not say. His reverence for freedom never wavered. He wrote to an editor who had criticised his Liverpool address (Jan. 3, 1873):—In the interest of my address, I wish to say that not a word to my knowledge fell from me limiting the range of free inquiry, nor have I ever supposed St. Paul to say anything so silly as“Prove all things: but some you must not prove.”Doubtless some obscurity of mine, I know not what, has led to an error into which the able writer of the article has fallen, not alone.To the Duke of Argyll he wrote:—Dec. 28, '72.—I have been touching upon deep and dangerous subjects at Liverpool. Whether I went beyond my province many may doubt. But of the extent of the mischief I do not doubt any more than of its virulence. All that I hear from day to day convinces me of the extension of this strange epidemic, for it is not, considering how it comes, worthy of being called a rational or scientific process. Be it however, what it may, we politicians are children playing with toys in comparison to that great work of and for manhood, which has to be done, and will yet be done, in restoring belief.[pg 525]Sir Robert Morier sent him from Munich Frohschammer's reply to Strauss.“If I understand him aright,”said Mr. Gladstone,“he is a Unitarian, minus Miracle and Inspiration.”The whole book seemed to him able, honest, and diligent:—But, he adds, I am one of those who think the Christianity of Frohschammer (as I have described it) is like a tall tree scientifically prepared for the saw by the preliminary process, well known to wood-cutters, of clearing away with the axe all projecting roots, which as long as they remained rendered the final operation impossible. This first process leaves the tree standing in a very trim condition, much more mathematical in form, as it is more near a cylinder, than in its native state. The business of the saw, when the horse and the man arrive, is soon accomplished.To his article on ritualism he prefixed as motto two short lines of Pindar, about days that are to come being wisest witnesses.327In spite of retreat, it was impossible that he should forget the vast responsibility imposed upon him, both by his gifts and by the popular ascendency into which they had brought him. His was not the retreat of self-indulgence, and the days that were to come speedily brought him duties that were to bear him far into regions of storm and conflict now unforeseen. Meanwhile, with occasional visits to Westminster, he lived even and industrious days at Hawarden, felling trees, working at Greek mythology and ethnology, delighting in the woods and glades of the park, above all delighting in the tranquillity of his“temple of peace.”Besides being the bookroom of a student, this was still a far-shining beacon in the popular eye. If sages, scholars, heroes, saints, with time's serene and hallowed gravity looked upon him from their shelves, yet loud echoes sounded in his ear from roaring surges of an outer world—from turbid ebb and flow of all the struggle and clamorous hopes and half-blind mysterious instincts of the nations.[pg 526]

Book VII. 1874-1880Chapter I. Retirement From Leadership. (1874-1875)“ἐγὼ μὲν, ὧναξ, πρεσβύτερός τε ἤδη εἰμὶ καὶ βαρὺς ἀείρεσθαι; σὺ δέ τινα τῶνδε τῶν νεωτέρων κέλευε ταῦτα ποιέειν.”—Herodotusiv. 150.“I am too old, O king, and slow to stir; so bid thou one of the younger men here do these things.”A member of the great government of 1868, in a letter to one of his family, gave an account of the final meeting of the cabinet:—Feb. 17, 1874.—I doubt—he says—whether I ever passed a more eventful evening than yesterday. The whole cabinet was assembled. We resolved after full discussion of pros and cons, and some slight difference of opinion, to resign at once. After which came the startling announcement that Gladstone would no longer retain the leadership of the liberal party, nor resume it, unless the party had settled its differences. He will not expose himself to the insults and outrages of 1866-8, and he has a keen sense of the disloyalty of the party during the last three years. He will sit as a private member and occasionally speak for himself, but he will not attend the House regularly, nor assume any one of the functions of leader. He does this not from anger, but because he says that it is absolutely necessary to party action to learn that all the duties and responsibilities do not rest on the leaders, but that followers have their obligations too. As a consequence of this Cardwell retires to the House of Lords.[pg 498]He will not take the leadership, nor will he consent to serve under any one but Gladstone. He is too old, he says. Lowe protests against the anarchical experiment, and talks of Hartington as leader. As neither Lowe, nor Bright, nor Goschen, nor Forster is in a position to act as leader, it may come to this, so that the liberal front benches of the two Houses will be entirely remodelled.309Here is Mr. Gladstone's own account, written twenty-three years later, and confirmed by all other accessible papers of the moment:—I was most anxious to make the retirement of the ministry the occasion of my own. I had served for more than forty years. My age—65—was greater than that of Sir Robert Peel at his retirement in 1846, or at his death in 1850, and was much beyond that at which most of the leading commoners of the century had terminated their political career, together with their natural life. I felt myself to be in some measure out of touch with some of the tendencies of the liberal party, especially in religious matters. Sir A. Clark, whom I consulted, would give me on medical grounds no encouragement whatever. But I deeply desired an interval between parliament and the grave. In spite of the solicitations of my friends I persisted. For 1874 there was a sort of compromise“without prejudice.”As having a title to some rest I was not a very regular attendant, but did not formally abdicate.Reasons For WithdrawalHe found specific reasons for withdrawal in the state of the party (Feb. 12):—1. The absence of any great positive aim (the late plan [budget] having failed) for which to co-operate. 2. The difficulty of establishing united and vigorous action in the liberal party for the purposes of economy. 3. The unlikelihood of arriving at any present agreement respecting education.In another fragment of the same date, he says:—I do not forget that I am in debt to the party generally for kindness, indulgence, and confidence, much beyond what I have[pg 499]deserved. Deeming myself unable to hold it together from my present position in a manner worthy of it, I see how unlikely it is that I should hereafter be able to give any material aid in the adjustment of its difficulties. Yet if such aid should at any time be generally desired with a view to arresting some great evil or procuring for the nation some great good, my willingness to enter into counsel for the occasion would follow from all I have said. But always with the understanding that as between section and section I could not become a partisan, and that such interference even in the case of its proving useful would entail no obligation whatever on those accepting it, and carry with it no disturbance of any arrangement subsisting at the time.The situation proved, as Lowe had foreseen, an anarchic experiment. Mr. Gladstone went up to London for the session, and followed his ordinary social course:—March 9, 1874.—Off at 4.45 to Windsor for the fête. We dined at St. George's Hall. I was presented to the Duchess of C. by the Queen, and had a few kind words from H.M. 11.—Archbishop Manning, 9-11. It is kind in him to come, but most of it is rather hollow work, limited as we are. 16.—Dined at Marlborough House. A civil talk with Disraeli. 20.—FinishedVivian Grey. The first quarter extremely clever, the rest trash.May 15.—Emperor of Russia's reception at 3.15. He thanked me for my conduct to Russia while I was minister. I assured his Majesty I had watched with profound interest the transactions of his reign, and the great benefits he had conferred upon his people. He hoped the relations of the two countries would always be good.... Dined at Marlborough House. Stafford House ball afterwards. The emperor complained of the burden and late hours of evening entertainments. Princess of Wales so nice about her picture. D[israeli] complained of my absence, said they could not get on without me. 20.—Dined at the F.O. to meet the emperor. It was very kind of Derby. Much work at Hawarden in arranging books and papers.The House of Commons is hardly attractive to an irregular and perfunctory attendant; and Mr. Gladstone's thoughts[pg 500]all turned to other fields. To Mrs. Gladstone he wrote early in April:—The anti-parliamentary reaction has been stronger with me even than I anticipated. I am as far as possible from feeling the want of the House of Commons. I could cheerfully go there to do a work; but I hope and pray to be as little there as possible, except for such an aim. In London I think we were too much hustled to speak leisurely or effectually of the future. It will open for us by degrees. I shall be glad when the matter of money, after all a secondary one, is disentangled, but chiefly because it seems to put pressure upon you. I spoke to Stephen about these matters on Saturday; he was kind, reasonable, and in all ways as satisfactory as possible. There is one thing I should like you to understand clearly as to my view of things, for it is an essential part of that view. I am convinced that the welfare of mankind does not now depend on the state or the world of politics; the real battle is being fought in the world of thought, where a deadly attack is made with great tenacity of purpose and over a wide field, upon the greatest treasure of mankind, the belief in God and the gospel of Christ.In June Sir Stephen Glynne died,—“a dark, dark day.”“My brother-in-law,”wrote Mr. Gladstone at a later date,“was a man of singular refinement and as remarkable modesty. His culture was high and his character one of deep interest. His memory was on the whole decidedly the most remarkable known to me of the generation and country. His life, however, was retired and unobtrusive; but he sat in parliament, I think, for about fifteen years, and was lord-lieutenant of his county.”I thank you much—Mr. Gladstone said to the Duke of Argyll—for your kind note. Your sympathy and that of the duchess are ever ready. But even you can hardly tell how it is on this occasion needed and warranted. My wife has lost the last member of a family united by bonds of the rarest tenderness, the last representative of his line, the best of brothers, who had ever drawn closer to her as the little rank was thinned. As for me, no one can know what our personal relations were, without knowing[pg 501]the interior details of a long family history, and efforts and struggles in common carried on through a long series of years, which riveted into the closest union our original affection. He was a very rare man, but we grieve not for him; he sleeps the sleep of the just. The event is a great one also to the outward frame of our life here.310Ecclesiastical DebateIn the same letter he says it is most painful to him to be dragged into ecclesiastical turmoil, as for example by the Scotch patronage bill, which he considers precipitate, unwise, and daring, or the bill directed against the endowed schools commissioners, of whom his brother-in-law, Lord Lyttelton, was one. In the last case he acted as a leader of an organised party, but in the more important instance of a bill devised, as Mr. Disraeli said, to put down ritualism, his dissent from most of those around him fulfilled all the anticipations that had pointed to retirement. The House was heartily in favour of the bill, and what is called the country earnestly supported it, though in the cabinet itself at least four ministers were strenuously hostile. Mr. Gladstone writes to his wife a trenchant account of his vigorous dealing with a prominent colleague who had rashly ventured to mark him for assault. He sent word to the two archbishops that if they carried a certain amendment he should hold himself“altogether discharged from maintaining any longer the establishment of the church.”He wrote to Lord Harrowby when the recess came:—I think, or rather I am convinced, that the effecteitherof one or two more ecclesiastical sessions of parliament such as the last, or of any prolonged series of contentious proceedings under the recent Act, upon subjects of widespread interest, will be to disestablish the church. I do not feel the dread of disestablishment which you may probably entertain: but I desire and seek so long as standing ground remains, to avert, not to precipitate it.To another correspondent—Individually I have serious doubts whether the whole of the penal proceedings taken in this country with respect to church[pg 502]matters from the day of Dr. Hampden downwards, have not done considerably more harm than good. There is no doubt at all that all the evils, of whatever kind, at which they were aimed, exist at this moment among us in a far more aggravated shape than when they began.... My object and desire has ever been and still is, to keep the church of England together, both as a church and as an establishment. As a church, I believe she is strong enough, by virtue of the prayer-book, to hold together under all circumstances; but as an establishment, in my opinion, she is not strong enough to bear either serious secession or prolonged parliamentary agitation.Finally, in a letter dated from Whittinghame (Nov. 17)—There are already too many causes of demoralisation operating upon the House of Commons. If it is also to become a debased copy of an ecclesiastical council, all the worst men and worst qualities of the worst men will come to the front, and the place will become intolerable.Even any member of parliament who shares none of Mr. Gladstone's theology, may sympathise to the full with his deep disgust at theologic and ecclesiastical discussions as conducted in that secular air. We can easily understand how detestable he found it, and how those discussions fortified his sense of estrangement from the ruling sentiments of the parliamentary party of which he was still the titular leader.Of course the whigs, always for keeping a parliamentary church in its proper place, disliked his line. Liberals like Thirlwall read his speeches“with great pain and suspicion,”and declared their confidence to be shaken. Hardly any section was completely satisfied. His mind in the autumn and winter of 1874 was absorbed, as we shall see within a few pages, in an assault upon the decrees of the Vatican Council of 1870. This assault, as he told Lord Granville (Dec. 7, 1874), while tending“to hearten”the party generally, was against his resumption of formal leadership, because it widened the breach with the Irishmen in the House of Commons. Apart from this there were many questions, each with a group of adherents to a special view, but incapable of being pursued by common and united action. He[pg 503]ran through the list in writing to Lord Granville. It has historic interest:—1. Extension of the suffrage, with redistribution of seats abreast or in the rear. 2. Disestablishment in Scotland, England. 3. Land laws. 4. Retrenchment. 5. Colonial policy, territorial extension of the empire. 6. Reform of local government taxation. 7. Secular education. 8. Undenominational education. 9. Irish affairs. On no one of these is there known to exist a plan desired by the entire party, or by any clear and decisive majority of it.On the whole, he was persuaded that neither the party generally nor the country desired another period of active reforms, even if he were fit to conduct them. Besides this he confessed his“apprehension that differences would spring up, and great shrinking from any breach with the party, and a determination, often expressed, never, if he could help it, to lead one branch of it against another.”In many forms he carried Lord Granville with him round the circle of his arguments. He once sent his points on half-a-dozen scraps of paper. Granville playfully replied,“I should like to treat them as old Lord Bessborough used to treat his playing-cards when luck was adverse—tear them up into small bits and toss them in the fire.”Nothing shook him, not even Mrs. Gladstone's misgivings. To her he wrote from Carlton House Terrace on the eve of the session of 1875:—Now for the grave matter about the leadership. I have had much conversation with Granville and Cardwell, and I am going to see Hartington, also Goschen, to-morrow. My letter is rewritten and improved, but I am obliged to stand to my conclusion, for many reasons. Among them the church reason is one of the most serious, and the other the undefined and prolonged character of the service if now undertaken. This, while arguing and deprecating, they admit I think to a great extent. Our old colleagues are inclined to come up on Thursday if they can, and this will be rather to hear than to debate. Hartington will succeed. I am indeed sorry that you and I have not been able to take the same view of this important subject, but you know that[pg 504]I am acting on convictions very long entertained, and will I am sure believe that I have probed myself deeply, and used all the means in my power to get at a right conclusion. Nay, I think you will be more reconciled, when I tell you that Granville did not really see his way either to a nominal leadership, or to making any arrangement by which I could after a short time with some certainty have escaped. I saw Clark last night and this morning; he gives an excellent account of me and makes it impossible for me to plead health as my reason.The drama went rapidly forward:—Jan. 12.—I find that the agreement made yesterday that I should meet my former colleagues on Monday will require me to remain until this day, though after a pretty busy morning the pressure is less. I have, however, to preside in the evening at the meeting of the Metaphysical Society, and to listen, though I hope nothing more, to a tough discussion. Manning, I am sorry to say, will be there. His pamphlet is at length going to press, and will extend he says to 150 pages. Newman is not out yet.11 Carlton House Terrace, Jan. 14, '75.—This great affair is nearly arranged. My old colleagues all submit under protest; and I shall be free. An article in theTimesthis morning is undisguisedly aimed at getting rid of me; but it does not express any of their feelings. We have had a morning at Granville's; Halifax, Granville, Cardwell, Hartington, Aberdare, Forster, Carlingford, Stansfeld, Selborne, Goschen, Lowe, Kimberley,—in short all, I think, except Argyll and Bright. There was argument and exhortation, and much kindness. My letter to Granville will be accompanied by a short reply from him expressing difference of opinion and regret. They are afraid of being blamed by the party if they seem to show indifference.The Queen thanked Mr. Gladstone for communicating to her his resolution of retiring from the more active duties of parliamentary life. She was not entirely unprepared for it after what he told her himself last year.“She knows that his zeal and untiring energy have always been exerted with the desire of advancing the welfare of the nation and[pg 505]maintaining the honour of the crown, and she thanks him for his loyal assurances of support on all occasions when it may become necessary.”Bright And Other ColleaguesThe Duke of Argyll wrote“sincerely to congratulate”him upon his withdrawal. Bright on the other hand (Jan. 17) said he could not applaud, yet he would not blame: Mr. Gladstone's course seemed so unfortunate if not disastrous to the great public interests committed to him:—For myself, says Bright, if I could have foreseen either the result of the election of last year, or your retirement from the conduct of the party, I should certainly have withdrawn from parliament, where now I seem to have quite as little of duty or of a mission as you have. The front opposition bench is full of discord, and when you are not there full of jealousy, and I find myself without any particular attraction to any particular part of the House. However, I will not complain; some door of escape may open for me, and I can become a spectator as you are proposing to be.I hope on some occasion I may have the chance of seeing you when you come to town. I have had so much pleasure in your friendship, and have gained so much from it, that I would fain hope it need not cease now, when our association will necessarily be less frequent than it has been of late years. Whether you come back to the political field or turn wholly to study and to literature, I am sure you will be usefully employed, and I hope that nothing but blessing may rest upon all your labours.The feeling among liberals in the country was of deep dismay. Some of the whigs doubtless found solace in the anticipation that a new middle party might be formed, with“a recovery of the old liberal position demolished for the time by John Mill, Gladstone, and Cobden.”311But this was limited to a narrow circle.“All sunshine is gone out of politics,”was a general phrase. The news was compared by one correspondent to Gelon's message to the Greeks, that the spring was taken out of their year.312An organ of the stiff nonconformists said,313“Against his government we felt that we had a great grievance; for himself,[pg 506]the nonconformists of this country have long cherished a loyalty more fervent, we are inclined to imagine, than that with which he has been regarded by any other section of the community. He, beyond all other modern statesmen, with perhaps here and there a doubtful exception, gave us the impression of a man who regarded politics as a part of Christian duty.”And the same writers most truly added,“We do not know what the English people have done for Mr. Gladstone that can be compared for a moment with what Mr. Gladstone has done for them. Claims on him we have none. He has far more than discharged any debt that he could have owed to the nation.”These words are a just remonstrance against the somewhat tyrannical conventions of English public life.When the session began, he wrote to Mrs. Gladstone (Feb. 15):“I came down to the House and took my seat nearly in the same spot as last year, finding Bright my neighbour, with which I was very well pleased. Granville and Hartington both much preferred my continuingonthe front bench to my going elsewhere.”Lord Hartington, strongly encouraged against his own inclinations by Mr. Gladstone, accepted a thankless and unpromising post, and held it with honour and credit for five difficult years to come.[pg 507]Chapter II. Vaticanism. (1874-1875)Let no susceptibilities, puritan, protestant, anglican, or other, be startled if we observe that Rome is, and may long be, in some important respects, the centre of the Christian world. It is indeed a centre which repels as well as attracts; which probably repels even more than it attracts; but which, whether repelling or attracting, influences.—-Gladstone(1875).IOne question, as the reader by this time well knows, living deepest in Mr. Gladstone's heart and mind from his first book in 1838 onwards, was the relation of the churches to modern society. English statesmen are wont to be either blind to the existence of such a question, or else they seek an easy refuge from it in a perfunctory erastianism, sometimes intellectually refined, sometimes a little brutish, but always shallow. In all the three great branches of Christianity, the Latin, the Greek or orthodox, the protestant, Mr. Gladstone's interest was incessant, sincere, and profound. It covered their theology, their organisation, their history and principles of growth, the bearings of their system upon individual character and social well-being all over Europe. He was one of the very few public men capable of discerning that the fall of the temporal power of the pope marked a more startling change and a profounder crisis in human history, than the unification of Italy, the unification of Germany, the reconstructed republic in France, perhaps even than the preservation of the American union. He knew the force of ideas in the world; he realised the vast transformations that had in their succession swept over the minds of men since cardinal dogmas had been established; he comprehended the motion in[pg 508]articles of faith, as men made their“voyagings through strange seas of thought”; he was alive to the fact that moral crises brought on by change in intellectual outlook and temperature, are of deeper concern than questions of territory, or dynasty, or form of government. The moral crisis is what reaches furthest and matters most. A movement of the first magnitude was accentuated by Pius IX., when by the Syllabus of 1864 he challenged modern society in all its foundations, its aims, its principles, in the whole range of its ideals. Some called this daring ultimatum the gravest event since the French uprising in 1789. The Syllabus prepared the way for a more elaborately organised operation on behalf of papal authority. The train was secretly laid for a grand reaction, a grand re-installation of the Christian faith.314The Two SchoolsThe pope had been despoiled of territory, his sway within the walls of Rome itself was in constant danger, his most powerful protector north of the Alps had been weakened and humiliated by protestant Prussia. He was now to be compensated for his calamities by a majestic demonstration of his hold upon the spiritual allegiance of millions of adherents in every portion of the habitable globe. The twentieth ecumenical council assembled in St. Peter's at Rome on December 8, 1869. In this gathering of catholic prelates from both hemispheres, two antagonistic schools confronted one another. The ultramontanes held that the revolutionary welter and confusion of the modern world could only be healed by solemn affirmation of the principle of sovereign authority lodged in an infallible pope, with absolute power to define by that apostolic authority what ought to be held as articles of faith or morals. The assumptions, the standards, the ruling types of the modern age, they boldly encountered with rigid iteration of maxims of old time, imposing obedience and submission to a fixed social order and a divinely commissioned hierarchy. Inflexibility was to be the single watchword by which the church could recover a world that, from Naples even to Mexico, seemed to be rapidly drifting away from her. The[pg 509]opposing school took other ground. Perhaps they saw that supremacy is one thing, and infallibility another thing quite different. The liberal catholics did not contest the dogma of papal infallibility; they questioned the expediency of its proclamation; they were for associating ideas of religion with ideas of liberty; they were not for extending the domain of miracle and the supernatural.Then as in the old historic councils, influence of race and nation had decisive effects. It could not be otherwise in what was in essence a conflict between a centralised doctrinal authority on the one hand, and the inextinguishable tendency towards national churches on the other. The Italian bishops went with the pope. The Germans, as of old they had been for emperor against priest, were now on the side of freedom against what certain of them did not hesitate to call tyranny and fraud. Some of the ablest of the French were true to Gallican tradition and resisted the decree. Among the most active and uncompromising of all the ultramontane party was our English Manning.315IIAt the end of November 1869, Acton had written to Mr. Gladstone from Rome.“Your letter is a very sad one,”Mr. Gladstone answered.“I feel as deep and real an interest in the affairs of other Christian communions as in my own; and most of all in the case of the most famous of them all, and the one within which the largest number of Christian souls find their spiritual food.”Before Manning left for 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[pg 510]thought to lie in a governing faculty, and in its wise moderation. Now he is ever quoted as theultraof 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 bealleyes 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 willanyhave 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 theapprobation of the flock.316Unless 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.Issue Of The CouncilThe French government wrote despatches of mild protest but said nothing of withdrawing their garrison. Mr. Gladstone and Lord Clarendon were for informing the Roman court that they were cognizant of the French despatches, and approved of their tenour. The Queen and the cabinet, however, were entirely averse to meddling with the council,[pg 511]and nothing was done officially. This did not prevent Mr. Gladstone from telling Archbishop Manning what impediments would be placed in the way of Irish legislation by the state of English feeling as to the Syllabus and other papal proceedings.“Myfeelings and convictions,”he says (April 16),“are as you well know decidedly with your‘opposition,’which I believe to be contending for the religious and civil interests of mankind against influences highly disastrous and menacing to both. But the prevailing opinion is that it is better to let those influences take their course, and work out the damage which they will naturally and surely entail upon the see of Rome and upon what is bound to it.”In parliament there was an utter aversion to the Roman policy, and he gives instances, noting even a change of opinion about the Irish land bill.“What I have described is no matter of speculation. I know it by actual and daily touch. I am glad you have moved me to state it in some detail. It is to me matter of profound grief, especially as regards land in Ireland.”To Lord Acton:—Of all the prelates at Rome, none have a finer opportunity, to none is a more crucial test now applied, than to those of the United States. For if there, where there is nothing of covenant, of restraint, or of equivalent between the church and the state, the propositions of the Syllabus are still to have the countenance of the episcopate, it becomes really a little difficult to maintain in argument the civil rights of such persons to toleration, however conclusive be the argument of policy in favour of granting it. I can hardly bring myself to speculate or care on what particular day the foregone conclusion is to be finally adopted. My grief is sincere and deep, but it is at the whole thing, so ruinous in its consequences as they concern faith. In my view, the size of the minority, though important, is not nearly so important as the question whether there will be a minority at all.There was a minority. In a division taken at a late stage, 451 composed the majority, 88 resisted, and 62 were for a new examination. Then the minority turned their backs on Rome; and on July 18 the definition of infallibility[pg 512]was acclaimed in St. Peter's in presence of the pope by 533 against 2.Mr. Gladstone is very glad when Clarendon instructs Mr. Russell to turn his back on the festivities at Rome.“The whole proceeding has been monstrous, and it will hereafter become one of the laughing-stocks of history. The fanaticism of the middle ages is really sober compared with that of the nineteenth century.”“The proclamation of Infallibility,”he said to Bishop Moriarty,“I must own I look upon as the most portentous (taking them singly), of all events in the history of the Christian church.”IIIThe next day, as we know, war was declared by France against Germany, the French garrison left Rome, and on September 20 the Italians marched in.A month before the war broke out, Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Clarendon:“I would avoid any official support of the Italian application to France for the evacuation of Rome, by saying that this country had always abstained from mixing in that question; and that we were the more induced to persevere in that policy from being well convinced that the French government is perfectly aware that in this country the occupation of any part of the pontifical territories by French troops is regarded with regret, pain, and disapproval. Further, that those who most strongly entertain these sentiments, are generally the persons who most highly value, and have most striven to promote, the good understanding between France and England.”The occupation of Rome by the Italian government brought upon Mr. Gladstone various demands and movements from different parts of the country. His cabinet agreed that the proper course was to decline all interference with a view to the restoration of the temporal power, though they accepted the task of promoting, by means of friendly representations, arrangements to secure the pontiff's freedom and becoming support. Then some of his presbyterian friends asked him why he should even do so much as this, when he would take no such steps for the moderator of the free church. Now[pg 513]consider, Mr. Gladstone replied:“the pope is a sovereign who was in lawful possession of large revenues, and who had charged himself with the support of a body of cardinals, ministers, nuncios, servants, and guards out of those revenues. He has been dispossessed, not for any fault of his own, but because clerical dominion was deemed intolerable. In the maintenance of the pope and his court, followers and agents, six millions of our fellow-subjects or thereabouts are deeply interested; and they are making demands upon us which we are forced to decline. But I should for one be ashamed to deny that there are the strongest equitable claims upon the Italian government growing out of the past state of things; that in these equitable claims the six millions I speak of have a real interest and share; and as the matter is international, and they have nolocus standiwith the Italian government, it is our part so far to plead their cause if need be.”IVVisit To MunichFour years elapsed before Mr. Gladstone was in a position to follow up his strong opinions on the injury done, as he believed, to human liberty by the Vatican decrees. But the great debate between ultramontanes and old catholics was followed by him with an interest that never slackened. In September 1874 he went to Munich, and we can hardly be wrong in ascribing to that visit the famous tract which was to make so lively a stir before the end of the year. His principal object was to communicate with Dr. Döllinger, and this object, he tells Mrs. Gladstone, was fully gained.“I think,”he says,“I have spent two-thirds of my whole time with Dr. Döllinger, who is indeed a most remarkable man, and it makes my blood run cold to think ofhisbeing excommunicated in his venerable but, thank God, hale and strong old age. In conversation we have covered a wide field. I know no one with whose mode of viewing and handling religious matters I more cordially agree.... He is wonderful, and simple as a child.”“I think it was in 1874,”Döllinger afterwards mentioned,“that I remember Gladstone's paying me a visit at six o'clock[pg 514]in the evening. We began talking on political and theological subjects, and became, both of us, so engrossed with the conversation, that it was two o'clock at night when I left the room to fetch a book from my library bearing on the matter in hand. I returned with it in a few minutes, and found him deep in a volume he had drawn out of his pocket—true to his principle of never losing time—during my momentary absence.”317“In the course of a walk out of Munich in the travelling season of 1874,”Mr. Gladstone wrote sixteen years later,“Dr. Döllinger told me that he was engaged in the work of retrial through the whole circle of his Latin teaching and knowledge. The results were tested in his proceedings at Bonn, when he attempted to establish aformula concordiaeupon the questions which most gravely divided Christendom.”318Among other topics Mr. Gladstone commended to his mentor the idea of a republication in a series, of the best works of those whom he would call the Henotic or Eirenic writers on the differences that separate Christians and churches from one another. He also read Pichler on the theology of Leibnitz, not without suspicion that it was rather Pichler than Leibnitz. But neither Leibnitz nor Pichler was really in his mind.After the session of 1874, when the public ear and mind had been possessed by the word Ritualism, he had as usual sought a vent in a magazine article for the thoughts with which he was teeming.319He speaks with some disdain of the question whether a handful of the clergy are or are not engaged in“an utterly hopeless and visionary effort to Romanise the church and people of England.”At no time, he says, since the sanguinary reign of Mary has such a scheme been possible. Least of all, he proceeds, could the scheme have life in it“when Rome has substituted for the proud boast ofsemper eadema policy of violence and change in faith; when she has refurbished and paraded anew every[pg 515]rusty tool she was fondly thought to have disused; when no one can become her convert, without renouncing his moral and mental freedom, and placing his civil loyalty and duty at the mercy of another; and when she has equally repudiated modern thought and ancient history.”If these strong words expressed his state of mind before he went abroad, we may readily imagine how the Bavarian air would fan the flame.Though Dr. Döllinger himself—“so inaccessible to religious passions”—was not aware of the purpose of his English friend, there can be little doubt that Mr. Gladstone returned from Munich with the same degree of internal ferment as that which had possessed his mind on his return from Naples three-and-twenty years before. In October he writes to Lord Acton from Hawarden:—What you have said on the subject of ultramontanism and of the mode in which it should be handled, appears to me to be as wise and as good as is possible. It is really a case for hitting hard, but for hitting the right men. In anything I say or do on the subject, I would wish heartily and simply to conform to the spirit of your words. But I feel myself drawn onwards. Indeed some of your words help to draw me. The question with me now is whether I shall or shall not publish a tract which I have written, and of which the title would probably be,“The Vatican Decrees in their bearing on Civil Allegiance: a Political Expostulation.”I incline to think that I ought to publish it. If it were in your power and will to run over here for a night or two I should seek to profit by your counsel, and should ask you to read as much of thems.as your patience would endure. A more substantial attraction would be that I could go over much of my long and interesting conversations with Döllinger.VPublication Of The PamphletThe pamphlet320appeared in November, and was meant for an argument that the decree of infallibility aimed a deadly blow at the old historic, scientific, and moderate school; it was a degradation of the episcopal order; it carried to its furthest point that spirit of absolutist centralisation, which[pg 516]in its excesses is as fatal to vigorous life in the church, as in the state; it overthrew the principle not even denied by the council of Trent in the sixteenth century, that the pope and his judgments were triable by the assembled representatives of the Christian world.Thrice in history it seemed as if the constitutional party in the church was about to triumph: at the council of Constance in the fifteenth century; in the conflict between the French episcopate and Innocentxi.in the days of Bossuet; and thirdly, when Clementxiv., exactly a hundred years before now, dealt with the Jesuits and“levelled in the dust the deadliest foes that mental and moral liberty have ever known.”From July 1870 all this had passed away, and the constitutional party had seen its death-warrant signed and sealed. The“myrmidons of the apostolic chamber”had committed their church to revolutionary measures. The vast new claims were lodged in the reign of a pontiff, who by the dark Syllabus of 1864 had condemned free speech, a free press, liberty of conscience, toleration of nonconformity, the free study of civil and philosophic things independently of church authority, marriage unless sacramentally contracted, and all definition by the state of the civil rights of the church.The Pamphlet“It has been a favourite purpose of my life,”Mr. Gladstone said,“not to conjure up, but to conjure down, public alarms. I am not now going to pretend that either foreign foe or domestic treason can, at the bidding of the court of Rome, disturb these peaceful shores. But although such fears may be visionary, it is more visionary still to suppose for one moment that the claims of Gregoryvii., of Innocentiii., and of Bonifaceviii.have been disinterred in the nineteenth century, like hideous mummies picked out of Egyptian sarcophagi, in the interests of archæology, or without a definite and practical aim.”What, then, was the clear and foregone purpose behind the parade of all these astonishing reassertions? The first was—by claims to infallibility in creed, to the prerogative of miracles, to dominion over the unseen world—to satisfy spiritual appetites, sharpened into reaction and made morbid by“the levity of the destructive speculations so widely current, and the notable hardihood of the[pg 517]anti-Christian writing of the day.”This alone, however, would not explain the deliberate provocation of all the“risks of so daring a raid upon the civil sphere.”The answer was to be found in the favourite design, hardly a secret design, of restoring by the road of force when any favourable opportunity should arise, and of re-erecting, the terrestrial throne of the popedom,“even if it could only be re-erected on the ashes of the city, and amidst the whitening bones of the people.”And this brings the writer to the immediate practical aspects of his tract.“If the baleful power which is expressed by the phraseCuria Romana, and not at all adequately rendered in its historic force by the usual English equivalent‘Court of Rome,’really entertains the scheme, it doubtless counts on the support in every country of an organised and devoted party; which, when it can command the scales of political power, will promote interference, and while it is in a minority, will work for securing neutrality. As the peace of Europe may be in jeopardy, and as the duties even of England, as one of its constabulary authorities, might come to be in question, it would be most interesting to know the mental attitude of our Roman catholic fellow-countrymen in England and Ireland with reference to the subject; and it seems to be one on which we are entitled to solicit information.”Too commonly the spirit of the convert was to be expressed by the notorious words,“a catholic first, an Englishman afterwards”—words that properly convey no more than a truism,“for every Christian must seek to place his religion even before his country in his inner heart; but very far from a truism in the sense in which we have been led to construe them.”This, indeed, was a new and very real“papal aggression.”For himself, Mr. Gladstone said, it should not shake his allegiance to“the rule of maintaining equal civil rights irrespectively of religious differences.”Had he not given conclusive indications of that view, by supporting in parliament as a minister since the council, the repeal in 1871 of the law against ecclesiastical titles, whose enactment he had opposed twenty years before?That the pamphlet should create intense excitement, was inevitable from the place of the writer in the public eye,[pg 518]from the extraordinary vehemence of the attack, and above all from the unquenchable fascination of the topic. Whether the excitement in the country was more than superficial; whether most readers fathomed the deep issues as they stood, not between catholic and protestant, but between catholic and catholic within the fold; whether in fastening upon the civil allegiance of English Romanists Mr. Gladstone took the true point against Vaticanism—these are questions that we need not here discuss. The central proposition made a cruel dilemma for a large class of the subjects of the Queen; for the choice assigned to them by assuming stringent logic was between being bad citizens if they submitted to the decree of papal infallibility, and bad catholics if they did not. Protestant logicians wrote to Mr. Gladstone that if his contention were good, we ought now to repeal catholic emancipation and again clap on the fetters. Syllogisms in action are but stupid things after all, unless they are checked by a tincture of what seems paradox.321Apart from the particular issue in his Vatican pamphlet, Mr. Gladstone believed himself to be but following his own main track in life and thought in his assault upon“a policy which declines to acknowledge the high place assigned to liberty in the counsels of Providence, and which upon the pretext of the abuse that like every other good she suffers, expels her from its system.”Among the names that he was never willing to discuss with me—Machiavelli, for instance—was Joseph de Maistre, the hardiest, most adventurous, most ingenious, and incisive of all the speculative champions of European reaction.322In the pages of de Maistre he might have found the reasoned base on which the ultramontane creed may be supposed to rest. He would have found liberty depicted less as a blessing than a scourge; even Bossuet denounced as a heretic with dubious chances of salvation, for his struggle on behalf of a national church against Roman centralisation; the old[pg 519]Greeks held up to odium as a race of talkers, frivolous, light, and born incorrigible dividers. In dealing with de Maistre, Mr. Gladstone would have had a foeman worthier of his powerful steel than the authors of the Syllabus, Schema, Postulatum, and all the rest of what he called the Vaticanism of 1870. But here, as always, he was man of action, and wrote for a specific though perhaps a fugitive purpose.VILabours Of The ControversyAt the end of the year the total number printed of the tract was 145,000, and of these 120,000 were in a people's edition.“My pamphlet,”he tells Lacaita,“has brought upon me such a mass of work as I can hardly cope with, and I am compelled to do all things as succinctly as possible, though my work is with little intermission from morning till night. I agree with you that the pamphlet in the main tells its own story; and I am glad there is no need to select in a hurry some one to write on the difference between papism and Catholicism.... There is no doubt that the discussion opens,i.e.makes a breach in the walls of the papal theology, and it ought to be turned to account. But I shall have enough to do with all my hands, if I am to work properly through the task I have undertaken. Not, I trust, for long, for I think another pamphlet should suffice to end it on my side. But I am vexed that Manning (as if he had been pulled up at Rome), after having announced his formal reply six weeks ago, hangs fire and now talks of delaying it.”The result, he assures Lord Granville (Nov. 25),“must be injurious to the pestilent opinions that have so grievously obtained the upper hand in that church, and to the party whichmeansto have a war in Europe for the restoration of the temporal power. To place impediments in their way has been my principal purpose.”He told Acton (Dec. 18),“When you were putting in caveats and warnings, you did not say to me,‘Now mind, this affair will absorb some, perhaps many, months of your life.’It has been so up to the present moment, and it evidently will be so for some time.”With Acton he carried on elaborate correspondence[pg 520]upon some of the questions raised by the Syllabus, notably on the effect of the pope's disciplinary judgment on anglican marriages, converting them into relations that were not marriage at all. He fears that he has conceded too much to the papal party in not treating the Syllabus asex cathedra; in allowing that the popes had been apt to claim dogmatic infallibility for wellnigh a thousand years; as to the ecumenicity of the Vatican council. Among other matters he was reading“the curious volumes ofDiscorsi di Pio IX., published at Rome, and he might find it his duty to write collaterally upon them.”This duty he performed with much fidelity in theQuarterly Reviewfor January 1875. He is active in interest about translations; keen to enlist auxiliaries in every camp and all countries; delighted with all utterances from Italy or elsewhere that make in his direction, even noting with satisfaction that the agnostic Huxley was warm in approval.“I pass my days and nights,”he tells the Duke of Argyll (Dec. 19),“in the Vatican. Already the pope has given me two months of incessant correspondence and other hard work, and it may very well last two more. Nor is this work pleasant; but I am as far as possible from repenting of it, as no one else to whom the public would listen saved me the trouble. It is full of intense interest. Every post brings a mass of general reading, writing, or both. Forty covers of one kind or another to-day, and all my time is absorbed. But the subject is well worth the pains.”The Italians, Lord Granville told him,“generally approved, but were puzzled why you should have thought it necessary.”Retorts and replies arose in swarms, including one from Manning and another from Newman. He was accused by some of introducing a BismarckianKulturkampfinto England, of seeking to recover his lost popularity by pandering to no-popery, of disregarding the best interests of the country for the sake of his own restoration to power.323I have now finished reading—he said at the beginning of February—the 20th reply to my pamphlet, They cover 1000 pages. And I am hard at work preparing mine with a good[pg 521]conscience and I think a good argument. Manning has been, I think, as civil as he could.Feb. 5.—All this morning I have had to spend in hunting up one important statement of Manning's which I am almost convinced is a gross mis-statement....Feb. 6.—Manning in his 200 pages has not, I venture to say, made a single point against me. But I shall have to show up his quotations very seriously. We have exchanged one or two friendly notes. 8.—Worked on Vaticanism nearly all day and (an exception to my rule) late at night. 14.—Eight hours' work on my proof sheets. 15.—Went through Acton's corrections and notes on my proofs. 19.—Worked much in evening on finishing up my tract, Dr. Döllinger's final criticisms having arrived. He thinks highly of the work, which he observes will cut deeper than the former one, and be more difficult to deal with. By midnight I had the revises ready with the corrections. 20.—Inserted one or two references and wrote“Press”on the 2nd revises. May the power and blessing of God go with the work.The second tract was more pungent than the first, and it gave pleasure to an important minister abroad who had now entangled himself by Falk laws and otherwise in a quarrel with the papacy.“I have had a letter of thanks,”Mr. Gladstone writes to Hawarden (March 6),“from Bismarck. This pamphlet is stouter, sharper, and cheaper than the last, but is only in its eleventh thousand, I believe.”Among others who replied toVaticanismwas Dr. Newman; he appended a new postscript of four-and-twenty pages to his former answer to the first of Mr. Gladstone's pamphlets. Its tone is courteous and argumentative—far too much so to please the ultras who had the pope's ear—and without the wild hitting that Mr. Gladstone found in Manning.Newman wrote to thank him (Jan. 17, 1875) for a letter that he described as“forbearing and generous.”“It has been a great grief to me,”said Newman,“to have had to write against one whose career I have followed from first to last with so much (I may say) loyal interest and admiration. I had known about you from others, and had looked at you with kindly curiosity, before you came up to Christ Church, and from the time that you were launched into public life,[pg 522]you have retained a hold on my thoughts and on my gratitude by the various marks of attention which every now and then you have shown me, when you had an opportunity, and I could not fancy my ever standing towards you in any other relation than that which had lasted so long. What a fate it is, that now when so memorable a career has reached its formal termination [retirement from leadership], I should be the man, on the very day on which it closed, to present to you amid the many expressions of public sympathy which it elicits, a controversial pamphlet as my offering.”But he could not help writing it, he was called upon from such various quarters; and his conscience told him that he who had been in great measure the cause of so many becoming catholics, had no right to leave them in the lurch, when charges were made against them as serious as unexpected.“I do not think,”he concluded,“I ever can be sorry for what I have done, but I never can cease to be sorry for the necessity of doing it.”VIIChange Of AbodeThis fierce controversial episode was enough to show that the habit and temperament of action still followed him in the midst of all his purposes of retreat. Withdrawal from parliamentary leadership was accompanied by other steps, apparently all making in the same direction. He sold the house in Carlton House Terrace, where he had passed eight-and-twenty years of work and power and varied sociability.“I had grown to the house,”he says (April 15),“having lived more time in it than in any other since I was born, and mainly by reason of all that was done in it.”To Mrs. Gladstone he wrote (Feb. 28):—I do not wonder that you feel parting from the house will be a blow and a pang. It is nothing less than this to me, but it must be faced and you will face it gallantly. So much has occurred there; and thus it is leaving not the house only but the neighbourhood, where I have been with you for more than thirty-five years, and altogether nearly forty. The truth is that innocently and from special causes we have on the whole been housed better than according to our circumstances. All along Carlton House[pg 523]Terrace I think you would not find any one with less than £20,000 a year, and most of them with, much more.He sold his collection of china and his Wedgwood ware.324He despatched his books to Hawarden. He can hardly have resolved on retirement that should be effective and complete, or else he must have arranged to quit the House of Commons. In his diary he entered (March 30, 1875):—Views about the future and remaining section of my life. In outline they are undefined but in substance definite. The main point is this: that setting aside exceptional circumstances which would have to provide for themselves, my prospective work is not parliamentary. My ties will be slight to an assembly with whose tendencies I am little in harmony at the present time; nor can I flatter myself that what is called the public out of doors is more sympathetic. But there is much to be done with the pen, all bearing much on high and sacred ends, for even Homeric study as I view it, is in this very sense of high importance; and what lies beyond this is concerned directly with the great subject of belief.To Mrs. Gladstone he wrote (May 19, 1875):“I am feeling as it were my way towards the purposes of the rest of my life. It will I dare say clear by degrees. For the general business of the country, my ideas and temper are thoroughly out of harmony with the ideas and temper of the day, especially as they are represented in London.”The movement of negation had been in full swing for a dozen years before the force and weight of it had, amid the stress and absorption of daily business, reached his inner mind. In May 1872, in a speech as member of the council of King's College—“averse from, and little used to platform speaking,”as he described himself to Manning—he used some strong language about those who promulgate as science what is not science and as religion what is not religion; but he took care to sever himself from the recent Roman decrees, which“seemed much to resemble the proclamation of a[pg 524]perpetual war against the progress and the movement of the human mind.”325In December 1872, he caused a marked sensation by an address at Liverpool, in which he spoke of Strauss's book onNew and Old Belief.326He had become a member of the metaphysical society, where eminent representatives of every faith and of no faith discussed every aspect of the foundations of human creeds. He was of too masculine and energetic a cast of mind to feel mere shock as he listened to Huxley, Tyndall, Clifford, Harrison, firmly arguing materialism or positivism or agnosticism or other unhistoric forms. That his whole soul was energetically oppugnant, I need not say. His reverence for freedom never wavered. He wrote to an editor who had criticised his Liverpool address (Jan. 3, 1873):—In the interest of my address, I wish to say that not a word to my knowledge fell from me limiting the range of free inquiry, nor have I ever supposed St. Paul to say anything so silly as“Prove all things: but some you must not prove.”Doubtless some obscurity of mine, I know not what, has led to an error into which the able writer of the article has fallen, not alone.To the Duke of Argyll he wrote:—Dec. 28, '72.—I have been touching upon deep and dangerous subjects at Liverpool. Whether I went beyond my province many may doubt. But of the extent of the mischief I do not doubt any more than of its virulence. All that I hear from day to day convinces me of the extension of this strange epidemic, for it is not, considering how it comes, worthy of being called a rational or scientific process. Be it however, what it may, we politicians are children playing with toys in comparison to that great work of and for manhood, which has to be done, and will yet be done, in restoring belief.[pg 525]Sir Robert Morier sent him from Munich Frohschammer's reply to Strauss.“If I understand him aright,”said Mr. Gladstone,“he is a Unitarian, minus Miracle and Inspiration.”The whole book seemed to him able, honest, and diligent:—But, he adds, I am one of those who think the Christianity of Frohschammer (as I have described it) is like a tall tree scientifically prepared for the saw by the preliminary process, well known to wood-cutters, of clearing away with the axe all projecting roots, which as long as they remained rendered the final operation impossible. This first process leaves the tree standing in a very trim condition, much more mathematical in form, as it is more near a cylinder, than in its native state. The business of the saw, when the horse and the man arrive, is soon accomplished.To his article on ritualism he prefixed as motto two short lines of Pindar, about days that are to come being wisest witnesses.327In spite of retreat, it was impossible that he should forget the vast responsibility imposed upon him, both by his gifts and by the popular ascendency into which they had brought him. His was not the retreat of self-indulgence, and the days that were to come speedily brought him duties that were to bear him far into regions of storm and conflict now unforeseen. Meanwhile, with occasional visits to Westminster, he lived even and industrious days at Hawarden, felling trees, working at Greek mythology and ethnology, delighting in the woods and glades of the park, above all delighting in the tranquillity of his“temple of peace.”Besides being the bookroom of a student, this was still a far-shining beacon in the popular eye. If sages, scholars, heroes, saints, with time's serene and hallowed gravity looked upon him from their shelves, yet loud echoes sounded in his ear from roaring surges of an outer world—from turbid ebb and flow of all the struggle and clamorous hopes and half-blind mysterious instincts of the nations.[pg 526]

Book VII. 1874-1880Chapter I. Retirement From Leadership. (1874-1875)“ἐγὼ μὲν, ὧναξ, πρεσβύτερός τε ἤδη εἰμὶ καὶ βαρὺς ἀείρεσθαι; σὺ δέ τινα τῶνδε τῶν νεωτέρων κέλευε ταῦτα ποιέειν.”—Herodotusiv. 150.“I am too old, O king, and slow to stir; so bid thou one of the younger men here do these things.”A member of the great government of 1868, in a letter to one of his family, gave an account of the final meeting of the cabinet:—Feb. 17, 1874.—I doubt—he says—whether I ever passed a more eventful evening than yesterday. The whole cabinet was assembled. We resolved after full discussion of pros and cons, and some slight difference of opinion, to resign at once. After which came the startling announcement that Gladstone would no longer retain the leadership of the liberal party, nor resume it, unless the party had settled its differences. He will not expose himself to the insults and outrages of 1866-8, and he has a keen sense of the disloyalty of the party during the last three years. He will sit as a private member and occasionally speak for himself, but he will not attend the House regularly, nor assume any one of the functions of leader. He does this not from anger, but because he says that it is absolutely necessary to party action to learn that all the duties and responsibilities do not rest on the leaders, but that followers have their obligations too. As a consequence of this Cardwell retires to the House of Lords.[pg 498]He will not take the leadership, nor will he consent to serve under any one but Gladstone. He is too old, he says. Lowe protests against the anarchical experiment, and talks of Hartington as leader. As neither Lowe, nor Bright, nor Goschen, nor Forster is in a position to act as leader, it may come to this, so that the liberal front benches of the two Houses will be entirely remodelled.309Here is Mr. Gladstone's own account, written twenty-three years later, and confirmed by all other accessible papers of the moment:—I was most anxious to make the retirement of the ministry the occasion of my own. I had served for more than forty years. My age—65—was greater than that of Sir Robert Peel at his retirement in 1846, or at his death in 1850, and was much beyond that at which most of the leading commoners of the century had terminated their political career, together with their natural life. I felt myself to be in some measure out of touch with some of the tendencies of the liberal party, especially in religious matters. Sir A. Clark, whom I consulted, would give me on medical grounds no encouragement whatever. But I deeply desired an interval between parliament and the grave. In spite of the solicitations of my friends I persisted. For 1874 there was a sort of compromise“without prejudice.”As having a title to some rest I was not a very regular attendant, but did not formally abdicate.Reasons For WithdrawalHe found specific reasons for withdrawal in the state of the party (Feb. 12):—1. The absence of any great positive aim (the late plan [budget] having failed) for which to co-operate. 2. The difficulty of establishing united and vigorous action in the liberal party for the purposes of economy. 3. The unlikelihood of arriving at any present agreement respecting education.In another fragment of the same date, he says:—I do not forget that I am in debt to the party generally for kindness, indulgence, and confidence, much beyond what I have[pg 499]deserved. Deeming myself unable to hold it together from my present position in a manner worthy of it, I see how unlikely it is that I should hereafter be able to give any material aid in the adjustment of its difficulties. Yet if such aid should at any time be generally desired with a view to arresting some great evil or procuring for the nation some great good, my willingness to enter into counsel for the occasion would follow from all I have said. But always with the understanding that as between section and section I could not become a partisan, and that such interference even in the case of its proving useful would entail no obligation whatever on those accepting it, and carry with it no disturbance of any arrangement subsisting at the time.The situation proved, as Lowe had foreseen, an anarchic experiment. Mr. Gladstone went up to London for the session, and followed his ordinary social course:—March 9, 1874.—Off at 4.45 to Windsor for the fête. We dined at St. George's Hall. I was presented to the Duchess of C. by the Queen, and had a few kind words from H.M. 11.—Archbishop Manning, 9-11. It is kind in him to come, but most of it is rather hollow work, limited as we are. 16.—Dined at Marlborough House. A civil talk with Disraeli. 20.—FinishedVivian Grey. The first quarter extremely clever, the rest trash.May 15.—Emperor of Russia's reception at 3.15. He thanked me for my conduct to Russia while I was minister. I assured his Majesty I had watched with profound interest the transactions of his reign, and the great benefits he had conferred upon his people. He hoped the relations of the two countries would always be good.... Dined at Marlborough House. Stafford House ball afterwards. The emperor complained of the burden and late hours of evening entertainments. Princess of Wales so nice about her picture. D[israeli] complained of my absence, said they could not get on without me. 20.—Dined at the F.O. to meet the emperor. It was very kind of Derby. Much work at Hawarden in arranging books and papers.The House of Commons is hardly attractive to an irregular and perfunctory attendant; and Mr. Gladstone's thoughts[pg 500]all turned to other fields. To Mrs. Gladstone he wrote early in April:—The anti-parliamentary reaction has been stronger with me even than I anticipated. I am as far as possible from feeling the want of the House of Commons. I could cheerfully go there to do a work; but I hope and pray to be as little there as possible, except for such an aim. In London I think we were too much hustled to speak leisurely or effectually of the future. It will open for us by degrees. I shall be glad when the matter of money, after all a secondary one, is disentangled, but chiefly because it seems to put pressure upon you. I spoke to Stephen about these matters on Saturday; he was kind, reasonable, and in all ways as satisfactory as possible. There is one thing I should like you to understand clearly as to my view of things, for it is an essential part of that view. I am convinced that the welfare of mankind does not now depend on the state or the world of politics; the real battle is being fought in the world of thought, where a deadly attack is made with great tenacity of purpose and over a wide field, upon the greatest treasure of mankind, the belief in God and the gospel of Christ.In June Sir Stephen Glynne died,—“a dark, dark day.”“My brother-in-law,”wrote Mr. Gladstone at a later date,“was a man of singular refinement and as remarkable modesty. His culture was high and his character one of deep interest. His memory was on the whole decidedly the most remarkable known to me of the generation and country. His life, however, was retired and unobtrusive; but he sat in parliament, I think, for about fifteen years, and was lord-lieutenant of his county.”I thank you much—Mr. Gladstone said to the Duke of Argyll—for your kind note. Your sympathy and that of the duchess are ever ready. But even you can hardly tell how it is on this occasion needed and warranted. My wife has lost the last member of a family united by bonds of the rarest tenderness, the last representative of his line, the best of brothers, who had ever drawn closer to her as the little rank was thinned. As for me, no one can know what our personal relations were, without knowing[pg 501]the interior details of a long family history, and efforts and struggles in common carried on through a long series of years, which riveted into the closest union our original affection. He was a very rare man, but we grieve not for him; he sleeps the sleep of the just. The event is a great one also to the outward frame of our life here.310Ecclesiastical DebateIn the same letter he says it is most painful to him to be dragged into ecclesiastical turmoil, as for example by the Scotch patronage bill, which he considers precipitate, unwise, and daring, or the bill directed against the endowed schools commissioners, of whom his brother-in-law, Lord Lyttelton, was one. In the last case he acted as a leader of an organised party, but in the more important instance of a bill devised, as Mr. Disraeli said, to put down ritualism, his dissent from most of those around him fulfilled all the anticipations that had pointed to retirement. The House was heartily in favour of the bill, and what is called the country earnestly supported it, though in the cabinet itself at least four ministers were strenuously hostile. Mr. Gladstone writes to his wife a trenchant account of his vigorous dealing with a prominent colleague who had rashly ventured to mark him for assault. He sent word to the two archbishops that if they carried a certain amendment he should hold himself“altogether discharged from maintaining any longer the establishment of the church.”He wrote to Lord Harrowby when the recess came:—I think, or rather I am convinced, that the effecteitherof one or two more ecclesiastical sessions of parliament such as the last, or of any prolonged series of contentious proceedings under the recent Act, upon subjects of widespread interest, will be to disestablish the church. I do not feel the dread of disestablishment which you may probably entertain: but I desire and seek so long as standing ground remains, to avert, not to precipitate it.To another correspondent—Individually I have serious doubts whether the whole of the penal proceedings taken in this country with respect to church[pg 502]matters from the day of Dr. Hampden downwards, have not done considerably more harm than good. There is no doubt at all that all the evils, of whatever kind, at which they were aimed, exist at this moment among us in a far more aggravated shape than when they began.... My object and desire has ever been and still is, to keep the church of England together, both as a church and as an establishment. As a church, I believe she is strong enough, by virtue of the prayer-book, to hold together under all circumstances; but as an establishment, in my opinion, she is not strong enough to bear either serious secession or prolonged parliamentary agitation.Finally, in a letter dated from Whittinghame (Nov. 17)—There are already too many causes of demoralisation operating upon the House of Commons. If it is also to become a debased copy of an ecclesiastical council, all the worst men and worst qualities of the worst men will come to the front, and the place will become intolerable.Even any member of parliament who shares none of Mr. Gladstone's theology, may sympathise to the full with his deep disgust at theologic and ecclesiastical discussions as conducted in that secular air. We can easily understand how detestable he found it, and how those discussions fortified his sense of estrangement from the ruling sentiments of the parliamentary party of which he was still the titular leader.Of course the whigs, always for keeping a parliamentary church in its proper place, disliked his line. Liberals like Thirlwall read his speeches“with great pain and suspicion,”and declared their confidence to be shaken. Hardly any section was completely satisfied. His mind in the autumn and winter of 1874 was absorbed, as we shall see within a few pages, in an assault upon the decrees of the Vatican Council of 1870. This assault, as he told Lord Granville (Dec. 7, 1874), while tending“to hearten”the party generally, was against his resumption of formal leadership, because it widened the breach with the Irishmen in the House of Commons. Apart from this there were many questions, each with a group of adherents to a special view, but incapable of being pursued by common and united action. He[pg 503]ran through the list in writing to Lord Granville. It has historic interest:—1. Extension of the suffrage, with redistribution of seats abreast or in the rear. 2. Disestablishment in Scotland, England. 3. Land laws. 4. Retrenchment. 5. Colonial policy, territorial extension of the empire. 6. Reform of local government taxation. 7. Secular education. 8. Undenominational education. 9. Irish affairs. On no one of these is there known to exist a plan desired by the entire party, or by any clear and decisive majority of it.On the whole, he was persuaded that neither the party generally nor the country desired another period of active reforms, even if he were fit to conduct them. Besides this he confessed his“apprehension that differences would spring up, and great shrinking from any breach with the party, and a determination, often expressed, never, if he could help it, to lead one branch of it against another.”In many forms he carried Lord Granville with him round the circle of his arguments. He once sent his points on half-a-dozen scraps of paper. Granville playfully replied,“I should like to treat them as old Lord Bessborough used to treat his playing-cards when luck was adverse—tear them up into small bits and toss them in the fire.”Nothing shook him, not even Mrs. Gladstone's misgivings. To her he wrote from Carlton House Terrace on the eve of the session of 1875:—Now for the grave matter about the leadership. I have had much conversation with Granville and Cardwell, and I am going to see Hartington, also Goschen, to-morrow. My letter is rewritten and improved, but I am obliged to stand to my conclusion, for many reasons. Among them the church reason is one of the most serious, and the other the undefined and prolonged character of the service if now undertaken. This, while arguing and deprecating, they admit I think to a great extent. Our old colleagues are inclined to come up on Thursday if they can, and this will be rather to hear than to debate. Hartington will succeed. I am indeed sorry that you and I have not been able to take the same view of this important subject, but you know that[pg 504]I am acting on convictions very long entertained, and will I am sure believe that I have probed myself deeply, and used all the means in my power to get at a right conclusion. Nay, I think you will be more reconciled, when I tell you that Granville did not really see his way either to a nominal leadership, or to making any arrangement by which I could after a short time with some certainty have escaped. I saw Clark last night and this morning; he gives an excellent account of me and makes it impossible for me to plead health as my reason.The drama went rapidly forward:—Jan. 12.—I find that the agreement made yesterday that I should meet my former colleagues on Monday will require me to remain until this day, though after a pretty busy morning the pressure is less. I have, however, to preside in the evening at the meeting of the Metaphysical Society, and to listen, though I hope nothing more, to a tough discussion. Manning, I am sorry to say, will be there. His pamphlet is at length going to press, and will extend he says to 150 pages. Newman is not out yet.11 Carlton House Terrace, Jan. 14, '75.—This great affair is nearly arranged. My old colleagues all submit under protest; and I shall be free. An article in theTimesthis morning is undisguisedly aimed at getting rid of me; but it does not express any of their feelings. We have had a morning at Granville's; Halifax, Granville, Cardwell, Hartington, Aberdare, Forster, Carlingford, Stansfeld, Selborne, Goschen, Lowe, Kimberley,—in short all, I think, except Argyll and Bright. There was argument and exhortation, and much kindness. My letter to Granville will be accompanied by a short reply from him expressing difference of opinion and regret. They are afraid of being blamed by the party if they seem to show indifference.The Queen thanked Mr. Gladstone for communicating to her his resolution of retiring from the more active duties of parliamentary life. She was not entirely unprepared for it after what he told her himself last year.“She knows that his zeal and untiring energy have always been exerted with the desire of advancing the welfare of the nation and[pg 505]maintaining the honour of the crown, and she thanks him for his loyal assurances of support on all occasions when it may become necessary.”Bright And Other ColleaguesThe Duke of Argyll wrote“sincerely to congratulate”him upon his withdrawal. Bright on the other hand (Jan. 17) said he could not applaud, yet he would not blame: Mr. Gladstone's course seemed so unfortunate if not disastrous to the great public interests committed to him:—For myself, says Bright, if I could have foreseen either the result of the election of last year, or your retirement from the conduct of the party, I should certainly have withdrawn from parliament, where now I seem to have quite as little of duty or of a mission as you have. The front opposition bench is full of discord, and when you are not there full of jealousy, and I find myself without any particular attraction to any particular part of the House. However, I will not complain; some door of escape may open for me, and I can become a spectator as you are proposing to be.I hope on some occasion I may have the chance of seeing you when you come to town. I have had so much pleasure in your friendship, and have gained so much from it, that I would fain hope it need not cease now, when our association will necessarily be less frequent than it has been of late years. Whether you come back to the political field or turn wholly to study and to literature, I am sure you will be usefully employed, and I hope that nothing but blessing may rest upon all your labours.The feeling among liberals in the country was of deep dismay. Some of the whigs doubtless found solace in the anticipation that a new middle party might be formed, with“a recovery of the old liberal position demolished for the time by John Mill, Gladstone, and Cobden.”311But this was limited to a narrow circle.“All sunshine is gone out of politics,”was a general phrase. The news was compared by one correspondent to Gelon's message to the Greeks, that the spring was taken out of their year.312An organ of the stiff nonconformists said,313“Against his government we felt that we had a great grievance; for himself,[pg 506]the nonconformists of this country have long cherished a loyalty more fervent, we are inclined to imagine, than that with which he has been regarded by any other section of the community. He, beyond all other modern statesmen, with perhaps here and there a doubtful exception, gave us the impression of a man who regarded politics as a part of Christian duty.”And the same writers most truly added,“We do not know what the English people have done for Mr. Gladstone that can be compared for a moment with what Mr. Gladstone has done for them. Claims on him we have none. He has far more than discharged any debt that he could have owed to the nation.”These words are a just remonstrance against the somewhat tyrannical conventions of English public life.When the session began, he wrote to Mrs. Gladstone (Feb. 15):“I came down to the House and took my seat nearly in the same spot as last year, finding Bright my neighbour, with which I was very well pleased. Granville and Hartington both much preferred my continuingonthe front bench to my going elsewhere.”Lord Hartington, strongly encouraged against his own inclinations by Mr. Gladstone, accepted a thankless and unpromising post, and held it with honour and credit for five difficult years to come.[pg 507]Chapter II. Vaticanism. (1874-1875)Let no susceptibilities, puritan, protestant, anglican, or other, be startled if we observe that Rome is, and may long be, in some important respects, the centre of the Christian world. It is indeed a centre which repels as well as attracts; which probably repels even more than it attracts; but which, whether repelling or attracting, influences.—-Gladstone(1875).IOne question, as the reader by this time well knows, living deepest in Mr. Gladstone's heart and mind from his first book in 1838 onwards, was the relation of the churches to modern society. English statesmen are wont to be either blind to the existence of such a question, or else they seek an easy refuge from it in a perfunctory erastianism, sometimes intellectually refined, sometimes a little brutish, but always shallow. In all the three great branches of Christianity, the Latin, the Greek or orthodox, the protestant, Mr. Gladstone's interest was incessant, sincere, and profound. It covered their theology, their organisation, their history and principles of growth, the bearings of their system upon individual character and social well-being all over Europe. He was one of the very few public men capable of discerning that the fall of the temporal power of the pope marked a more startling change and a profounder crisis in human history, than the unification of Italy, the unification of Germany, the reconstructed republic in France, perhaps even than the preservation of the American union. He knew the force of ideas in the world; he realised the vast transformations that had in their succession swept over the minds of men since cardinal dogmas had been established; he comprehended the motion in[pg 508]articles of faith, as men made their“voyagings through strange seas of thought”; he was alive to the fact that moral crises brought on by change in intellectual outlook and temperature, are of deeper concern than questions of territory, or dynasty, or form of government. The moral crisis is what reaches furthest and matters most. A movement of the first magnitude was accentuated by Pius IX., when by the Syllabus of 1864 he challenged modern society in all its foundations, its aims, its principles, in the whole range of its ideals. Some called this daring ultimatum the gravest event since the French uprising in 1789. The Syllabus prepared the way for a more elaborately organised operation on behalf of papal authority. The train was secretly laid for a grand reaction, a grand re-installation of the Christian faith.314The Two SchoolsThe pope had been despoiled of territory, his sway within the walls of Rome itself was in constant danger, his most powerful protector north of the Alps had been weakened and humiliated by protestant Prussia. He was now to be compensated for his calamities by a majestic demonstration of his hold upon the spiritual allegiance of millions of adherents in every portion of the habitable globe. The twentieth ecumenical council assembled in St. Peter's at Rome on December 8, 1869. In this gathering of catholic prelates from both hemispheres, two antagonistic schools confronted one another. The ultramontanes held that the revolutionary welter and confusion of the modern world could only be healed by solemn affirmation of the principle of sovereign authority lodged in an infallible pope, with absolute power to define by that apostolic authority what ought to be held as articles of faith or morals. The assumptions, the standards, the ruling types of the modern age, they boldly encountered with rigid iteration of maxims of old time, imposing obedience and submission to a fixed social order and a divinely commissioned hierarchy. Inflexibility was to be the single watchword by which the church could recover a world that, from Naples even to Mexico, seemed to be rapidly drifting away from her. The[pg 509]opposing school took other ground. Perhaps they saw that supremacy is one thing, and infallibility another thing quite different. The liberal catholics did not contest the dogma of papal infallibility; they questioned the expediency of its proclamation; they were for associating ideas of religion with ideas of liberty; they were not for extending the domain of miracle and the supernatural.Then as in the old historic councils, influence of race and nation had decisive effects. It could not be otherwise in what was in essence a conflict between a centralised doctrinal authority on the one hand, and the inextinguishable tendency towards national churches on the other. The Italian bishops went with the pope. The Germans, as of old they had been for emperor against priest, were now on the side of freedom against what certain of them did not hesitate to call tyranny and fraud. Some of the ablest of the French were true to Gallican tradition and resisted the decree. Among the most active and uncompromising of all the ultramontane party was our English Manning.315IIAt the end of November 1869, Acton had written to Mr. Gladstone from Rome.“Your letter is a very sad one,”Mr. Gladstone answered.“I feel as deep and real an interest in the affairs of other Christian communions as in my own; and most of all in the case of the most famous of them all, and the one within which the largest number of Christian souls find their spiritual food.”Before Manning left for 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[pg 510]thought to lie in a governing faculty, and in its wise moderation. Now he is ever quoted as theultraof 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 bealleyes 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 willanyhave 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 theapprobation of the flock.316Unless 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.Issue Of The CouncilThe French government wrote despatches of mild protest but said nothing of withdrawing their garrison. Mr. Gladstone and Lord Clarendon were for informing the Roman court that they were cognizant of the French despatches, and approved of their tenour. The Queen and the cabinet, however, were entirely averse to meddling with the council,[pg 511]and nothing was done officially. This did not prevent Mr. Gladstone from telling Archbishop Manning what impediments would be placed in the way of Irish legislation by the state of English feeling as to the Syllabus and other papal proceedings.“Myfeelings and convictions,”he says (April 16),“are as you well know decidedly with your‘opposition,’which I believe to be contending for the religious and civil interests of mankind against influences highly disastrous and menacing to both. But the prevailing opinion is that it is better to let those influences take their course, and work out the damage which they will naturally and surely entail upon the see of Rome and upon what is bound to it.”In parliament there was an utter aversion to the Roman policy, and he gives instances, noting even a change of opinion about the Irish land bill.“What I have described is no matter of speculation. I know it by actual and daily touch. I am glad you have moved me to state it in some detail. It is to me matter of profound grief, especially as regards land in Ireland.”To Lord Acton:—Of all the prelates at Rome, none have a finer opportunity, to none is a more crucial test now applied, than to those of the United States. For if there, where there is nothing of covenant, of restraint, or of equivalent between the church and the state, the propositions of the Syllabus are still to have the countenance of the episcopate, it becomes really a little difficult to maintain in argument the civil rights of such persons to toleration, however conclusive be the argument of policy in favour of granting it. I can hardly bring myself to speculate or care on what particular day the foregone conclusion is to be finally adopted. My grief is sincere and deep, but it is at the whole thing, so ruinous in its consequences as they concern faith. In my view, the size of the minority, though important, is not nearly so important as the question whether there will be a minority at all.There was a minority. In a division taken at a late stage, 451 composed the majority, 88 resisted, and 62 were for a new examination. Then the minority turned their backs on Rome; and on July 18 the definition of infallibility[pg 512]was acclaimed in St. Peter's in presence of the pope by 533 against 2.Mr. Gladstone is very glad when Clarendon instructs Mr. Russell to turn his back on the festivities at Rome.“The whole proceeding has been monstrous, and it will hereafter become one of the laughing-stocks of history. The fanaticism of the middle ages is really sober compared with that of the nineteenth century.”“The proclamation of Infallibility,”he said to Bishop Moriarty,“I must own I look upon as the most portentous (taking them singly), of all events in the history of the Christian church.”IIIThe next day, as we know, war was declared by France against Germany, the French garrison left Rome, and on September 20 the Italians marched in.A month before the war broke out, Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Clarendon:“I would avoid any official support of the Italian application to France for the evacuation of Rome, by saying that this country had always abstained from mixing in that question; and that we were the more induced to persevere in that policy from being well convinced that the French government is perfectly aware that in this country the occupation of any part of the pontifical territories by French troops is regarded with regret, pain, and disapproval. Further, that those who most strongly entertain these sentiments, are generally the persons who most highly value, and have most striven to promote, the good understanding between France and England.”The occupation of Rome by the Italian government brought upon Mr. Gladstone various demands and movements from different parts of the country. His cabinet agreed that the proper course was to decline all interference with a view to the restoration of the temporal power, though they accepted the task of promoting, by means of friendly representations, arrangements to secure the pontiff's freedom and becoming support. Then some of his presbyterian friends asked him why he should even do so much as this, when he would take no such steps for the moderator of the free church. Now[pg 513]consider, Mr. Gladstone replied:“the pope is a sovereign who was in lawful possession of large revenues, and who had charged himself with the support of a body of cardinals, ministers, nuncios, servants, and guards out of those revenues. He has been dispossessed, not for any fault of his own, but because clerical dominion was deemed intolerable. In the maintenance of the pope and his court, followers and agents, six millions of our fellow-subjects or thereabouts are deeply interested; and they are making demands upon us which we are forced to decline. But I should for one be ashamed to deny that there are the strongest equitable claims upon the Italian government growing out of the past state of things; that in these equitable claims the six millions I speak of have a real interest and share; and as the matter is international, and they have nolocus standiwith the Italian government, it is our part so far to plead their cause if need be.”IVVisit To MunichFour years elapsed before Mr. Gladstone was in a position to follow up his strong opinions on the injury done, as he believed, to human liberty by the Vatican decrees. But the great debate between ultramontanes and old catholics was followed by him with an interest that never slackened. In September 1874 he went to Munich, and we can hardly be wrong in ascribing to that visit the famous tract which was to make so lively a stir before the end of the year. His principal object was to communicate with Dr. Döllinger, and this object, he tells Mrs. Gladstone, was fully gained.“I think,”he says,“I have spent two-thirds of my whole time with Dr. Döllinger, who is indeed a most remarkable man, and it makes my blood run cold to think ofhisbeing excommunicated in his venerable but, thank God, hale and strong old age. In conversation we have covered a wide field. I know no one with whose mode of viewing and handling religious matters I more cordially agree.... He is wonderful, and simple as a child.”“I think it was in 1874,”Döllinger afterwards mentioned,“that I remember Gladstone's paying me a visit at six o'clock[pg 514]in the evening. We began talking on political and theological subjects, and became, both of us, so engrossed with the conversation, that it was two o'clock at night when I left the room to fetch a book from my library bearing on the matter in hand. I returned with it in a few minutes, and found him deep in a volume he had drawn out of his pocket—true to his principle of never losing time—during my momentary absence.”317“In the course of a walk out of Munich in the travelling season of 1874,”Mr. Gladstone wrote sixteen years later,“Dr. Döllinger told me that he was engaged in the work of retrial through the whole circle of his Latin teaching and knowledge. The results were tested in his proceedings at Bonn, when he attempted to establish aformula concordiaeupon the questions which most gravely divided Christendom.”318Among other topics Mr. Gladstone commended to his mentor the idea of a republication in a series, of the best works of those whom he would call the Henotic or Eirenic writers on the differences that separate Christians and churches from one another. He also read Pichler on the theology of Leibnitz, not without suspicion that it was rather Pichler than Leibnitz. But neither Leibnitz nor Pichler was really in his mind.After the session of 1874, when the public ear and mind had been possessed by the word Ritualism, he had as usual sought a vent in a magazine article for the thoughts with which he was teeming.319He speaks with some disdain of the question whether a handful of the clergy are or are not engaged in“an utterly hopeless and visionary effort to Romanise the church and people of England.”At no time, he says, since the sanguinary reign of Mary has such a scheme been possible. Least of all, he proceeds, could the scheme have life in it“when Rome has substituted for the proud boast ofsemper eadema policy of violence and change in faith; when she has refurbished and paraded anew every[pg 515]rusty tool she was fondly thought to have disused; when no one can become her convert, without renouncing his moral and mental freedom, and placing his civil loyalty and duty at the mercy of another; and when she has equally repudiated modern thought and ancient history.”If these strong words expressed his state of mind before he went abroad, we may readily imagine how the Bavarian air would fan the flame.Though Dr. Döllinger himself—“so inaccessible to religious passions”—was not aware of the purpose of his English friend, there can be little doubt that Mr. Gladstone returned from Munich with the same degree of internal ferment as that which had possessed his mind on his return from Naples three-and-twenty years before. In October he writes to Lord Acton from Hawarden:—What you have said on the subject of ultramontanism and of the mode in which it should be handled, appears to me to be as wise and as good as is possible. It is really a case for hitting hard, but for hitting the right men. In anything I say or do on the subject, I would wish heartily and simply to conform to the spirit of your words. But I feel myself drawn onwards. Indeed some of your words help to draw me. The question with me now is whether I shall or shall not publish a tract which I have written, and of which the title would probably be,“The Vatican Decrees in their bearing on Civil Allegiance: a Political Expostulation.”I incline to think that I ought to publish it. If it were in your power and will to run over here for a night or two I should seek to profit by your counsel, and should ask you to read as much of thems.as your patience would endure. A more substantial attraction would be that I could go over much of my long and interesting conversations with Döllinger.VPublication Of The PamphletThe pamphlet320appeared in November, and was meant for an argument that the decree of infallibility aimed a deadly blow at the old historic, scientific, and moderate school; it was a degradation of the episcopal order; it carried to its furthest point that spirit of absolutist centralisation, which[pg 516]in its excesses is as fatal to vigorous life in the church, as in the state; it overthrew the principle not even denied by the council of Trent in the sixteenth century, that the pope and his judgments were triable by the assembled representatives of the Christian world.Thrice in history it seemed as if the constitutional party in the church was about to triumph: at the council of Constance in the fifteenth century; in the conflict between the French episcopate and Innocentxi.in the days of Bossuet; and thirdly, when Clementxiv., exactly a hundred years before now, dealt with the Jesuits and“levelled in the dust the deadliest foes that mental and moral liberty have ever known.”From July 1870 all this had passed away, and the constitutional party had seen its death-warrant signed and sealed. The“myrmidons of the apostolic chamber”had committed their church to revolutionary measures. The vast new claims were lodged in the reign of a pontiff, who by the dark Syllabus of 1864 had condemned free speech, a free press, liberty of conscience, toleration of nonconformity, the free study of civil and philosophic things independently of church authority, marriage unless sacramentally contracted, and all definition by the state of the civil rights of the church.The Pamphlet“It has been a favourite purpose of my life,”Mr. Gladstone said,“not to conjure up, but to conjure down, public alarms. I am not now going to pretend that either foreign foe or domestic treason can, at the bidding of the court of Rome, disturb these peaceful shores. But although such fears may be visionary, it is more visionary still to suppose for one moment that the claims of Gregoryvii., of Innocentiii., and of Bonifaceviii.have been disinterred in the nineteenth century, like hideous mummies picked out of Egyptian sarcophagi, in the interests of archæology, or without a definite and practical aim.”What, then, was the clear and foregone purpose behind the parade of all these astonishing reassertions? The first was—by claims to infallibility in creed, to the prerogative of miracles, to dominion over the unseen world—to satisfy spiritual appetites, sharpened into reaction and made morbid by“the levity of the destructive speculations so widely current, and the notable hardihood of the[pg 517]anti-Christian writing of the day.”This alone, however, would not explain the deliberate provocation of all the“risks of so daring a raid upon the civil sphere.”The answer was to be found in the favourite design, hardly a secret design, of restoring by the road of force when any favourable opportunity should arise, and of re-erecting, the terrestrial throne of the popedom,“even if it could only be re-erected on the ashes of the city, and amidst the whitening bones of the people.”And this brings the writer to the immediate practical aspects of his tract.“If the baleful power which is expressed by the phraseCuria Romana, and not at all adequately rendered in its historic force by the usual English equivalent‘Court of Rome,’really entertains the scheme, it doubtless counts on the support in every country of an organised and devoted party; which, when it can command the scales of political power, will promote interference, and while it is in a minority, will work for securing neutrality. As the peace of Europe may be in jeopardy, and as the duties even of England, as one of its constabulary authorities, might come to be in question, it would be most interesting to know the mental attitude of our Roman catholic fellow-countrymen in England and Ireland with reference to the subject; and it seems to be one on which we are entitled to solicit information.”Too commonly the spirit of the convert was to be expressed by the notorious words,“a catholic first, an Englishman afterwards”—words that properly convey no more than a truism,“for every Christian must seek to place his religion even before his country in his inner heart; but very far from a truism in the sense in which we have been led to construe them.”This, indeed, was a new and very real“papal aggression.”For himself, Mr. Gladstone said, it should not shake his allegiance to“the rule of maintaining equal civil rights irrespectively of religious differences.”Had he not given conclusive indications of that view, by supporting in parliament as a minister since the council, the repeal in 1871 of the law against ecclesiastical titles, whose enactment he had opposed twenty years before?That the pamphlet should create intense excitement, was inevitable from the place of the writer in the public eye,[pg 518]from the extraordinary vehemence of the attack, and above all from the unquenchable fascination of the topic. Whether the excitement in the country was more than superficial; whether most readers fathomed the deep issues as they stood, not between catholic and protestant, but between catholic and catholic within the fold; whether in fastening upon the civil allegiance of English Romanists Mr. Gladstone took the true point against Vaticanism—these are questions that we need not here discuss. The central proposition made a cruel dilemma for a large class of the subjects of the Queen; for the choice assigned to them by assuming stringent logic was between being bad citizens if they submitted to the decree of papal infallibility, and bad catholics if they did not. Protestant logicians wrote to Mr. Gladstone that if his contention were good, we ought now to repeal catholic emancipation and again clap on the fetters. Syllogisms in action are but stupid things after all, unless they are checked by a tincture of what seems paradox.321Apart from the particular issue in his Vatican pamphlet, Mr. Gladstone believed himself to be but following his own main track in life and thought in his assault upon“a policy which declines to acknowledge the high place assigned to liberty in the counsels of Providence, and which upon the pretext of the abuse that like every other good she suffers, expels her from its system.”Among the names that he was never willing to discuss with me—Machiavelli, for instance—was Joseph de Maistre, the hardiest, most adventurous, most ingenious, and incisive of all the speculative champions of European reaction.322In the pages of de Maistre he might have found the reasoned base on which the ultramontane creed may be supposed to rest. He would have found liberty depicted less as a blessing than a scourge; even Bossuet denounced as a heretic with dubious chances of salvation, for his struggle on behalf of a national church against Roman centralisation; the old[pg 519]Greeks held up to odium as a race of talkers, frivolous, light, and born incorrigible dividers. In dealing with de Maistre, Mr. Gladstone would have had a foeman worthier of his powerful steel than the authors of the Syllabus, Schema, Postulatum, and all the rest of what he called the Vaticanism of 1870. But here, as always, he was man of action, and wrote for a specific though perhaps a fugitive purpose.VILabours Of The ControversyAt the end of the year the total number printed of the tract was 145,000, and of these 120,000 were in a people's edition.“My pamphlet,”he tells Lacaita,“has brought upon me such a mass of work as I can hardly cope with, and I am compelled to do all things as succinctly as possible, though my work is with little intermission from morning till night. I agree with you that the pamphlet in the main tells its own story; and I am glad there is no need to select in a hurry some one to write on the difference between papism and Catholicism.... There is no doubt that the discussion opens,i.e.makes a breach in the walls of the papal theology, and it ought to be turned to account. But I shall have enough to do with all my hands, if I am to work properly through the task I have undertaken. Not, I trust, for long, for I think another pamphlet should suffice to end it on my side. But I am vexed that Manning (as if he had been pulled up at Rome), after having announced his formal reply six weeks ago, hangs fire and now talks of delaying it.”The result, he assures Lord Granville (Nov. 25),“must be injurious to the pestilent opinions that have so grievously obtained the upper hand in that church, and to the party whichmeansto have a war in Europe for the restoration of the temporal power. To place impediments in their way has been my principal purpose.”He told Acton (Dec. 18),“When you were putting in caveats and warnings, you did not say to me,‘Now mind, this affair will absorb some, perhaps many, months of your life.’It has been so up to the present moment, and it evidently will be so for some time.”With Acton he carried on elaborate correspondence[pg 520]upon some of the questions raised by the Syllabus, notably on the effect of the pope's disciplinary judgment on anglican marriages, converting them into relations that were not marriage at all. He fears that he has conceded too much to the papal party in not treating the Syllabus asex cathedra; in allowing that the popes had been apt to claim dogmatic infallibility for wellnigh a thousand years; as to the ecumenicity of the Vatican council. Among other matters he was reading“the curious volumes ofDiscorsi di Pio IX., published at Rome, and he might find it his duty to write collaterally upon them.”This duty he performed with much fidelity in theQuarterly Reviewfor January 1875. He is active in interest about translations; keen to enlist auxiliaries in every camp and all countries; delighted with all utterances from Italy or elsewhere that make in his direction, even noting with satisfaction that the agnostic Huxley was warm in approval.“I pass my days and nights,”he tells the Duke of Argyll (Dec. 19),“in the Vatican. Already the pope has given me two months of incessant correspondence and other hard work, and it may very well last two more. Nor is this work pleasant; but I am as far as possible from repenting of it, as no one else to whom the public would listen saved me the trouble. It is full of intense interest. Every post brings a mass of general reading, writing, or both. Forty covers of one kind or another to-day, and all my time is absorbed. But the subject is well worth the pains.”The Italians, Lord Granville told him,“generally approved, but were puzzled why you should have thought it necessary.”Retorts and replies arose in swarms, including one from Manning and another from Newman. He was accused by some of introducing a BismarckianKulturkampfinto England, of seeking to recover his lost popularity by pandering to no-popery, of disregarding the best interests of the country for the sake of his own restoration to power.323I have now finished reading—he said at the beginning of February—the 20th reply to my pamphlet, They cover 1000 pages. And I am hard at work preparing mine with a good[pg 521]conscience and I think a good argument. Manning has been, I think, as civil as he could.Feb. 5.—All this morning I have had to spend in hunting up one important statement of Manning's which I am almost convinced is a gross mis-statement....Feb. 6.—Manning in his 200 pages has not, I venture to say, made a single point against me. But I shall have to show up his quotations very seriously. We have exchanged one or two friendly notes. 8.—Worked on Vaticanism nearly all day and (an exception to my rule) late at night. 14.—Eight hours' work on my proof sheets. 15.—Went through Acton's corrections and notes on my proofs. 19.—Worked much in evening on finishing up my tract, Dr. Döllinger's final criticisms having arrived. He thinks highly of the work, which he observes will cut deeper than the former one, and be more difficult to deal with. By midnight I had the revises ready with the corrections. 20.—Inserted one or two references and wrote“Press”on the 2nd revises. May the power and blessing of God go with the work.The second tract was more pungent than the first, and it gave pleasure to an important minister abroad who had now entangled himself by Falk laws and otherwise in a quarrel with the papacy.“I have had a letter of thanks,”Mr. Gladstone writes to Hawarden (March 6),“from Bismarck. This pamphlet is stouter, sharper, and cheaper than the last, but is only in its eleventh thousand, I believe.”Among others who replied toVaticanismwas Dr. Newman; he appended a new postscript of four-and-twenty pages to his former answer to the first of Mr. Gladstone's pamphlets. Its tone is courteous and argumentative—far too much so to please the ultras who had the pope's ear—and without the wild hitting that Mr. Gladstone found in Manning.Newman wrote to thank him (Jan. 17, 1875) for a letter that he described as“forbearing and generous.”“It has been a great grief to me,”said Newman,“to have had to write against one whose career I have followed from first to last with so much (I may say) loyal interest and admiration. I had known about you from others, and had looked at you with kindly curiosity, before you came up to Christ Church, and from the time that you were launched into public life,[pg 522]you have retained a hold on my thoughts and on my gratitude by the various marks of attention which every now and then you have shown me, when you had an opportunity, and I could not fancy my ever standing towards you in any other relation than that which had lasted so long. What a fate it is, that now when so memorable a career has reached its formal termination [retirement from leadership], I should be the man, on the very day on which it closed, to present to you amid the many expressions of public sympathy which it elicits, a controversial pamphlet as my offering.”But he could not help writing it, he was called upon from such various quarters; and his conscience told him that he who had been in great measure the cause of so many becoming catholics, had no right to leave them in the lurch, when charges were made against them as serious as unexpected.“I do not think,”he concluded,“I ever can be sorry for what I have done, but I never can cease to be sorry for the necessity of doing it.”VIIChange Of AbodeThis fierce controversial episode was enough to show that the habit and temperament of action still followed him in the midst of all his purposes of retreat. Withdrawal from parliamentary leadership was accompanied by other steps, apparently all making in the same direction. He sold the house in Carlton House Terrace, where he had passed eight-and-twenty years of work and power and varied sociability.“I had grown to the house,”he says (April 15),“having lived more time in it than in any other since I was born, and mainly by reason of all that was done in it.”To Mrs. Gladstone he wrote (Feb. 28):—I do not wonder that you feel parting from the house will be a blow and a pang. It is nothing less than this to me, but it must be faced and you will face it gallantly. So much has occurred there; and thus it is leaving not the house only but the neighbourhood, where I have been with you for more than thirty-five years, and altogether nearly forty. The truth is that innocently and from special causes we have on the whole been housed better than according to our circumstances. All along Carlton House[pg 523]Terrace I think you would not find any one with less than £20,000 a year, and most of them with, much more.He sold his collection of china and his Wedgwood ware.324He despatched his books to Hawarden. He can hardly have resolved on retirement that should be effective and complete, or else he must have arranged to quit the House of Commons. In his diary he entered (March 30, 1875):—Views about the future and remaining section of my life. In outline they are undefined but in substance definite. The main point is this: that setting aside exceptional circumstances which would have to provide for themselves, my prospective work is not parliamentary. My ties will be slight to an assembly with whose tendencies I am little in harmony at the present time; nor can I flatter myself that what is called the public out of doors is more sympathetic. But there is much to be done with the pen, all bearing much on high and sacred ends, for even Homeric study as I view it, is in this very sense of high importance; and what lies beyond this is concerned directly with the great subject of belief.To Mrs. Gladstone he wrote (May 19, 1875):“I am feeling as it were my way towards the purposes of the rest of my life. It will I dare say clear by degrees. For the general business of the country, my ideas and temper are thoroughly out of harmony with the ideas and temper of the day, especially as they are represented in London.”The movement of negation had been in full swing for a dozen years before the force and weight of it had, amid the stress and absorption of daily business, reached his inner mind. In May 1872, in a speech as member of the council of King's College—“averse from, and little used to platform speaking,”as he described himself to Manning—he used some strong language about those who promulgate as science what is not science and as religion what is not religion; but he took care to sever himself from the recent Roman decrees, which“seemed much to resemble the proclamation of a[pg 524]perpetual war against the progress and the movement of the human mind.”325In December 1872, he caused a marked sensation by an address at Liverpool, in which he spoke of Strauss's book onNew and Old Belief.326He had become a member of the metaphysical society, where eminent representatives of every faith and of no faith discussed every aspect of the foundations of human creeds. He was of too masculine and energetic a cast of mind to feel mere shock as he listened to Huxley, Tyndall, Clifford, Harrison, firmly arguing materialism or positivism or agnosticism or other unhistoric forms. That his whole soul was energetically oppugnant, I need not say. His reverence for freedom never wavered. He wrote to an editor who had criticised his Liverpool address (Jan. 3, 1873):—In the interest of my address, I wish to say that not a word to my knowledge fell from me limiting the range of free inquiry, nor have I ever supposed St. Paul to say anything so silly as“Prove all things: but some you must not prove.”Doubtless some obscurity of mine, I know not what, has led to an error into which the able writer of the article has fallen, not alone.To the Duke of Argyll he wrote:—Dec. 28, '72.—I have been touching upon deep and dangerous subjects at Liverpool. Whether I went beyond my province many may doubt. But of the extent of the mischief I do not doubt any more than of its virulence. All that I hear from day to day convinces me of the extension of this strange epidemic, for it is not, considering how it comes, worthy of being called a rational or scientific process. Be it however, what it may, we politicians are children playing with toys in comparison to that great work of and for manhood, which has to be done, and will yet be done, in restoring belief.[pg 525]Sir Robert Morier sent him from Munich Frohschammer's reply to Strauss.“If I understand him aright,”said Mr. Gladstone,“he is a Unitarian, minus Miracle and Inspiration.”The whole book seemed to him able, honest, and diligent:—But, he adds, I am one of those who think the Christianity of Frohschammer (as I have described it) is like a tall tree scientifically prepared for the saw by the preliminary process, well known to wood-cutters, of clearing away with the axe all projecting roots, which as long as they remained rendered the final operation impossible. This first process leaves the tree standing in a very trim condition, much more mathematical in form, as it is more near a cylinder, than in its native state. The business of the saw, when the horse and the man arrive, is soon accomplished.To his article on ritualism he prefixed as motto two short lines of Pindar, about days that are to come being wisest witnesses.327In spite of retreat, it was impossible that he should forget the vast responsibility imposed upon him, both by his gifts and by the popular ascendency into which they had brought him. His was not the retreat of self-indulgence, and the days that were to come speedily brought him duties that were to bear him far into regions of storm and conflict now unforeseen. Meanwhile, with occasional visits to Westminster, he lived even and industrious days at Hawarden, felling trees, working at Greek mythology and ethnology, delighting in the woods and glades of the park, above all delighting in the tranquillity of his“temple of peace.”Besides being the bookroom of a student, this was still a far-shining beacon in the popular eye. If sages, scholars, heroes, saints, with time's serene and hallowed gravity looked upon him from their shelves, yet loud echoes sounded in his ear from roaring surges of an outer world—from turbid ebb and flow of all the struggle and clamorous hopes and half-blind mysterious instincts of the nations.[pg 526]

Chapter I. Retirement From Leadership. (1874-1875)“ἐγὼ μὲν, ὧναξ, πρεσβύτερός τε ἤδη εἰμὶ καὶ βαρὺς ἀείρεσθαι; σὺ δέ τινα τῶνδε τῶν νεωτέρων κέλευε ταῦτα ποιέειν.”—Herodotusiv. 150.“I am too old, O king, and slow to stir; so bid thou one of the younger men here do these things.”A member of the great government of 1868, in a letter to one of his family, gave an account of the final meeting of the cabinet:—Feb. 17, 1874.—I doubt—he says—whether I ever passed a more eventful evening than yesterday. The whole cabinet was assembled. We resolved after full discussion of pros and cons, and some slight difference of opinion, to resign at once. After which came the startling announcement that Gladstone would no longer retain the leadership of the liberal party, nor resume it, unless the party had settled its differences. He will not expose himself to the insults and outrages of 1866-8, and he has a keen sense of the disloyalty of the party during the last three years. He will sit as a private member and occasionally speak for himself, but he will not attend the House regularly, nor assume any one of the functions of leader. He does this not from anger, but because he says that it is absolutely necessary to party action to learn that all the duties and responsibilities do not rest on the leaders, but that followers have their obligations too. As a consequence of this Cardwell retires to the House of Lords.[pg 498]He will not take the leadership, nor will he consent to serve under any one but Gladstone. He is too old, he says. Lowe protests against the anarchical experiment, and talks of Hartington as leader. As neither Lowe, nor Bright, nor Goschen, nor Forster is in a position to act as leader, it may come to this, so that the liberal front benches of the two Houses will be entirely remodelled.309Here is Mr. Gladstone's own account, written twenty-three years later, and confirmed by all other accessible papers of the moment:—I was most anxious to make the retirement of the ministry the occasion of my own. I had served for more than forty years. My age—65—was greater than that of Sir Robert Peel at his retirement in 1846, or at his death in 1850, and was much beyond that at which most of the leading commoners of the century had terminated their political career, together with their natural life. I felt myself to be in some measure out of touch with some of the tendencies of the liberal party, especially in religious matters. Sir A. Clark, whom I consulted, would give me on medical grounds no encouragement whatever. But I deeply desired an interval between parliament and the grave. In spite of the solicitations of my friends I persisted. For 1874 there was a sort of compromise“without prejudice.”As having a title to some rest I was not a very regular attendant, but did not formally abdicate.Reasons For WithdrawalHe found specific reasons for withdrawal in the state of the party (Feb. 12):—1. The absence of any great positive aim (the late plan [budget] having failed) for which to co-operate. 2. The difficulty of establishing united and vigorous action in the liberal party for the purposes of economy. 3. The unlikelihood of arriving at any present agreement respecting education.In another fragment of the same date, he says:—I do not forget that I am in debt to the party generally for kindness, indulgence, and confidence, much beyond what I have[pg 499]deserved. Deeming myself unable to hold it together from my present position in a manner worthy of it, I see how unlikely it is that I should hereafter be able to give any material aid in the adjustment of its difficulties. Yet if such aid should at any time be generally desired with a view to arresting some great evil or procuring for the nation some great good, my willingness to enter into counsel for the occasion would follow from all I have said. But always with the understanding that as between section and section I could not become a partisan, and that such interference even in the case of its proving useful would entail no obligation whatever on those accepting it, and carry with it no disturbance of any arrangement subsisting at the time.The situation proved, as Lowe had foreseen, an anarchic experiment. Mr. Gladstone went up to London for the session, and followed his ordinary social course:—March 9, 1874.—Off at 4.45 to Windsor for the fête. We dined at St. George's Hall. I was presented to the Duchess of C. by the Queen, and had a few kind words from H.M. 11.—Archbishop Manning, 9-11. It is kind in him to come, but most of it is rather hollow work, limited as we are. 16.—Dined at Marlborough House. A civil talk with Disraeli. 20.—FinishedVivian Grey. The first quarter extremely clever, the rest trash.May 15.—Emperor of Russia's reception at 3.15. He thanked me for my conduct to Russia while I was minister. I assured his Majesty I had watched with profound interest the transactions of his reign, and the great benefits he had conferred upon his people. He hoped the relations of the two countries would always be good.... Dined at Marlborough House. Stafford House ball afterwards. The emperor complained of the burden and late hours of evening entertainments. Princess of Wales so nice about her picture. D[israeli] complained of my absence, said they could not get on without me. 20.—Dined at the F.O. to meet the emperor. It was very kind of Derby. Much work at Hawarden in arranging books and papers.The House of Commons is hardly attractive to an irregular and perfunctory attendant; and Mr. Gladstone's thoughts[pg 500]all turned to other fields. To Mrs. Gladstone he wrote early in April:—The anti-parliamentary reaction has been stronger with me even than I anticipated. I am as far as possible from feeling the want of the House of Commons. I could cheerfully go there to do a work; but I hope and pray to be as little there as possible, except for such an aim. In London I think we were too much hustled to speak leisurely or effectually of the future. It will open for us by degrees. I shall be glad when the matter of money, after all a secondary one, is disentangled, but chiefly because it seems to put pressure upon you. I spoke to Stephen about these matters on Saturday; he was kind, reasonable, and in all ways as satisfactory as possible. There is one thing I should like you to understand clearly as to my view of things, for it is an essential part of that view. I am convinced that the welfare of mankind does not now depend on the state or the world of politics; the real battle is being fought in the world of thought, where a deadly attack is made with great tenacity of purpose and over a wide field, upon the greatest treasure of mankind, the belief in God and the gospel of Christ.In June Sir Stephen Glynne died,—“a dark, dark day.”“My brother-in-law,”wrote Mr. Gladstone at a later date,“was a man of singular refinement and as remarkable modesty. His culture was high and his character one of deep interest. His memory was on the whole decidedly the most remarkable known to me of the generation and country. His life, however, was retired and unobtrusive; but he sat in parliament, I think, for about fifteen years, and was lord-lieutenant of his county.”I thank you much—Mr. Gladstone said to the Duke of Argyll—for your kind note. Your sympathy and that of the duchess are ever ready. But even you can hardly tell how it is on this occasion needed and warranted. My wife has lost the last member of a family united by bonds of the rarest tenderness, the last representative of his line, the best of brothers, who had ever drawn closer to her as the little rank was thinned. As for me, no one can know what our personal relations were, without knowing[pg 501]the interior details of a long family history, and efforts and struggles in common carried on through a long series of years, which riveted into the closest union our original affection. He was a very rare man, but we grieve not for him; he sleeps the sleep of the just. The event is a great one also to the outward frame of our life here.310Ecclesiastical DebateIn the same letter he says it is most painful to him to be dragged into ecclesiastical turmoil, as for example by the Scotch patronage bill, which he considers precipitate, unwise, and daring, or the bill directed against the endowed schools commissioners, of whom his brother-in-law, Lord Lyttelton, was one. In the last case he acted as a leader of an organised party, but in the more important instance of a bill devised, as Mr. Disraeli said, to put down ritualism, his dissent from most of those around him fulfilled all the anticipations that had pointed to retirement. The House was heartily in favour of the bill, and what is called the country earnestly supported it, though in the cabinet itself at least four ministers were strenuously hostile. Mr. Gladstone writes to his wife a trenchant account of his vigorous dealing with a prominent colleague who had rashly ventured to mark him for assault. He sent word to the two archbishops that if they carried a certain amendment he should hold himself“altogether discharged from maintaining any longer the establishment of the church.”He wrote to Lord Harrowby when the recess came:—I think, or rather I am convinced, that the effecteitherof one or two more ecclesiastical sessions of parliament such as the last, or of any prolonged series of contentious proceedings under the recent Act, upon subjects of widespread interest, will be to disestablish the church. I do not feel the dread of disestablishment which you may probably entertain: but I desire and seek so long as standing ground remains, to avert, not to precipitate it.To another correspondent—Individually I have serious doubts whether the whole of the penal proceedings taken in this country with respect to church[pg 502]matters from the day of Dr. Hampden downwards, have not done considerably more harm than good. There is no doubt at all that all the evils, of whatever kind, at which they were aimed, exist at this moment among us in a far more aggravated shape than when they began.... My object and desire has ever been and still is, to keep the church of England together, both as a church and as an establishment. As a church, I believe she is strong enough, by virtue of the prayer-book, to hold together under all circumstances; but as an establishment, in my opinion, she is not strong enough to bear either serious secession or prolonged parliamentary agitation.Finally, in a letter dated from Whittinghame (Nov. 17)—There are already too many causes of demoralisation operating upon the House of Commons. If it is also to become a debased copy of an ecclesiastical council, all the worst men and worst qualities of the worst men will come to the front, and the place will become intolerable.Even any member of parliament who shares none of Mr. Gladstone's theology, may sympathise to the full with his deep disgust at theologic and ecclesiastical discussions as conducted in that secular air. We can easily understand how detestable he found it, and how those discussions fortified his sense of estrangement from the ruling sentiments of the parliamentary party of which he was still the titular leader.Of course the whigs, always for keeping a parliamentary church in its proper place, disliked his line. Liberals like Thirlwall read his speeches“with great pain and suspicion,”and declared their confidence to be shaken. Hardly any section was completely satisfied. His mind in the autumn and winter of 1874 was absorbed, as we shall see within a few pages, in an assault upon the decrees of the Vatican Council of 1870. This assault, as he told Lord Granville (Dec. 7, 1874), while tending“to hearten”the party generally, was against his resumption of formal leadership, because it widened the breach with the Irishmen in the House of Commons. Apart from this there were many questions, each with a group of adherents to a special view, but incapable of being pursued by common and united action. He[pg 503]ran through the list in writing to Lord Granville. It has historic interest:—1. Extension of the suffrage, with redistribution of seats abreast or in the rear. 2. Disestablishment in Scotland, England. 3. Land laws. 4. Retrenchment. 5. Colonial policy, territorial extension of the empire. 6. Reform of local government taxation. 7. Secular education. 8. Undenominational education. 9. Irish affairs. On no one of these is there known to exist a plan desired by the entire party, or by any clear and decisive majority of it.On the whole, he was persuaded that neither the party generally nor the country desired another period of active reforms, even if he were fit to conduct them. Besides this he confessed his“apprehension that differences would spring up, and great shrinking from any breach with the party, and a determination, often expressed, never, if he could help it, to lead one branch of it against another.”In many forms he carried Lord Granville with him round the circle of his arguments. He once sent his points on half-a-dozen scraps of paper. Granville playfully replied,“I should like to treat them as old Lord Bessborough used to treat his playing-cards when luck was adverse—tear them up into small bits and toss them in the fire.”Nothing shook him, not even Mrs. Gladstone's misgivings. To her he wrote from Carlton House Terrace on the eve of the session of 1875:—Now for the grave matter about the leadership. I have had much conversation with Granville and Cardwell, and I am going to see Hartington, also Goschen, to-morrow. My letter is rewritten and improved, but I am obliged to stand to my conclusion, for many reasons. Among them the church reason is one of the most serious, and the other the undefined and prolonged character of the service if now undertaken. This, while arguing and deprecating, they admit I think to a great extent. Our old colleagues are inclined to come up on Thursday if they can, and this will be rather to hear than to debate. Hartington will succeed. I am indeed sorry that you and I have not been able to take the same view of this important subject, but you know that[pg 504]I am acting on convictions very long entertained, and will I am sure believe that I have probed myself deeply, and used all the means in my power to get at a right conclusion. Nay, I think you will be more reconciled, when I tell you that Granville did not really see his way either to a nominal leadership, or to making any arrangement by which I could after a short time with some certainty have escaped. I saw Clark last night and this morning; he gives an excellent account of me and makes it impossible for me to plead health as my reason.The drama went rapidly forward:—Jan. 12.—I find that the agreement made yesterday that I should meet my former colleagues on Monday will require me to remain until this day, though after a pretty busy morning the pressure is less. I have, however, to preside in the evening at the meeting of the Metaphysical Society, and to listen, though I hope nothing more, to a tough discussion. Manning, I am sorry to say, will be there. His pamphlet is at length going to press, and will extend he says to 150 pages. Newman is not out yet.11 Carlton House Terrace, Jan. 14, '75.—This great affair is nearly arranged. My old colleagues all submit under protest; and I shall be free. An article in theTimesthis morning is undisguisedly aimed at getting rid of me; but it does not express any of their feelings. We have had a morning at Granville's; Halifax, Granville, Cardwell, Hartington, Aberdare, Forster, Carlingford, Stansfeld, Selborne, Goschen, Lowe, Kimberley,—in short all, I think, except Argyll and Bright. There was argument and exhortation, and much kindness. My letter to Granville will be accompanied by a short reply from him expressing difference of opinion and regret. They are afraid of being blamed by the party if they seem to show indifference.The Queen thanked Mr. Gladstone for communicating to her his resolution of retiring from the more active duties of parliamentary life. She was not entirely unprepared for it after what he told her himself last year.“She knows that his zeal and untiring energy have always been exerted with the desire of advancing the welfare of the nation and[pg 505]maintaining the honour of the crown, and she thanks him for his loyal assurances of support on all occasions when it may become necessary.”Bright And Other ColleaguesThe Duke of Argyll wrote“sincerely to congratulate”him upon his withdrawal. Bright on the other hand (Jan. 17) said he could not applaud, yet he would not blame: Mr. Gladstone's course seemed so unfortunate if not disastrous to the great public interests committed to him:—For myself, says Bright, if I could have foreseen either the result of the election of last year, or your retirement from the conduct of the party, I should certainly have withdrawn from parliament, where now I seem to have quite as little of duty or of a mission as you have. The front opposition bench is full of discord, and when you are not there full of jealousy, and I find myself without any particular attraction to any particular part of the House. However, I will not complain; some door of escape may open for me, and I can become a spectator as you are proposing to be.I hope on some occasion I may have the chance of seeing you when you come to town. I have had so much pleasure in your friendship, and have gained so much from it, that I would fain hope it need not cease now, when our association will necessarily be less frequent than it has been of late years. Whether you come back to the political field or turn wholly to study and to literature, I am sure you will be usefully employed, and I hope that nothing but blessing may rest upon all your labours.The feeling among liberals in the country was of deep dismay. Some of the whigs doubtless found solace in the anticipation that a new middle party might be formed, with“a recovery of the old liberal position demolished for the time by John Mill, Gladstone, and Cobden.”311But this was limited to a narrow circle.“All sunshine is gone out of politics,”was a general phrase. The news was compared by one correspondent to Gelon's message to the Greeks, that the spring was taken out of their year.312An organ of the stiff nonconformists said,313“Against his government we felt that we had a great grievance; for himself,[pg 506]the nonconformists of this country have long cherished a loyalty more fervent, we are inclined to imagine, than that with which he has been regarded by any other section of the community. He, beyond all other modern statesmen, with perhaps here and there a doubtful exception, gave us the impression of a man who regarded politics as a part of Christian duty.”And the same writers most truly added,“We do not know what the English people have done for Mr. Gladstone that can be compared for a moment with what Mr. Gladstone has done for them. Claims on him we have none. He has far more than discharged any debt that he could have owed to the nation.”These words are a just remonstrance against the somewhat tyrannical conventions of English public life.When the session began, he wrote to Mrs. Gladstone (Feb. 15):“I came down to the House and took my seat nearly in the same spot as last year, finding Bright my neighbour, with which I was very well pleased. Granville and Hartington both much preferred my continuingonthe front bench to my going elsewhere.”Lord Hartington, strongly encouraged against his own inclinations by Mr. Gladstone, accepted a thankless and unpromising post, and held it with honour and credit for five difficult years to come.

“ἐγὼ μὲν, ὧναξ, πρεσβύτερός τε ἤδη εἰμὶ καὶ βαρὺς ἀείρεσθαι; σὺ δέ τινα τῶνδε τῶν νεωτέρων κέλευε ταῦτα ποιέειν.”—Herodotusiv. 150.“I am too old, O king, and slow to stir; so bid thou one of the younger men here do these things.”

“ἐγὼ μὲν, ὧναξ, πρεσβύτερός τε ἤδη εἰμὶ καὶ βαρὺς ἀείρεσθαι; σὺ δέ τινα τῶνδε τῶν νεωτέρων κέλευε ταῦτα ποιέειν.”—Herodotusiv. 150.

“I am too old, O king, and slow to stir; so bid thou one of the younger men here do these things.”

A member of the great government of 1868, in a letter to one of his family, gave an account of the final meeting of the cabinet:—

Feb. 17, 1874.—I doubt—he says—whether I ever passed a more eventful evening than yesterday. The whole cabinet was assembled. We resolved after full discussion of pros and cons, and some slight difference of opinion, to resign at once. After which came the startling announcement that Gladstone would no longer retain the leadership of the liberal party, nor resume it, unless the party had settled its differences. He will not expose himself to the insults and outrages of 1866-8, and he has a keen sense of the disloyalty of the party during the last three years. He will sit as a private member and occasionally speak for himself, but he will not attend the House regularly, nor assume any one of the functions of leader. He does this not from anger, but because he says that it is absolutely necessary to party action to learn that all the duties and responsibilities do not rest on the leaders, but that followers have their obligations too. As a consequence of this Cardwell retires to the House of Lords.[pg 498]He will not take the leadership, nor will he consent to serve under any one but Gladstone. He is too old, he says. Lowe protests against the anarchical experiment, and talks of Hartington as leader. As neither Lowe, nor Bright, nor Goschen, nor Forster is in a position to act as leader, it may come to this, so that the liberal front benches of the two Houses will be entirely remodelled.309

Here is Mr. Gladstone's own account, written twenty-three years later, and confirmed by all other accessible papers of the moment:—

I was most anxious to make the retirement of the ministry the occasion of my own. I had served for more than forty years. My age—65—was greater than that of Sir Robert Peel at his retirement in 1846, or at his death in 1850, and was much beyond that at which most of the leading commoners of the century had terminated their political career, together with their natural life. I felt myself to be in some measure out of touch with some of the tendencies of the liberal party, especially in religious matters. Sir A. Clark, whom I consulted, would give me on medical grounds no encouragement whatever. But I deeply desired an interval between parliament and the grave. In spite of the solicitations of my friends I persisted. For 1874 there was a sort of compromise“without prejudice.”As having a title to some rest I was not a very regular attendant, but did not formally abdicate.

Reasons For Withdrawal

Reasons For Withdrawal

He found specific reasons for withdrawal in the state of the party (Feb. 12):—

1. The absence of any great positive aim (the late plan [budget] having failed) for which to co-operate. 2. The difficulty of establishing united and vigorous action in the liberal party for the purposes of economy. 3. The unlikelihood of arriving at any present agreement respecting education.

In another fragment of the same date, he says:—

I do not forget that I am in debt to the party generally for kindness, indulgence, and confidence, much beyond what I have[pg 499]deserved. Deeming myself unable to hold it together from my present position in a manner worthy of it, I see how unlikely it is that I should hereafter be able to give any material aid in the adjustment of its difficulties. Yet if such aid should at any time be generally desired with a view to arresting some great evil or procuring for the nation some great good, my willingness to enter into counsel for the occasion would follow from all I have said. But always with the understanding that as between section and section I could not become a partisan, and that such interference even in the case of its proving useful would entail no obligation whatever on those accepting it, and carry with it no disturbance of any arrangement subsisting at the time.

The situation proved, as Lowe had foreseen, an anarchic experiment. Mr. Gladstone went up to London for the session, and followed his ordinary social course:—

March 9, 1874.—Off at 4.45 to Windsor for the fête. We dined at St. George's Hall. I was presented to the Duchess of C. by the Queen, and had a few kind words from H.M. 11.—Archbishop Manning, 9-11. It is kind in him to come, but most of it is rather hollow work, limited as we are. 16.—Dined at Marlborough House. A civil talk with Disraeli. 20.—FinishedVivian Grey. The first quarter extremely clever, the rest trash.May 15.—Emperor of Russia's reception at 3.15. He thanked me for my conduct to Russia while I was minister. I assured his Majesty I had watched with profound interest the transactions of his reign, and the great benefits he had conferred upon his people. He hoped the relations of the two countries would always be good.... Dined at Marlborough House. Stafford House ball afterwards. The emperor complained of the burden and late hours of evening entertainments. Princess of Wales so nice about her picture. D[israeli] complained of my absence, said they could not get on without me. 20.—Dined at the F.O. to meet the emperor. It was very kind of Derby. Much work at Hawarden in arranging books and papers.

March 9, 1874.—Off at 4.45 to Windsor for the fête. We dined at St. George's Hall. I was presented to the Duchess of C. by the Queen, and had a few kind words from H.M. 11.—Archbishop Manning, 9-11. It is kind in him to come, but most of it is rather hollow work, limited as we are. 16.—Dined at Marlborough House. A civil talk with Disraeli. 20.—FinishedVivian Grey. The first quarter extremely clever, the rest trash.

May 15.—Emperor of Russia's reception at 3.15. He thanked me for my conduct to Russia while I was minister. I assured his Majesty I had watched with profound interest the transactions of his reign, and the great benefits he had conferred upon his people. He hoped the relations of the two countries would always be good.... Dined at Marlborough House. Stafford House ball afterwards. The emperor complained of the burden and late hours of evening entertainments. Princess of Wales so nice about her picture. D[israeli] complained of my absence, said they could not get on without me. 20.—Dined at the F.O. to meet the emperor. It was very kind of Derby. Much work at Hawarden in arranging books and papers.

The House of Commons is hardly attractive to an irregular and perfunctory attendant; and Mr. Gladstone's thoughts[pg 500]all turned to other fields. To Mrs. Gladstone he wrote early in April:—

The anti-parliamentary reaction has been stronger with me even than I anticipated. I am as far as possible from feeling the want of the House of Commons. I could cheerfully go there to do a work; but I hope and pray to be as little there as possible, except for such an aim. In London I think we were too much hustled to speak leisurely or effectually of the future. It will open for us by degrees. I shall be glad when the matter of money, after all a secondary one, is disentangled, but chiefly because it seems to put pressure upon you. I spoke to Stephen about these matters on Saturday; he was kind, reasonable, and in all ways as satisfactory as possible. There is one thing I should like you to understand clearly as to my view of things, for it is an essential part of that view. I am convinced that the welfare of mankind does not now depend on the state or the world of politics; the real battle is being fought in the world of thought, where a deadly attack is made with great tenacity of purpose and over a wide field, upon the greatest treasure of mankind, the belief in God and the gospel of Christ.

In June Sir Stephen Glynne died,—“a dark, dark day.”“My brother-in-law,”wrote Mr. Gladstone at a later date,“was a man of singular refinement and as remarkable modesty. His culture was high and his character one of deep interest. His memory was on the whole decidedly the most remarkable known to me of the generation and country. His life, however, was retired and unobtrusive; but he sat in parliament, I think, for about fifteen years, and was lord-lieutenant of his county.”

I thank you much—Mr. Gladstone said to the Duke of Argyll—for your kind note. Your sympathy and that of the duchess are ever ready. But even you can hardly tell how it is on this occasion needed and warranted. My wife has lost the last member of a family united by bonds of the rarest tenderness, the last representative of his line, the best of brothers, who had ever drawn closer to her as the little rank was thinned. As for me, no one can know what our personal relations were, without knowing[pg 501]the interior details of a long family history, and efforts and struggles in common carried on through a long series of years, which riveted into the closest union our original affection. He was a very rare man, but we grieve not for him; he sleeps the sleep of the just. The event is a great one also to the outward frame of our life here.310

Ecclesiastical Debate

Ecclesiastical Debate

In the same letter he says it is most painful to him to be dragged into ecclesiastical turmoil, as for example by the Scotch patronage bill, which he considers precipitate, unwise, and daring, or the bill directed against the endowed schools commissioners, of whom his brother-in-law, Lord Lyttelton, was one. In the last case he acted as a leader of an organised party, but in the more important instance of a bill devised, as Mr. Disraeli said, to put down ritualism, his dissent from most of those around him fulfilled all the anticipations that had pointed to retirement. The House was heartily in favour of the bill, and what is called the country earnestly supported it, though in the cabinet itself at least four ministers were strenuously hostile. Mr. Gladstone writes to his wife a trenchant account of his vigorous dealing with a prominent colleague who had rashly ventured to mark him for assault. He sent word to the two archbishops that if they carried a certain amendment he should hold himself“altogether discharged from maintaining any longer the establishment of the church.”He wrote to Lord Harrowby when the recess came:—

I think, or rather I am convinced, that the effecteitherof one or two more ecclesiastical sessions of parliament such as the last, or of any prolonged series of contentious proceedings under the recent Act, upon subjects of widespread interest, will be to disestablish the church. I do not feel the dread of disestablishment which you may probably entertain: but I desire and seek so long as standing ground remains, to avert, not to precipitate it.

To another correspondent—

Individually I have serious doubts whether the whole of the penal proceedings taken in this country with respect to church[pg 502]matters from the day of Dr. Hampden downwards, have not done considerably more harm than good. There is no doubt at all that all the evils, of whatever kind, at which they were aimed, exist at this moment among us in a far more aggravated shape than when they began.... My object and desire has ever been and still is, to keep the church of England together, both as a church and as an establishment. As a church, I believe she is strong enough, by virtue of the prayer-book, to hold together under all circumstances; but as an establishment, in my opinion, she is not strong enough to bear either serious secession or prolonged parliamentary agitation.

Finally, in a letter dated from Whittinghame (Nov. 17)—

There are already too many causes of demoralisation operating upon the House of Commons. If it is also to become a debased copy of an ecclesiastical council, all the worst men and worst qualities of the worst men will come to the front, and the place will become intolerable.

Even any member of parliament who shares none of Mr. Gladstone's theology, may sympathise to the full with his deep disgust at theologic and ecclesiastical discussions as conducted in that secular air. We can easily understand how detestable he found it, and how those discussions fortified his sense of estrangement from the ruling sentiments of the parliamentary party of which he was still the titular leader.

Of course the whigs, always for keeping a parliamentary church in its proper place, disliked his line. Liberals like Thirlwall read his speeches“with great pain and suspicion,”and declared their confidence to be shaken. Hardly any section was completely satisfied. His mind in the autumn and winter of 1874 was absorbed, as we shall see within a few pages, in an assault upon the decrees of the Vatican Council of 1870. This assault, as he told Lord Granville (Dec. 7, 1874), while tending“to hearten”the party generally, was against his resumption of formal leadership, because it widened the breach with the Irishmen in the House of Commons. Apart from this there were many questions, each with a group of adherents to a special view, but incapable of being pursued by common and united action. He[pg 503]ran through the list in writing to Lord Granville. It has historic interest:—

1. Extension of the suffrage, with redistribution of seats abreast or in the rear. 2. Disestablishment in Scotland, England. 3. Land laws. 4. Retrenchment. 5. Colonial policy, territorial extension of the empire. 6. Reform of local government taxation. 7. Secular education. 8. Undenominational education. 9. Irish affairs. On no one of these is there known to exist a plan desired by the entire party, or by any clear and decisive majority of it.

On the whole, he was persuaded that neither the party generally nor the country desired another period of active reforms, even if he were fit to conduct them. Besides this he confessed his“apprehension that differences would spring up, and great shrinking from any breach with the party, and a determination, often expressed, never, if he could help it, to lead one branch of it against another.”In many forms he carried Lord Granville with him round the circle of his arguments. He once sent his points on half-a-dozen scraps of paper. Granville playfully replied,“I should like to treat them as old Lord Bessborough used to treat his playing-cards when luck was adverse—tear them up into small bits and toss them in the fire.”Nothing shook him, not even Mrs. Gladstone's misgivings. To her he wrote from Carlton House Terrace on the eve of the session of 1875:—

Now for the grave matter about the leadership. I have had much conversation with Granville and Cardwell, and I am going to see Hartington, also Goschen, to-morrow. My letter is rewritten and improved, but I am obliged to stand to my conclusion, for many reasons. Among them the church reason is one of the most serious, and the other the undefined and prolonged character of the service if now undertaken. This, while arguing and deprecating, they admit I think to a great extent. Our old colleagues are inclined to come up on Thursday if they can, and this will be rather to hear than to debate. Hartington will succeed. I am indeed sorry that you and I have not been able to take the same view of this important subject, but you know that[pg 504]I am acting on convictions very long entertained, and will I am sure believe that I have probed myself deeply, and used all the means in my power to get at a right conclusion. Nay, I think you will be more reconciled, when I tell you that Granville did not really see his way either to a nominal leadership, or to making any arrangement by which I could after a short time with some certainty have escaped. I saw Clark last night and this morning; he gives an excellent account of me and makes it impossible for me to plead health as my reason.

The drama went rapidly forward:—

Jan. 12.—I find that the agreement made yesterday that I should meet my former colleagues on Monday will require me to remain until this day, though after a pretty busy morning the pressure is less. I have, however, to preside in the evening at the meeting of the Metaphysical Society, and to listen, though I hope nothing more, to a tough discussion. Manning, I am sorry to say, will be there. His pamphlet is at length going to press, and will extend he says to 150 pages. Newman is not out yet.11 Carlton House Terrace, Jan. 14, '75.—This great affair is nearly arranged. My old colleagues all submit under protest; and I shall be free. An article in theTimesthis morning is undisguisedly aimed at getting rid of me; but it does not express any of their feelings. We have had a morning at Granville's; Halifax, Granville, Cardwell, Hartington, Aberdare, Forster, Carlingford, Stansfeld, Selborne, Goschen, Lowe, Kimberley,—in short all, I think, except Argyll and Bright. There was argument and exhortation, and much kindness. My letter to Granville will be accompanied by a short reply from him expressing difference of opinion and regret. They are afraid of being blamed by the party if they seem to show indifference.

Jan. 12.—I find that the agreement made yesterday that I should meet my former colleagues on Monday will require me to remain until this day, though after a pretty busy morning the pressure is less. I have, however, to preside in the evening at the meeting of the Metaphysical Society, and to listen, though I hope nothing more, to a tough discussion. Manning, I am sorry to say, will be there. His pamphlet is at length going to press, and will extend he says to 150 pages. Newman is not out yet.

11 Carlton House Terrace, Jan. 14, '75.—This great affair is nearly arranged. My old colleagues all submit under protest; and I shall be free. An article in theTimesthis morning is undisguisedly aimed at getting rid of me; but it does not express any of their feelings. We have had a morning at Granville's; Halifax, Granville, Cardwell, Hartington, Aberdare, Forster, Carlingford, Stansfeld, Selborne, Goschen, Lowe, Kimberley,—in short all, I think, except Argyll and Bright. There was argument and exhortation, and much kindness. My letter to Granville will be accompanied by a short reply from him expressing difference of opinion and regret. They are afraid of being blamed by the party if they seem to show indifference.

The Queen thanked Mr. Gladstone for communicating to her his resolution of retiring from the more active duties of parliamentary life. She was not entirely unprepared for it after what he told her himself last year.“She knows that his zeal and untiring energy have always been exerted with the desire of advancing the welfare of the nation and[pg 505]maintaining the honour of the crown, and she thanks him for his loyal assurances of support on all occasions when it may become necessary.”

Bright And Other Colleagues

Bright And Other Colleagues

The Duke of Argyll wrote“sincerely to congratulate”him upon his withdrawal. Bright on the other hand (Jan. 17) said he could not applaud, yet he would not blame: Mr. Gladstone's course seemed so unfortunate if not disastrous to the great public interests committed to him:—

For myself, says Bright, if I could have foreseen either the result of the election of last year, or your retirement from the conduct of the party, I should certainly have withdrawn from parliament, where now I seem to have quite as little of duty or of a mission as you have. The front opposition bench is full of discord, and when you are not there full of jealousy, and I find myself without any particular attraction to any particular part of the House. However, I will not complain; some door of escape may open for me, and I can become a spectator as you are proposing to be.I hope on some occasion I may have the chance of seeing you when you come to town. I have had so much pleasure in your friendship, and have gained so much from it, that I would fain hope it need not cease now, when our association will necessarily be less frequent than it has been of late years. Whether you come back to the political field or turn wholly to study and to literature, I am sure you will be usefully employed, and I hope that nothing but blessing may rest upon all your labours.

For myself, says Bright, if I could have foreseen either the result of the election of last year, or your retirement from the conduct of the party, I should certainly have withdrawn from parliament, where now I seem to have quite as little of duty or of a mission as you have. The front opposition bench is full of discord, and when you are not there full of jealousy, and I find myself without any particular attraction to any particular part of the House. However, I will not complain; some door of escape may open for me, and I can become a spectator as you are proposing to be.

I hope on some occasion I may have the chance of seeing you when you come to town. I have had so much pleasure in your friendship, and have gained so much from it, that I would fain hope it need not cease now, when our association will necessarily be less frequent than it has been of late years. Whether you come back to the political field or turn wholly to study and to literature, I am sure you will be usefully employed, and I hope that nothing but blessing may rest upon all your labours.

The feeling among liberals in the country was of deep dismay. Some of the whigs doubtless found solace in the anticipation that a new middle party might be formed, with“a recovery of the old liberal position demolished for the time by John Mill, Gladstone, and Cobden.”311But this was limited to a narrow circle.“All sunshine is gone out of politics,”was a general phrase. The news was compared by one correspondent to Gelon's message to the Greeks, that the spring was taken out of their year.312

An organ of the stiff nonconformists said,313“Against his government we felt that we had a great grievance; for himself,[pg 506]the nonconformists of this country have long cherished a loyalty more fervent, we are inclined to imagine, than that with which he has been regarded by any other section of the community. He, beyond all other modern statesmen, with perhaps here and there a doubtful exception, gave us the impression of a man who regarded politics as a part of Christian duty.”And the same writers most truly added,“We do not know what the English people have done for Mr. Gladstone that can be compared for a moment with what Mr. Gladstone has done for them. Claims on him we have none. He has far more than discharged any debt that he could have owed to the nation.”These words are a just remonstrance against the somewhat tyrannical conventions of English public life.

When the session began, he wrote to Mrs. Gladstone (Feb. 15):“I came down to the House and took my seat nearly in the same spot as last year, finding Bright my neighbour, with which I was very well pleased. Granville and Hartington both much preferred my continuingonthe front bench to my going elsewhere.”Lord Hartington, strongly encouraged against his own inclinations by Mr. Gladstone, accepted a thankless and unpromising post, and held it with honour and credit for five difficult years to come.

Chapter II. Vaticanism. (1874-1875)Let no susceptibilities, puritan, protestant, anglican, or other, be startled if we observe that Rome is, and may long be, in some important respects, the centre of the Christian world. It is indeed a centre which repels as well as attracts; which probably repels even more than it attracts; but which, whether repelling or attracting, influences.—-Gladstone(1875).IOne question, as the reader by this time well knows, living deepest in Mr. Gladstone's heart and mind from his first book in 1838 onwards, was the relation of the churches to modern society. English statesmen are wont to be either blind to the existence of such a question, or else they seek an easy refuge from it in a perfunctory erastianism, sometimes intellectually refined, sometimes a little brutish, but always shallow. In all the three great branches of Christianity, the Latin, the Greek or orthodox, the protestant, Mr. Gladstone's interest was incessant, sincere, and profound. It covered their theology, their organisation, their history and principles of growth, the bearings of their system upon individual character and social well-being all over Europe. He was one of the very few public men capable of discerning that the fall of the temporal power of the pope marked a more startling change and a profounder crisis in human history, than the unification of Italy, the unification of Germany, the reconstructed republic in France, perhaps even than the preservation of the American union. He knew the force of ideas in the world; he realised the vast transformations that had in their succession swept over the minds of men since cardinal dogmas had been established; he comprehended the motion in[pg 508]articles of faith, as men made their“voyagings through strange seas of thought”; he was alive to the fact that moral crises brought on by change in intellectual outlook and temperature, are of deeper concern than questions of territory, or dynasty, or form of government. The moral crisis is what reaches furthest and matters most. A movement of the first magnitude was accentuated by Pius IX., when by the Syllabus of 1864 he challenged modern society in all its foundations, its aims, its principles, in the whole range of its ideals. Some called this daring ultimatum the gravest event since the French uprising in 1789. The Syllabus prepared the way for a more elaborately organised operation on behalf of papal authority. The train was secretly laid for a grand reaction, a grand re-installation of the Christian faith.314The Two SchoolsThe pope had been despoiled of territory, his sway within the walls of Rome itself was in constant danger, his most powerful protector north of the Alps had been weakened and humiliated by protestant Prussia. He was now to be compensated for his calamities by a majestic demonstration of his hold upon the spiritual allegiance of millions of adherents in every portion of the habitable globe. The twentieth ecumenical council assembled in St. Peter's at Rome on December 8, 1869. In this gathering of catholic prelates from both hemispheres, two antagonistic schools confronted one another. The ultramontanes held that the revolutionary welter and confusion of the modern world could only be healed by solemn affirmation of the principle of sovereign authority lodged in an infallible pope, with absolute power to define by that apostolic authority what ought to be held as articles of faith or morals. The assumptions, the standards, the ruling types of the modern age, they boldly encountered with rigid iteration of maxims of old time, imposing obedience and submission to a fixed social order and a divinely commissioned hierarchy. Inflexibility was to be the single watchword by which the church could recover a world that, from Naples even to Mexico, seemed to be rapidly drifting away from her. The[pg 509]opposing school took other ground. Perhaps they saw that supremacy is one thing, and infallibility another thing quite different. The liberal catholics did not contest the dogma of papal infallibility; they questioned the expediency of its proclamation; they were for associating ideas of religion with ideas of liberty; they were not for extending the domain of miracle and the supernatural.Then as in the old historic councils, influence of race and nation had decisive effects. It could not be otherwise in what was in essence a conflict between a centralised doctrinal authority on the one hand, and the inextinguishable tendency towards national churches on the other. The Italian bishops went with the pope. The Germans, as of old they had been for emperor against priest, were now on the side of freedom against what certain of them did not hesitate to call tyranny and fraud. Some of the ablest of the French were true to Gallican tradition and resisted the decree. Among the most active and uncompromising of all the ultramontane party was our English Manning.315IIAt the end of November 1869, Acton had written to Mr. Gladstone from Rome.“Your letter is a very sad one,”Mr. Gladstone answered.“I feel as deep and real an interest in the affairs of other Christian communions as in my own; and most of all in the case of the most famous of them all, and the one within which the largest number of Christian souls find their spiritual food.”Before Manning left for 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[pg 510]thought to lie in a governing faculty, and in its wise moderation. Now he is ever quoted as theultraof 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 bealleyes 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 willanyhave 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 theapprobation of the flock.316Unless 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.Issue Of The CouncilThe French government wrote despatches of mild protest but said nothing of withdrawing their garrison. Mr. Gladstone and Lord Clarendon were for informing the Roman court that they were cognizant of the French despatches, and approved of their tenour. The Queen and the cabinet, however, were entirely averse to meddling with the council,[pg 511]and nothing was done officially. This did not prevent Mr. Gladstone from telling Archbishop Manning what impediments would be placed in the way of Irish legislation by the state of English feeling as to the Syllabus and other papal proceedings.“Myfeelings and convictions,”he says (April 16),“are as you well know decidedly with your‘opposition,’which I believe to be contending for the religious and civil interests of mankind against influences highly disastrous and menacing to both. But the prevailing opinion is that it is better to let those influences take their course, and work out the damage which they will naturally and surely entail upon the see of Rome and upon what is bound to it.”In parliament there was an utter aversion to the Roman policy, and he gives instances, noting even a change of opinion about the Irish land bill.“What I have described is no matter of speculation. I know it by actual and daily touch. I am glad you have moved me to state it in some detail. It is to me matter of profound grief, especially as regards land in Ireland.”To Lord Acton:—Of all the prelates at Rome, none have a finer opportunity, to none is a more crucial test now applied, than to those of the United States. For if there, where there is nothing of covenant, of restraint, or of equivalent between the church and the state, the propositions of the Syllabus are still to have the countenance of the episcopate, it becomes really a little difficult to maintain in argument the civil rights of such persons to toleration, however conclusive be the argument of policy in favour of granting it. I can hardly bring myself to speculate or care on what particular day the foregone conclusion is to be finally adopted. My grief is sincere and deep, but it is at the whole thing, so ruinous in its consequences as they concern faith. In my view, the size of the minority, though important, is not nearly so important as the question whether there will be a minority at all.There was a minority. In a division taken at a late stage, 451 composed the majority, 88 resisted, and 62 were for a new examination. Then the minority turned their backs on Rome; and on July 18 the definition of infallibility[pg 512]was acclaimed in St. Peter's in presence of the pope by 533 against 2.Mr. Gladstone is very glad when Clarendon instructs Mr. Russell to turn his back on the festivities at Rome.“The whole proceeding has been monstrous, and it will hereafter become one of the laughing-stocks of history. The fanaticism of the middle ages is really sober compared with that of the nineteenth century.”“The proclamation of Infallibility,”he said to Bishop Moriarty,“I must own I look upon as the most portentous (taking them singly), of all events in the history of the Christian church.”IIIThe next day, as we know, war was declared by France against Germany, the French garrison left Rome, and on September 20 the Italians marched in.A month before the war broke out, Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Clarendon:“I would avoid any official support of the Italian application to France for the evacuation of Rome, by saying that this country had always abstained from mixing in that question; and that we were the more induced to persevere in that policy from being well convinced that the French government is perfectly aware that in this country the occupation of any part of the pontifical territories by French troops is regarded with regret, pain, and disapproval. Further, that those who most strongly entertain these sentiments, are generally the persons who most highly value, and have most striven to promote, the good understanding between France and England.”The occupation of Rome by the Italian government brought upon Mr. Gladstone various demands and movements from different parts of the country. His cabinet agreed that the proper course was to decline all interference with a view to the restoration of the temporal power, though they accepted the task of promoting, by means of friendly representations, arrangements to secure the pontiff's freedom and becoming support. Then some of his presbyterian friends asked him why he should even do so much as this, when he would take no such steps for the moderator of the free church. Now[pg 513]consider, Mr. Gladstone replied:“the pope is a sovereign who was in lawful possession of large revenues, and who had charged himself with the support of a body of cardinals, ministers, nuncios, servants, and guards out of those revenues. He has been dispossessed, not for any fault of his own, but because clerical dominion was deemed intolerable. In the maintenance of the pope and his court, followers and agents, six millions of our fellow-subjects or thereabouts are deeply interested; and they are making demands upon us which we are forced to decline. But I should for one be ashamed to deny that there are the strongest equitable claims upon the Italian government growing out of the past state of things; that in these equitable claims the six millions I speak of have a real interest and share; and as the matter is international, and they have nolocus standiwith the Italian government, it is our part so far to plead their cause if need be.”IVVisit To MunichFour years elapsed before Mr. Gladstone was in a position to follow up his strong opinions on the injury done, as he believed, to human liberty by the Vatican decrees. But the great debate between ultramontanes and old catholics was followed by him with an interest that never slackened. In September 1874 he went to Munich, and we can hardly be wrong in ascribing to that visit the famous tract which was to make so lively a stir before the end of the year. His principal object was to communicate with Dr. Döllinger, and this object, he tells Mrs. Gladstone, was fully gained.“I think,”he says,“I have spent two-thirds of my whole time with Dr. Döllinger, who is indeed a most remarkable man, and it makes my blood run cold to think ofhisbeing excommunicated in his venerable but, thank God, hale and strong old age. In conversation we have covered a wide field. I know no one with whose mode of viewing and handling religious matters I more cordially agree.... He is wonderful, and simple as a child.”“I think it was in 1874,”Döllinger afterwards mentioned,“that I remember Gladstone's paying me a visit at six o'clock[pg 514]in the evening. We began talking on political and theological subjects, and became, both of us, so engrossed with the conversation, that it was two o'clock at night when I left the room to fetch a book from my library bearing on the matter in hand. I returned with it in a few minutes, and found him deep in a volume he had drawn out of his pocket—true to his principle of never losing time—during my momentary absence.”317“In the course of a walk out of Munich in the travelling season of 1874,”Mr. Gladstone wrote sixteen years later,“Dr. Döllinger told me that he was engaged in the work of retrial through the whole circle of his Latin teaching and knowledge. The results were tested in his proceedings at Bonn, when he attempted to establish aformula concordiaeupon the questions which most gravely divided Christendom.”318Among other topics Mr. Gladstone commended to his mentor the idea of a republication in a series, of the best works of those whom he would call the Henotic or Eirenic writers on the differences that separate Christians and churches from one another. He also read Pichler on the theology of Leibnitz, not without suspicion that it was rather Pichler than Leibnitz. But neither Leibnitz nor Pichler was really in his mind.After the session of 1874, when the public ear and mind had been possessed by the word Ritualism, he had as usual sought a vent in a magazine article for the thoughts with which he was teeming.319He speaks with some disdain of the question whether a handful of the clergy are or are not engaged in“an utterly hopeless and visionary effort to Romanise the church and people of England.”At no time, he says, since the sanguinary reign of Mary has such a scheme been possible. Least of all, he proceeds, could the scheme have life in it“when Rome has substituted for the proud boast ofsemper eadema policy of violence and change in faith; when she has refurbished and paraded anew every[pg 515]rusty tool she was fondly thought to have disused; when no one can become her convert, without renouncing his moral and mental freedom, and placing his civil loyalty and duty at the mercy of another; and when she has equally repudiated modern thought and ancient history.”If these strong words expressed his state of mind before he went abroad, we may readily imagine how the Bavarian air would fan the flame.Though Dr. Döllinger himself—“so inaccessible to religious passions”—was not aware of the purpose of his English friend, there can be little doubt that Mr. Gladstone returned from Munich with the same degree of internal ferment as that which had possessed his mind on his return from Naples three-and-twenty years before. In October he writes to Lord Acton from Hawarden:—What you have said on the subject of ultramontanism and of the mode in which it should be handled, appears to me to be as wise and as good as is possible. It is really a case for hitting hard, but for hitting the right men. In anything I say or do on the subject, I would wish heartily and simply to conform to the spirit of your words. But I feel myself drawn onwards. Indeed some of your words help to draw me. The question with me now is whether I shall or shall not publish a tract which I have written, and of which the title would probably be,“The Vatican Decrees in their bearing on Civil Allegiance: a Political Expostulation.”I incline to think that I ought to publish it. If it were in your power and will to run over here for a night or two I should seek to profit by your counsel, and should ask you to read as much of thems.as your patience would endure. A more substantial attraction would be that I could go over much of my long and interesting conversations with Döllinger.VPublication Of The PamphletThe pamphlet320appeared in November, and was meant for an argument that the decree of infallibility aimed a deadly blow at the old historic, scientific, and moderate school; it was a degradation of the episcopal order; it carried to its furthest point that spirit of absolutist centralisation, which[pg 516]in its excesses is as fatal to vigorous life in the church, as in the state; it overthrew the principle not even denied by the council of Trent in the sixteenth century, that the pope and his judgments were triable by the assembled representatives of the Christian world.Thrice in history it seemed as if the constitutional party in the church was about to triumph: at the council of Constance in the fifteenth century; in the conflict between the French episcopate and Innocentxi.in the days of Bossuet; and thirdly, when Clementxiv., exactly a hundred years before now, dealt with the Jesuits and“levelled in the dust the deadliest foes that mental and moral liberty have ever known.”From July 1870 all this had passed away, and the constitutional party had seen its death-warrant signed and sealed. The“myrmidons of the apostolic chamber”had committed their church to revolutionary measures. The vast new claims were lodged in the reign of a pontiff, who by the dark Syllabus of 1864 had condemned free speech, a free press, liberty of conscience, toleration of nonconformity, the free study of civil and philosophic things independently of church authority, marriage unless sacramentally contracted, and all definition by the state of the civil rights of the church.The Pamphlet“It has been a favourite purpose of my life,”Mr. Gladstone said,“not to conjure up, but to conjure down, public alarms. I am not now going to pretend that either foreign foe or domestic treason can, at the bidding of the court of Rome, disturb these peaceful shores. But although such fears may be visionary, it is more visionary still to suppose for one moment that the claims of Gregoryvii., of Innocentiii., and of Bonifaceviii.have been disinterred in the nineteenth century, like hideous mummies picked out of Egyptian sarcophagi, in the interests of archæology, or without a definite and practical aim.”What, then, was the clear and foregone purpose behind the parade of all these astonishing reassertions? The first was—by claims to infallibility in creed, to the prerogative of miracles, to dominion over the unseen world—to satisfy spiritual appetites, sharpened into reaction and made morbid by“the levity of the destructive speculations so widely current, and the notable hardihood of the[pg 517]anti-Christian writing of the day.”This alone, however, would not explain the deliberate provocation of all the“risks of so daring a raid upon the civil sphere.”The answer was to be found in the favourite design, hardly a secret design, of restoring by the road of force when any favourable opportunity should arise, and of re-erecting, the terrestrial throne of the popedom,“even if it could only be re-erected on the ashes of the city, and amidst the whitening bones of the people.”And this brings the writer to the immediate practical aspects of his tract.“If the baleful power which is expressed by the phraseCuria Romana, and not at all adequately rendered in its historic force by the usual English equivalent‘Court of Rome,’really entertains the scheme, it doubtless counts on the support in every country of an organised and devoted party; which, when it can command the scales of political power, will promote interference, and while it is in a minority, will work for securing neutrality. As the peace of Europe may be in jeopardy, and as the duties even of England, as one of its constabulary authorities, might come to be in question, it would be most interesting to know the mental attitude of our Roman catholic fellow-countrymen in England and Ireland with reference to the subject; and it seems to be one on which we are entitled to solicit information.”Too commonly the spirit of the convert was to be expressed by the notorious words,“a catholic first, an Englishman afterwards”—words that properly convey no more than a truism,“for every Christian must seek to place his religion even before his country in his inner heart; but very far from a truism in the sense in which we have been led to construe them.”This, indeed, was a new and very real“papal aggression.”For himself, Mr. Gladstone said, it should not shake his allegiance to“the rule of maintaining equal civil rights irrespectively of religious differences.”Had he not given conclusive indications of that view, by supporting in parliament as a minister since the council, the repeal in 1871 of the law against ecclesiastical titles, whose enactment he had opposed twenty years before?That the pamphlet should create intense excitement, was inevitable from the place of the writer in the public eye,[pg 518]from the extraordinary vehemence of the attack, and above all from the unquenchable fascination of the topic. Whether the excitement in the country was more than superficial; whether most readers fathomed the deep issues as they stood, not between catholic and protestant, but between catholic and catholic within the fold; whether in fastening upon the civil allegiance of English Romanists Mr. Gladstone took the true point against Vaticanism—these are questions that we need not here discuss. The central proposition made a cruel dilemma for a large class of the subjects of the Queen; for the choice assigned to them by assuming stringent logic was between being bad citizens if they submitted to the decree of papal infallibility, and bad catholics if they did not. Protestant logicians wrote to Mr. Gladstone that if his contention were good, we ought now to repeal catholic emancipation and again clap on the fetters. Syllogisms in action are but stupid things after all, unless they are checked by a tincture of what seems paradox.321Apart from the particular issue in his Vatican pamphlet, Mr. Gladstone believed himself to be but following his own main track in life and thought in his assault upon“a policy which declines to acknowledge the high place assigned to liberty in the counsels of Providence, and which upon the pretext of the abuse that like every other good she suffers, expels her from its system.”Among the names that he was never willing to discuss with me—Machiavelli, for instance—was Joseph de Maistre, the hardiest, most adventurous, most ingenious, and incisive of all the speculative champions of European reaction.322In the pages of de Maistre he might have found the reasoned base on which the ultramontane creed may be supposed to rest. He would have found liberty depicted less as a blessing than a scourge; even Bossuet denounced as a heretic with dubious chances of salvation, for his struggle on behalf of a national church against Roman centralisation; the old[pg 519]Greeks held up to odium as a race of talkers, frivolous, light, and born incorrigible dividers. In dealing with de Maistre, Mr. Gladstone would have had a foeman worthier of his powerful steel than the authors of the Syllabus, Schema, Postulatum, and all the rest of what he called the Vaticanism of 1870. But here, as always, he was man of action, and wrote for a specific though perhaps a fugitive purpose.VILabours Of The ControversyAt the end of the year the total number printed of the tract was 145,000, and of these 120,000 were in a people's edition.“My pamphlet,”he tells Lacaita,“has brought upon me such a mass of work as I can hardly cope with, and I am compelled to do all things as succinctly as possible, though my work is with little intermission from morning till night. I agree with you that the pamphlet in the main tells its own story; and I am glad there is no need to select in a hurry some one to write on the difference between papism and Catholicism.... There is no doubt that the discussion opens,i.e.makes a breach in the walls of the papal theology, and it ought to be turned to account. But I shall have enough to do with all my hands, if I am to work properly through the task I have undertaken. Not, I trust, for long, for I think another pamphlet should suffice to end it on my side. But I am vexed that Manning (as if he had been pulled up at Rome), after having announced his formal reply six weeks ago, hangs fire and now talks of delaying it.”The result, he assures Lord Granville (Nov. 25),“must be injurious to the pestilent opinions that have so grievously obtained the upper hand in that church, and to the party whichmeansto have a war in Europe for the restoration of the temporal power. To place impediments in their way has been my principal purpose.”He told Acton (Dec. 18),“When you were putting in caveats and warnings, you did not say to me,‘Now mind, this affair will absorb some, perhaps many, months of your life.’It has been so up to the present moment, and it evidently will be so for some time.”With Acton he carried on elaborate correspondence[pg 520]upon some of the questions raised by the Syllabus, notably on the effect of the pope's disciplinary judgment on anglican marriages, converting them into relations that were not marriage at all. He fears that he has conceded too much to the papal party in not treating the Syllabus asex cathedra; in allowing that the popes had been apt to claim dogmatic infallibility for wellnigh a thousand years; as to the ecumenicity of the Vatican council. Among other matters he was reading“the curious volumes ofDiscorsi di Pio IX., published at Rome, and he might find it his duty to write collaterally upon them.”This duty he performed with much fidelity in theQuarterly Reviewfor January 1875. He is active in interest about translations; keen to enlist auxiliaries in every camp and all countries; delighted with all utterances from Italy or elsewhere that make in his direction, even noting with satisfaction that the agnostic Huxley was warm in approval.“I pass my days and nights,”he tells the Duke of Argyll (Dec. 19),“in the Vatican. Already the pope has given me two months of incessant correspondence and other hard work, and it may very well last two more. Nor is this work pleasant; but I am as far as possible from repenting of it, as no one else to whom the public would listen saved me the trouble. It is full of intense interest. Every post brings a mass of general reading, writing, or both. Forty covers of one kind or another to-day, and all my time is absorbed. But the subject is well worth the pains.”The Italians, Lord Granville told him,“generally approved, but were puzzled why you should have thought it necessary.”Retorts and replies arose in swarms, including one from Manning and another from Newman. He was accused by some of introducing a BismarckianKulturkampfinto England, of seeking to recover his lost popularity by pandering to no-popery, of disregarding the best interests of the country for the sake of his own restoration to power.323I have now finished reading—he said at the beginning of February—the 20th reply to my pamphlet, They cover 1000 pages. And I am hard at work preparing mine with a good[pg 521]conscience and I think a good argument. Manning has been, I think, as civil as he could.Feb. 5.—All this morning I have had to spend in hunting up one important statement of Manning's which I am almost convinced is a gross mis-statement....Feb. 6.—Manning in his 200 pages has not, I venture to say, made a single point against me. But I shall have to show up his quotations very seriously. We have exchanged one or two friendly notes. 8.—Worked on Vaticanism nearly all day and (an exception to my rule) late at night. 14.—Eight hours' work on my proof sheets. 15.—Went through Acton's corrections and notes on my proofs. 19.—Worked much in evening on finishing up my tract, Dr. Döllinger's final criticisms having arrived. He thinks highly of the work, which he observes will cut deeper than the former one, and be more difficult to deal with. By midnight I had the revises ready with the corrections. 20.—Inserted one or two references and wrote“Press”on the 2nd revises. May the power and blessing of God go with the work.The second tract was more pungent than the first, and it gave pleasure to an important minister abroad who had now entangled himself by Falk laws and otherwise in a quarrel with the papacy.“I have had a letter of thanks,”Mr. Gladstone writes to Hawarden (March 6),“from Bismarck. This pamphlet is stouter, sharper, and cheaper than the last, but is only in its eleventh thousand, I believe.”Among others who replied toVaticanismwas Dr. Newman; he appended a new postscript of four-and-twenty pages to his former answer to the first of Mr. Gladstone's pamphlets. Its tone is courteous and argumentative—far too much so to please the ultras who had the pope's ear—and without the wild hitting that Mr. Gladstone found in Manning.Newman wrote to thank him (Jan. 17, 1875) for a letter that he described as“forbearing and generous.”“It has been a great grief to me,”said Newman,“to have had to write against one whose career I have followed from first to last with so much (I may say) loyal interest and admiration. I had known about you from others, and had looked at you with kindly curiosity, before you came up to Christ Church, and from the time that you were launched into public life,[pg 522]you have retained a hold on my thoughts and on my gratitude by the various marks of attention which every now and then you have shown me, when you had an opportunity, and I could not fancy my ever standing towards you in any other relation than that which had lasted so long. What a fate it is, that now when so memorable a career has reached its formal termination [retirement from leadership], I should be the man, on the very day on which it closed, to present to you amid the many expressions of public sympathy which it elicits, a controversial pamphlet as my offering.”But he could not help writing it, he was called upon from such various quarters; and his conscience told him that he who had been in great measure the cause of so many becoming catholics, had no right to leave them in the lurch, when charges were made against them as serious as unexpected.“I do not think,”he concluded,“I ever can be sorry for what I have done, but I never can cease to be sorry for the necessity of doing it.”VIIChange Of AbodeThis fierce controversial episode was enough to show that the habit and temperament of action still followed him in the midst of all his purposes of retreat. Withdrawal from parliamentary leadership was accompanied by other steps, apparently all making in the same direction. He sold the house in Carlton House Terrace, where he had passed eight-and-twenty years of work and power and varied sociability.“I had grown to the house,”he says (April 15),“having lived more time in it than in any other since I was born, and mainly by reason of all that was done in it.”To Mrs. Gladstone he wrote (Feb. 28):—I do not wonder that you feel parting from the house will be a blow and a pang. It is nothing less than this to me, but it must be faced and you will face it gallantly. So much has occurred there; and thus it is leaving not the house only but the neighbourhood, where I have been with you for more than thirty-five years, and altogether nearly forty. The truth is that innocently and from special causes we have on the whole been housed better than according to our circumstances. All along Carlton House[pg 523]Terrace I think you would not find any one with less than £20,000 a year, and most of them with, much more.He sold his collection of china and his Wedgwood ware.324He despatched his books to Hawarden. He can hardly have resolved on retirement that should be effective and complete, or else he must have arranged to quit the House of Commons. In his diary he entered (March 30, 1875):—Views about the future and remaining section of my life. In outline they are undefined but in substance definite. The main point is this: that setting aside exceptional circumstances which would have to provide for themselves, my prospective work is not parliamentary. My ties will be slight to an assembly with whose tendencies I am little in harmony at the present time; nor can I flatter myself that what is called the public out of doors is more sympathetic. But there is much to be done with the pen, all bearing much on high and sacred ends, for even Homeric study as I view it, is in this very sense of high importance; and what lies beyond this is concerned directly with the great subject of belief.To Mrs. Gladstone he wrote (May 19, 1875):“I am feeling as it were my way towards the purposes of the rest of my life. It will I dare say clear by degrees. For the general business of the country, my ideas and temper are thoroughly out of harmony with the ideas and temper of the day, especially as they are represented in London.”The movement of negation had been in full swing for a dozen years before the force and weight of it had, amid the stress and absorption of daily business, reached his inner mind. In May 1872, in a speech as member of the council of King's College—“averse from, and little used to platform speaking,”as he described himself to Manning—he used some strong language about those who promulgate as science what is not science and as religion what is not religion; but he took care to sever himself from the recent Roman decrees, which“seemed much to resemble the proclamation of a[pg 524]perpetual war against the progress and the movement of the human mind.”325In December 1872, he caused a marked sensation by an address at Liverpool, in which he spoke of Strauss's book onNew and Old Belief.326He had become a member of the metaphysical society, where eminent representatives of every faith and of no faith discussed every aspect of the foundations of human creeds. He was of too masculine and energetic a cast of mind to feel mere shock as he listened to Huxley, Tyndall, Clifford, Harrison, firmly arguing materialism or positivism or agnosticism or other unhistoric forms. That his whole soul was energetically oppugnant, I need not say. His reverence for freedom never wavered. He wrote to an editor who had criticised his Liverpool address (Jan. 3, 1873):—In the interest of my address, I wish to say that not a word to my knowledge fell from me limiting the range of free inquiry, nor have I ever supposed St. Paul to say anything so silly as“Prove all things: but some you must not prove.”Doubtless some obscurity of mine, I know not what, has led to an error into which the able writer of the article has fallen, not alone.To the Duke of Argyll he wrote:—Dec. 28, '72.—I have been touching upon deep and dangerous subjects at Liverpool. Whether I went beyond my province many may doubt. But of the extent of the mischief I do not doubt any more than of its virulence. All that I hear from day to day convinces me of the extension of this strange epidemic, for it is not, considering how it comes, worthy of being called a rational or scientific process. Be it however, what it may, we politicians are children playing with toys in comparison to that great work of and for manhood, which has to be done, and will yet be done, in restoring belief.[pg 525]Sir Robert Morier sent him from Munich Frohschammer's reply to Strauss.“If I understand him aright,”said Mr. Gladstone,“he is a Unitarian, minus Miracle and Inspiration.”The whole book seemed to him able, honest, and diligent:—But, he adds, I am one of those who think the Christianity of Frohschammer (as I have described it) is like a tall tree scientifically prepared for the saw by the preliminary process, well known to wood-cutters, of clearing away with the axe all projecting roots, which as long as they remained rendered the final operation impossible. This first process leaves the tree standing in a very trim condition, much more mathematical in form, as it is more near a cylinder, than in its native state. The business of the saw, when the horse and the man arrive, is soon accomplished.To his article on ritualism he prefixed as motto two short lines of Pindar, about days that are to come being wisest witnesses.327In spite of retreat, it was impossible that he should forget the vast responsibility imposed upon him, both by his gifts and by the popular ascendency into which they had brought him. His was not the retreat of self-indulgence, and the days that were to come speedily brought him duties that were to bear him far into regions of storm and conflict now unforeseen. Meanwhile, with occasional visits to Westminster, he lived even and industrious days at Hawarden, felling trees, working at Greek mythology and ethnology, delighting in the woods and glades of the park, above all delighting in the tranquillity of his“temple of peace.”Besides being the bookroom of a student, this was still a far-shining beacon in the popular eye. If sages, scholars, heroes, saints, with time's serene and hallowed gravity looked upon him from their shelves, yet loud echoes sounded in his ear from roaring surges of an outer world—from turbid ebb and flow of all the struggle and clamorous hopes and half-blind mysterious instincts of the nations.

Let no susceptibilities, puritan, protestant, anglican, or other, be startled if we observe that Rome is, and may long be, in some important respects, the centre of the Christian world. It is indeed a centre which repels as well as attracts; which probably repels even more than it attracts; but which, whether repelling or attracting, influences.—-Gladstone(1875).

IOne question, as the reader by this time well knows, living deepest in Mr. Gladstone's heart and mind from his first book in 1838 onwards, was the relation of the churches to modern society. English statesmen are wont to be either blind to the existence of such a question, or else they seek an easy refuge from it in a perfunctory erastianism, sometimes intellectually refined, sometimes a little brutish, but always shallow. In all the three great branches of Christianity, the Latin, the Greek or orthodox, the protestant, Mr. Gladstone's interest was incessant, sincere, and profound. It covered their theology, their organisation, their history and principles of growth, the bearings of their system upon individual character and social well-being all over Europe. He was one of the very few public men capable of discerning that the fall of the temporal power of the pope marked a more startling change and a profounder crisis in human history, than the unification of Italy, the unification of Germany, the reconstructed republic in France, perhaps even than the preservation of the American union. He knew the force of ideas in the world; he realised the vast transformations that had in their succession swept over the minds of men since cardinal dogmas had been established; he comprehended the motion in[pg 508]articles of faith, as men made their“voyagings through strange seas of thought”; he was alive to the fact that moral crises brought on by change in intellectual outlook and temperature, are of deeper concern than questions of territory, or dynasty, or form of government. The moral crisis is what reaches furthest and matters most. A movement of the first magnitude was accentuated by Pius IX., when by the Syllabus of 1864 he challenged modern society in all its foundations, its aims, its principles, in the whole range of its ideals. Some called this daring ultimatum the gravest event since the French uprising in 1789. The Syllabus prepared the way for a more elaborately organised operation on behalf of papal authority. The train was secretly laid for a grand reaction, a grand re-installation of the Christian faith.314The Two SchoolsThe pope had been despoiled of territory, his sway within the walls of Rome itself was in constant danger, his most powerful protector north of the Alps had been weakened and humiliated by protestant Prussia. He was now to be compensated for his calamities by a majestic demonstration of his hold upon the spiritual allegiance of millions of adherents in every portion of the habitable globe. The twentieth ecumenical council assembled in St. Peter's at Rome on December 8, 1869. In this gathering of catholic prelates from both hemispheres, two antagonistic schools confronted one another. The ultramontanes held that the revolutionary welter and confusion of the modern world could only be healed by solemn affirmation of the principle of sovereign authority lodged in an infallible pope, with absolute power to define by that apostolic authority what ought to be held as articles of faith or morals. The assumptions, the standards, the ruling types of the modern age, they boldly encountered with rigid iteration of maxims of old time, imposing obedience and submission to a fixed social order and a divinely commissioned hierarchy. Inflexibility was to be the single watchword by which the church could recover a world that, from Naples even to Mexico, seemed to be rapidly drifting away from her. The[pg 509]opposing school took other ground. Perhaps they saw that supremacy is one thing, and infallibility another thing quite different. The liberal catholics did not contest the dogma of papal infallibility; they questioned the expediency of its proclamation; they were for associating ideas of religion with ideas of liberty; they were not for extending the domain of miracle and the supernatural.Then as in the old historic councils, influence of race and nation had decisive effects. It could not be otherwise in what was in essence a conflict between a centralised doctrinal authority on the one hand, and the inextinguishable tendency towards national churches on the other. The Italian bishops went with the pope. The Germans, as of old they had been for emperor against priest, were now on the side of freedom against what certain of them did not hesitate to call tyranny and fraud. Some of the ablest of the French were true to Gallican tradition and resisted the decree. Among the most active and uncompromising of all the ultramontane party was our English Manning.315

One question, as the reader by this time well knows, living deepest in Mr. Gladstone's heart and mind from his first book in 1838 onwards, was the relation of the churches to modern society. English statesmen are wont to be either blind to the existence of such a question, or else they seek an easy refuge from it in a perfunctory erastianism, sometimes intellectually refined, sometimes a little brutish, but always shallow. In all the three great branches of Christianity, the Latin, the Greek or orthodox, the protestant, Mr. Gladstone's interest was incessant, sincere, and profound. It covered their theology, their organisation, their history and principles of growth, the bearings of their system upon individual character and social well-being all over Europe. He was one of the very few public men capable of discerning that the fall of the temporal power of the pope marked a more startling change and a profounder crisis in human history, than the unification of Italy, the unification of Germany, the reconstructed republic in France, perhaps even than the preservation of the American union. He knew the force of ideas in the world; he realised the vast transformations that had in their succession swept over the minds of men since cardinal dogmas had been established; he comprehended the motion in[pg 508]articles of faith, as men made their“voyagings through strange seas of thought”; he was alive to the fact that moral crises brought on by change in intellectual outlook and temperature, are of deeper concern than questions of territory, or dynasty, or form of government. The moral crisis is what reaches furthest and matters most. A movement of the first magnitude was accentuated by Pius IX., when by the Syllabus of 1864 he challenged modern society in all its foundations, its aims, its principles, in the whole range of its ideals. Some called this daring ultimatum the gravest event since the French uprising in 1789. The Syllabus prepared the way for a more elaborately organised operation on behalf of papal authority. The train was secretly laid for a grand reaction, a grand re-installation of the Christian faith.314

The Two Schools

The Two Schools

The pope had been despoiled of territory, his sway within the walls of Rome itself was in constant danger, his most powerful protector north of the Alps had been weakened and humiliated by protestant Prussia. He was now to be compensated for his calamities by a majestic demonstration of his hold upon the spiritual allegiance of millions of adherents in every portion of the habitable globe. The twentieth ecumenical council assembled in St. Peter's at Rome on December 8, 1869. In this gathering of catholic prelates from both hemispheres, two antagonistic schools confronted one another. The ultramontanes held that the revolutionary welter and confusion of the modern world could only be healed by solemn affirmation of the principle of sovereign authority lodged in an infallible pope, with absolute power to define by that apostolic authority what ought to be held as articles of faith or morals. The assumptions, the standards, the ruling types of the modern age, they boldly encountered with rigid iteration of maxims of old time, imposing obedience and submission to a fixed social order and a divinely commissioned hierarchy. Inflexibility was to be the single watchword by which the church could recover a world that, from Naples even to Mexico, seemed to be rapidly drifting away from her. The[pg 509]opposing school took other ground. Perhaps they saw that supremacy is one thing, and infallibility another thing quite different. The liberal catholics did not contest the dogma of papal infallibility; they questioned the expediency of its proclamation; they were for associating ideas of religion with ideas of liberty; they were not for extending the domain of miracle and the supernatural.

Then as in the old historic councils, influence of race and nation had decisive effects. It could not be otherwise in what was in essence a conflict between a centralised doctrinal authority on the one hand, and the inextinguishable tendency towards national churches on the other. The Italian bishops went with the pope. The Germans, as of old they had been for emperor against priest, were now on the side of freedom against what certain of them did not hesitate to call tyranny and fraud. Some of the ablest of the French were true to Gallican tradition and resisted the decree. Among the most active and uncompromising of all the ultramontane party was our English Manning.315

IIAt the end of November 1869, Acton had written to Mr. Gladstone from Rome.“Your letter is a very sad one,”Mr. Gladstone answered.“I feel as deep and real an interest in the affairs of other Christian communions as in my own; and most of all in the case of the most famous of them all, and the one within which the largest number of Christian souls find their spiritual food.”Before Manning left for 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[pg 510]thought to lie in a governing faculty, and in its wise moderation. Now he is ever quoted as theultraof 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 bealleyes 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 willanyhave 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 theapprobation of the flock.316Unless 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.Issue Of The CouncilThe French government wrote despatches of mild protest but said nothing of withdrawing their garrison. Mr. Gladstone and Lord Clarendon were for informing the Roman court that they were cognizant of the French despatches, and approved of their tenour. The Queen and the cabinet, however, were entirely averse to meddling with the council,[pg 511]and nothing was done officially. This did not prevent Mr. Gladstone from telling Archbishop Manning what impediments would be placed in the way of Irish legislation by the state of English feeling as to the Syllabus and other papal proceedings.“Myfeelings and convictions,”he says (April 16),“are as you well know decidedly with your‘opposition,’which I believe to be contending for the religious and civil interests of mankind against influences highly disastrous and menacing to both. But the prevailing opinion is that it is better to let those influences take their course, and work out the damage which they will naturally and surely entail upon the see of Rome and upon what is bound to it.”In parliament there was an utter aversion to the Roman policy, and he gives instances, noting even a change of opinion about the Irish land bill.“What I have described is no matter of speculation. I know it by actual and daily touch. I am glad you have moved me to state it in some detail. It is to me matter of profound grief, especially as regards land in Ireland.”To Lord Acton:—Of all the prelates at Rome, none have a finer opportunity, to none is a more crucial test now applied, than to those of the United States. For if there, where there is nothing of covenant, of restraint, or of equivalent between the church and the state, the propositions of the Syllabus are still to have the countenance of the episcopate, it becomes really a little difficult to maintain in argument the civil rights of such persons to toleration, however conclusive be the argument of policy in favour of granting it. I can hardly bring myself to speculate or care on what particular day the foregone conclusion is to be finally adopted. My grief is sincere and deep, but it is at the whole thing, so ruinous in its consequences as they concern faith. In my view, the size of the minority, though important, is not nearly so important as the question whether there will be a minority at all.There was a minority. In a division taken at a late stage, 451 composed the majority, 88 resisted, and 62 were for a new examination. Then the minority turned their backs on Rome; and on July 18 the definition of infallibility[pg 512]was acclaimed in St. Peter's in presence of the pope by 533 against 2.Mr. Gladstone is very glad when Clarendon instructs Mr. Russell to turn his back on the festivities at Rome.“The whole proceeding has been monstrous, and it will hereafter become one of the laughing-stocks of history. The fanaticism of the middle ages is really sober compared with that of the nineteenth century.”“The proclamation of Infallibility,”he said to Bishop Moriarty,“I must own I look upon as the most portentous (taking them singly), of all events in the history of the Christian church.”

At the end of November 1869, Acton had written to Mr. Gladstone from Rome.“Your letter is a very sad one,”Mr. Gladstone answered.“I feel as deep and real an interest in the affairs of other Christian communions as in my own; and most of all in the case of the most famous of them all, and the one within which the largest number of Christian souls find their spiritual food.”Before Manning left for 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[pg 510]thought to lie in a governing faculty, and in its wise moderation. Now he is ever quoted as theultraof 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 bealleyes 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 willanyhave 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 theapprobation of the flock.316Unless 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.

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 willanyhave 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 theapprobation of the flock.316Unless 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.

Issue Of The Council

Issue Of The Council

The French government wrote despatches of mild protest but said nothing of withdrawing their garrison. Mr. Gladstone and Lord Clarendon were for informing the Roman court that they were cognizant of the French despatches, and approved of their tenour. The Queen and the cabinet, however, were entirely averse to meddling with the council,[pg 511]and nothing was done officially. This did not prevent Mr. Gladstone from telling Archbishop Manning what impediments would be placed in the way of Irish legislation by the state of English feeling as to the Syllabus and other papal proceedings.“Myfeelings and convictions,”he says (April 16),“are as you well know decidedly with your‘opposition,’which I believe to be contending for the religious and civil interests of mankind against influences highly disastrous and menacing to both. But the prevailing opinion is that it is better to let those influences take their course, and work out the damage which they will naturally and surely entail upon the see of Rome and upon what is bound to it.”In parliament there was an utter aversion to the Roman policy, and he gives instances, noting even a change of opinion about the Irish land bill.“What I have described is no matter of speculation. I know it by actual and daily touch. I am glad you have moved me to state it in some detail. It is to me matter of profound grief, especially as regards land in Ireland.”

To Lord Acton:—

Of all the prelates at Rome, none have a finer opportunity, to none is a more crucial test now applied, than to those of the United States. For if there, where there is nothing of covenant, of restraint, or of equivalent between the church and the state, the propositions of the Syllabus are still to have the countenance of the episcopate, it becomes really a little difficult to maintain in argument the civil rights of such persons to toleration, however conclusive be the argument of policy in favour of granting it. I can hardly bring myself to speculate or care on what particular day the foregone conclusion is to be finally adopted. My grief is sincere and deep, but it is at the whole thing, so ruinous in its consequences as they concern faith. In my view, the size of the minority, though important, is not nearly so important as the question whether there will be a minority at all.

There was a minority. In a division taken at a late stage, 451 composed the majority, 88 resisted, and 62 were for a new examination. Then the minority turned their backs on Rome; and on July 18 the definition of infallibility[pg 512]was acclaimed in St. Peter's in presence of the pope by 533 against 2.

Mr. Gladstone is very glad when Clarendon instructs Mr. Russell to turn his back on the festivities at Rome.“The whole proceeding has been monstrous, and it will hereafter become one of the laughing-stocks of history. The fanaticism of the middle ages is really sober compared with that of the nineteenth century.”“The proclamation of Infallibility,”he said to Bishop Moriarty,“I must own I look upon as the most portentous (taking them singly), of all events in the history of the Christian church.”

IIIThe next day, as we know, war was declared by France against Germany, the French garrison left Rome, and on September 20 the Italians marched in.A month before the war broke out, Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Clarendon:“I would avoid any official support of the Italian application to France for the evacuation of Rome, by saying that this country had always abstained from mixing in that question; and that we were the more induced to persevere in that policy from being well convinced that the French government is perfectly aware that in this country the occupation of any part of the pontifical territories by French troops is regarded with regret, pain, and disapproval. Further, that those who most strongly entertain these sentiments, are generally the persons who most highly value, and have most striven to promote, the good understanding between France and England.”The occupation of Rome by the Italian government brought upon Mr. Gladstone various demands and movements from different parts of the country. His cabinet agreed that the proper course was to decline all interference with a view to the restoration of the temporal power, though they accepted the task of promoting, by means of friendly representations, arrangements to secure the pontiff's freedom and becoming support. Then some of his presbyterian friends asked him why he should even do so much as this, when he would take no such steps for the moderator of the free church. Now[pg 513]consider, Mr. Gladstone replied:“the pope is a sovereign who was in lawful possession of large revenues, and who had charged himself with the support of a body of cardinals, ministers, nuncios, servants, and guards out of those revenues. He has been dispossessed, not for any fault of his own, but because clerical dominion was deemed intolerable. In the maintenance of the pope and his court, followers and agents, six millions of our fellow-subjects or thereabouts are deeply interested; and they are making demands upon us which we are forced to decline. But I should for one be ashamed to deny that there are the strongest equitable claims upon the Italian government growing out of the past state of things; that in these equitable claims the six millions I speak of have a real interest and share; and as the matter is international, and they have nolocus standiwith the Italian government, it is our part so far to plead their cause if need be.”

The next day, as we know, war was declared by France against Germany, the French garrison left Rome, and on September 20 the Italians marched in.

A month before the war broke out, Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Clarendon:“I would avoid any official support of the Italian application to France for the evacuation of Rome, by saying that this country had always abstained from mixing in that question; and that we were the more induced to persevere in that policy from being well convinced that the French government is perfectly aware that in this country the occupation of any part of the pontifical territories by French troops is regarded with regret, pain, and disapproval. Further, that those who most strongly entertain these sentiments, are generally the persons who most highly value, and have most striven to promote, the good understanding between France and England.”

The occupation of Rome by the Italian government brought upon Mr. Gladstone various demands and movements from different parts of the country. His cabinet agreed that the proper course was to decline all interference with a view to the restoration of the temporal power, though they accepted the task of promoting, by means of friendly representations, arrangements to secure the pontiff's freedom and becoming support. Then some of his presbyterian friends asked him why he should even do so much as this, when he would take no such steps for the moderator of the free church. Now[pg 513]consider, Mr. Gladstone replied:“the pope is a sovereign who was in lawful possession of large revenues, and who had charged himself with the support of a body of cardinals, ministers, nuncios, servants, and guards out of those revenues. He has been dispossessed, not for any fault of his own, but because clerical dominion was deemed intolerable. In the maintenance of the pope and his court, followers and agents, six millions of our fellow-subjects or thereabouts are deeply interested; and they are making demands upon us which we are forced to decline. But I should for one be ashamed to deny that there are the strongest equitable claims upon the Italian government growing out of the past state of things; that in these equitable claims the six millions I speak of have a real interest and share; and as the matter is international, and they have nolocus standiwith the Italian government, it is our part so far to plead their cause if need be.”

IVVisit To MunichFour years elapsed before Mr. Gladstone was in a position to follow up his strong opinions on the injury done, as he believed, to human liberty by the Vatican decrees. But the great debate between ultramontanes and old catholics was followed by him with an interest that never slackened. In September 1874 he went to Munich, and we can hardly be wrong in ascribing to that visit the famous tract which was to make so lively a stir before the end of the year. His principal object was to communicate with Dr. Döllinger, and this object, he tells Mrs. Gladstone, was fully gained.“I think,”he says,“I have spent two-thirds of my whole time with Dr. Döllinger, who is indeed a most remarkable man, and it makes my blood run cold to think ofhisbeing excommunicated in his venerable but, thank God, hale and strong old age. In conversation we have covered a wide field. I know no one with whose mode of viewing and handling religious matters I more cordially agree.... He is wonderful, and simple as a child.”“I think it was in 1874,”Döllinger afterwards mentioned,“that I remember Gladstone's paying me a visit at six o'clock[pg 514]in the evening. We began talking on political and theological subjects, and became, both of us, so engrossed with the conversation, that it was two o'clock at night when I left the room to fetch a book from my library bearing on the matter in hand. I returned with it in a few minutes, and found him deep in a volume he had drawn out of his pocket—true to his principle of never losing time—during my momentary absence.”317“In the course of a walk out of Munich in the travelling season of 1874,”Mr. Gladstone wrote sixteen years later,“Dr. Döllinger told me that he was engaged in the work of retrial through the whole circle of his Latin teaching and knowledge. The results were tested in his proceedings at Bonn, when he attempted to establish aformula concordiaeupon the questions which most gravely divided Christendom.”318Among other topics Mr. Gladstone commended to his mentor the idea of a republication in a series, of the best works of those whom he would call the Henotic or Eirenic writers on the differences that separate Christians and churches from one another. He also read Pichler on the theology of Leibnitz, not without suspicion that it was rather Pichler than Leibnitz. But neither Leibnitz nor Pichler was really in his mind.After the session of 1874, when the public ear and mind had been possessed by the word Ritualism, he had as usual sought a vent in a magazine article for the thoughts with which he was teeming.319He speaks with some disdain of the question whether a handful of the clergy are or are not engaged in“an utterly hopeless and visionary effort to Romanise the church and people of England.”At no time, he says, since the sanguinary reign of Mary has such a scheme been possible. Least of all, he proceeds, could the scheme have life in it“when Rome has substituted for the proud boast ofsemper eadema policy of violence and change in faith; when she has refurbished and paraded anew every[pg 515]rusty tool she was fondly thought to have disused; when no one can become her convert, without renouncing his moral and mental freedom, and placing his civil loyalty and duty at the mercy of another; and when she has equally repudiated modern thought and ancient history.”If these strong words expressed his state of mind before he went abroad, we may readily imagine how the Bavarian air would fan the flame.Though Dr. Döllinger himself—“so inaccessible to religious passions”—was not aware of the purpose of his English friend, there can be little doubt that Mr. Gladstone returned from Munich with the same degree of internal ferment as that which had possessed his mind on his return from Naples three-and-twenty years before. In October he writes to Lord Acton from Hawarden:—What you have said on the subject of ultramontanism and of the mode in which it should be handled, appears to me to be as wise and as good as is possible. It is really a case for hitting hard, but for hitting the right men. In anything I say or do on the subject, I would wish heartily and simply to conform to the spirit of your words. But I feel myself drawn onwards. Indeed some of your words help to draw me. The question with me now is whether I shall or shall not publish a tract which I have written, and of which the title would probably be,“The Vatican Decrees in their bearing on Civil Allegiance: a Political Expostulation.”I incline to think that I ought to publish it. If it were in your power and will to run over here for a night or two I should seek to profit by your counsel, and should ask you to read as much of thems.as your patience would endure. A more substantial attraction would be that I could go over much of my long and interesting conversations with Döllinger.

Visit To Munich

Visit To Munich

Four years elapsed before Mr. Gladstone was in a position to follow up his strong opinions on the injury done, as he believed, to human liberty by the Vatican decrees. But the great debate between ultramontanes and old catholics was followed by him with an interest that never slackened. In September 1874 he went to Munich, and we can hardly be wrong in ascribing to that visit the famous tract which was to make so lively a stir before the end of the year. His principal object was to communicate with Dr. Döllinger, and this object, he tells Mrs. Gladstone, was fully gained.“I think,”he says,“I have spent two-thirds of my whole time with Dr. Döllinger, who is indeed a most remarkable man, and it makes my blood run cold to think ofhisbeing excommunicated in his venerable but, thank God, hale and strong old age. In conversation we have covered a wide field. I know no one with whose mode of viewing and handling religious matters I more cordially agree.... He is wonderful, and simple as a child.”

“I think it was in 1874,”Döllinger afterwards mentioned,“that I remember Gladstone's paying me a visit at six o'clock[pg 514]in the evening. We began talking on political and theological subjects, and became, both of us, so engrossed with the conversation, that it was two o'clock at night when I left the room to fetch a book from my library bearing on the matter in hand. I returned with it in a few minutes, and found him deep in a volume he had drawn out of his pocket—true to his principle of never losing time—during my momentary absence.”317“In the course of a walk out of Munich in the travelling season of 1874,”Mr. Gladstone wrote sixteen years later,“Dr. Döllinger told me that he was engaged in the work of retrial through the whole circle of his Latin teaching and knowledge. The results were tested in his proceedings at Bonn, when he attempted to establish aformula concordiaeupon the questions which most gravely divided Christendom.”318Among other topics Mr. Gladstone commended to his mentor the idea of a republication in a series, of the best works of those whom he would call the Henotic or Eirenic writers on the differences that separate Christians and churches from one another. He also read Pichler on the theology of Leibnitz, not without suspicion that it was rather Pichler than Leibnitz. But neither Leibnitz nor Pichler was really in his mind.

After the session of 1874, when the public ear and mind had been possessed by the word Ritualism, he had as usual sought a vent in a magazine article for the thoughts with which he was teeming.319He speaks with some disdain of the question whether a handful of the clergy are or are not engaged in“an utterly hopeless and visionary effort to Romanise the church and people of England.”At no time, he says, since the sanguinary reign of Mary has such a scheme been possible. Least of all, he proceeds, could the scheme have life in it“when Rome has substituted for the proud boast ofsemper eadema policy of violence and change in faith; when she has refurbished and paraded anew every[pg 515]rusty tool she was fondly thought to have disused; when no one can become her convert, without renouncing his moral and mental freedom, and placing his civil loyalty and duty at the mercy of another; and when she has equally repudiated modern thought and ancient history.”If these strong words expressed his state of mind before he went abroad, we may readily imagine how the Bavarian air would fan the flame.

Though Dr. Döllinger himself—“so inaccessible to religious passions”—was not aware of the purpose of his English friend, there can be little doubt that Mr. Gladstone returned from Munich with the same degree of internal ferment as that which had possessed his mind on his return from Naples three-and-twenty years before. In October he writes to Lord Acton from Hawarden:—

What you have said on the subject of ultramontanism and of the mode in which it should be handled, appears to me to be as wise and as good as is possible. It is really a case for hitting hard, but for hitting the right men. In anything I say or do on the subject, I would wish heartily and simply to conform to the spirit of your words. But I feel myself drawn onwards. Indeed some of your words help to draw me. The question with me now is whether I shall or shall not publish a tract which I have written, and of which the title would probably be,“The Vatican Decrees in their bearing on Civil Allegiance: a Political Expostulation.”I incline to think that I ought to publish it. If it were in your power and will to run over here for a night or two I should seek to profit by your counsel, and should ask you to read as much of thems.as your patience would endure. A more substantial attraction would be that I could go over much of my long and interesting conversations with Döllinger.

VPublication Of The PamphletThe pamphlet320appeared in November, and was meant for an argument that the decree of infallibility aimed a deadly blow at the old historic, scientific, and moderate school; it was a degradation of the episcopal order; it carried to its furthest point that spirit of absolutist centralisation, which[pg 516]in its excesses is as fatal to vigorous life in the church, as in the state; it overthrew the principle not even denied by the council of Trent in the sixteenth century, that the pope and his judgments were triable by the assembled representatives of the Christian world.Thrice in history it seemed as if the constitutional party in the church was about to triumph: at the council of Constance in the fifteenth century; in the conflict between the French episcopate and Innocentxi.in the days of Bossuet; and thirdly, when Clementxiv., exactly a hundred years before now, dealt with the Jesuits and“levelled in the dust the deadliest foes that mental and moral liberty have ever known.”From July 1870 all this had passed away, and the constitutional party had seen its death-warrant signed and sealed. The“myrmidons of the apostolic chamber”had committed their church to revolutionary measures. The vast new claims were lodged in the reign of a pontiff, who by the dark Syllabus of 1864 had condemned free speech, a free press, liberty of conscience, toleration of nonconformity, the free study of civil and philosophic things independently of church authority, marriage unless sacramentally contracted, and all definition by the state of the civil rights of the church.The Pamphlet“It has been a favourite purpose of my life,”Mr. Gladstone said,“not to conjure up, but to conjure down, public alarms. I am not now going to pretend that either foreign foe or domestic treason can, at the bidding of the court of Rome, disturb these peaceful shores. But although such fears may be visionary, it is more visionary still to suppose for one moment that the claims of Gregoryvii., of Innocentiii., and of Bonifaceviii.have been disinterred in the nineteenth century, like hideous mummies picked out of Egyptian sarcophagi, in the interests of archæology, or without a definite and practical aim.”What, then, was the clear and foregone purpose behind the parade of all these astonishing reassertions? The first was—by claims to infallibility in creed, to the prerogative of miracles, to dominion over the unseen world—to satisfy spiritual appetites, sharpened into reaction and made morbid by“the levity of the destructive speculations so widely current, and the notable hardihood of the[pg 517]anti-Christian writing of the day.”This alone, however, would not explain the deliberate provocation of all the“risks of so daring a raid upon the civil sphere.”The answer was to be found in the favourite design, hardly a secret design, of restoring by the road of force when any favourable opportunity should arise, and of re-erecting, the terrestrial throne of the popedom,“even if it could only be re-erected on the ashes of the city, and amidst the whitening bones of the people.”And this brings the writer to the immediate practical aspects of his tract.“If the baleful power which is expressed by the phraseCuria Romana, and not at all adequately rendered in its historic force by the usual English equivalent‘Court of Rome,’really entertains the scheme, it doubtless counts on the support in every country of an organised and devoted party; which, when it can command the scales of political power, will promote interference, and while it is in a minority, will work for securing neutrality. As the peace of Europe may be in jeopardy, and as the duties even of England, as one of its constabulary authorities, might come to be in question, it would be most interesting to know the mental attitude of our Roman catholic fellow-countrymen in England and Ireland with reference to the subject; and it seems to be one on which we are entitled to solicit information.”Too commonly the spirit of the convert was to be expressed by the notorious words,“a catholic first, an Englishman afterwards”—words that properly convey no more than a truism,“for every Christian must seek to place his religion even before his country in his inner heart; but very far from a truism in the sense in which we have been led to construe them.”This, indeed, was a new and very real“papal aggression.”For himself, Mr. Gladstone said, it should not shake his allegiance to“the rule of maintaining equal civil rights irrespectively of religious differences.”Had he not given conclusive indications of that view, by supporting in parliament as a minister since the council, the repeal in 1871 of the law against ecclesiastical titles, whose enactment he had opposed twenty years before?That the pamphlet should create intense excitement, was inevitable from the place of the writer in the public eye,[pg 518]from the extraordinary vehemence of the attack, and above all from the unquenchable fascination of the topic. Whether the excitement in the country was more than superficial; whether most readers fathomed the deep issues as they stood, not between catholic and protestant, but between catholic and catholic within the fold; whether in fastening upon the civil allegiance of English Romanists Mr. Gladstone took the true point against Vaticanism—these are questions that we need not here discuss. The central proposition made a cruel dilemma for a large class of the subjects of the Queen; for the choice assigned to them by assuming stringent logic was between being bad citizens if they submitted to the decree of papal infallibility, and bad catholics if they did not. Protestant logicians wrote to Mr. Gladstone that if his contention were good, we ought now to repeal catholic emancipation and again clap on the fetters. Syllogisms in action are but stupid things after all, unless they are checked by a tincture of what seems paradox.321Apart from the particular issue in his Vatican pamphlet, Mr. Gladstone believed himself to be but following his own main track in life and thought in his assault upon“a policy which declines to acknowledge the high place assigned to liberty in the counsels of Providence, and which upon the pretext of the abuse that like every other good she suffers, expels her from its system.”Among the names that he was never willing to discuss with me—Machiavelli, for instance—was Joseph de Maistre, the hardiest, most adventurous, most ingenious, and incisive of all the speculative champions of European reaction.322In the pages of de Maistre he might have found the reasoned base on which the ultramontane creed may be supposed to rest. He would have found liberty depicted less as a blessing than a scourge; even Bossuet denounced as a heretic with dubious chances of salvation, for his struggle on behalf of a national church against Roman centralisation; the old[pg 519]Greeks held up to odium as a race of talkers, frivolous, light, and born incorrigible dividers. In dealing with de Maistre, Mr. Gladstone would have had a foeman worthier of his powerful steel than the authors of the Syllabus, Schema, Postulatum, and all the rest of what he called the Vaticanism of 1870. But here, as always, he was man of action, and wrote for a specific though perhaps a fugitive purpose.

Publication Of The Pamphlet

Publication Of The Pamphlet

The pamphlet320appeared in November, and was meant for an argument that the decree of infallibility aimed a deadly blow at the old historic, scientific, and moderate school; it was a degradation of the episcopal order; it carried to its furthest point that spirit of absolutist centralisation, which[pg 516]in its excesses is as fatal to vigorous life in the church, as in the state; it overthrew the principle not even denied by the council of Trent in the sixteenth century, that the pope and his judgments were triable by the assembled representatives of the Christian world.

Thrice in history it seemed as if the constitutional party in the church was about to triumph: at the council of Constance in the fifteenth century; in the conflict between the French episcopate and Innocentxi.in the days of Bossuet; and thirdly, when Clementxiv., exactly a hundred years before now, dealt with the Jesuits and“levelled in the dust the deadliest foes that mental and moral liberty have ever known.”From July 1870 all this had passed away, and the constitutional party had seen its death-warrant signed and sealed. The“myrmidons of the apostolic chamber”had committed their church to revolutionary measures. The vast new claims were lodged in the reign of a pontiff, who by the dark Syllabus of 1864 had condemned free speech, a free press, liberty of conscience, toleration of nonconformity, the free study of civil and philosophic things independently of church authority, marriage unless sacramentally contracted, and all definition by the state of the civil rights of the church.

The Pamphlet

The Pamphlet

“It has been a favourite purpose of my life,”Mr. Gladstone said,“not to conjure up, but to conjure down, public alarms. I am not now going to pretend that either foreign foe or domestic treason can, at the bidding of the court of Rome, disturb these peaceful shores. But although such fears may be visionary, it is more visionary still to suppose for one moment that the claims of Gregoryvii., of Innocentiii., and of Bonifaceviii.have been disinterred in the nineteenth century, like hideous mummies picked out of Egyptian sarcophagi, in the interests of archæology, or without a definite and practical aim.”What, then, was the clear and foregone purpose behind the parade of all these astonishing reassertions? The first was—by claims to infallibility in creed, to the prerogative of miracles, to dominion over the unseen world—to satisfy spiritual appetites, sharpened into reaction and made morbid by“the levity of the destructive speculations so widely current, and the notable hardihood of the[pg 517]anti-Christian writing of the day.”This alone, however, would not explain the deliberate provocation of all the“risks of so daring a raid upon the civil sphere.”The answer was to be found in the favourite design, hardly a secret design, of restoring by the road of force when any favourable opportunity should arise, and of re-erecting, the terrestrial throne of the popedom,“even if it could only be re-erected on the ashes of the city, and amidst the whitening bones of the people.”

And this brings the writer to the immediate practical aspects of his tract.“If the baleful power which is expressed by the phraseCuria Romana, and not at all adequately rendered in its historic force by the usual English equivalent‘Court of Rome,’really entertains the scheme, it doubtless counts on the support in every country of an organised and devoted party; which, when it can command the scales of political power, will promote interference, and while it is in a minority, will work for securing neutrality. As the peace of Europe may be in jeopardy, and as the duties even of England, as one of its constabulary authorities, might come to be in question, it would be most interesting to know the mental attitude of our Roman catholic fellow-countrymen in England and Ireland with reference to the subject; and it seems to be one on which we are entitled to solicit information.”Too commonly the spirit of the convert was to be expressed by the notorious words,“a catholic first, an Englishman afterwards”—words that properly convey no more than a truism,“for every Christian must seek to place his religion even before his country in his inner heart; but very far from a truism in the sense in which we have been led to construe them.”This, indeed, was a new and very real“papal aggression.”For himself, Mr. Gladstone said, it should not shake his allegiance to“the rule of maintaining equal civil rights irrespectively of religious differences.”Had he not given conclusive indications of that view, by supporting in parliament as a minister since the council, the repeal in 1871 of the law against ecclesiastical titles, whose enactment he had opposed twenty years before?

That the pamphlet should create intense excitement, was inevitable from the place of the writer in the public eye,[pg 518]from the extraordinary vehemence of the attack, and above all from the unquenchable fascination of the topic. Whether the excitement in the country was more than superficial; whether most readers fathomed the deep issues as they stood, not between catholic and protestant, but between catholic and catholic within the fold; whether in fastening upon the civil allegiance of English Romanists Mr. Gladstone took the true point against Vaticanism—these are questions that we need not here discuss. The central proposition made a cruel dilemma for a large class of the subjects of the Queen; for the choice assigned to them by assuming stringent logic was between being bad citizens if they submitted to the decree of papal infallibility, and bad catholics if they did not. Protestant logicians wrote to Mr. Gladstone that if his contention were good, we ought now to repeal catholic emancipation and again clap on the fetters. Syllogisms in action are but stupid things after all, unless they are checked by a tincture of what seems paradox.321Apart from the particular issue in his Vatican pamphlet, Mr. Gladstone believed himself to be but following his own main track in life and thought in his assault upon“a policy which declines to acknowledge the high place assigned to liberty in the counsels of Providence, and which upon the pretext of the abuse that like every other good she suffers, expels her from its system.”

Among the names that he was never willing to discuss with me—Machiavelli, for instance—was Joseph de Maistre, the hardiest, most adventurous, most ingenious, and incisive of all the speculative champions of European reaction.322In the pages of de Maistre he might have found the reasoned base on which the ultramontane creed may be supposed to rest. He would have found liberty depicted less as a blessing than a scourge; even Bossuet denounced as a heretic with dubious chances of salvation, for his struggle on behalf of a national church against Roman centralisation; the old[pg 519]Greeks held up to odium as a race of talkers, frivolous, light, and born incorrigible dividers. In dealing with de Maistre, Mr. Gladstone would have had a foeman worthier of his powerful steel than the authors of the Syllabus, Schema, Postulatum, and all the rest of what he called the Vaticanism of 1870. But here, as always, he was man of action, and wrote for a specific though perhaps a fugitive purpose.

VILabours Of The ControversyAt the end of the year the total number printed of the tract was 145,000, and of these 120,000 were in a people's edition.“My pamphlet,”he tells Lacaita,“has brought upon me such a mass of work as I can hardly cope with, and I am compelled to do all things as succinctly as possible, though my work is with little intermission from morning till night. I agree with you that the pamphlet in the main tells its own story; and I am glad there is no need to select in a hurry some one to write on the difference between papism and Catholicism.... There is no doubt that the discussion opens,i.e.makes a breach in the walls of the papal theology, and it ought to be turned to account. But I shall have enough to do with all my hands, if I am to work properly through the task I have undertaken. Not, I trust, for long, for I think another pamphlet should suffice to end it on my side. But I am vexed that Manning (as if he had been pulled up at Rome), after having announced his formal reply six weeks ago, hangs fire and now talks of delaying it.”The result, he assures Lord Granville (Nov. 25),“must be injurious to the pestilent opinions that have so grievously obtained the upper hand in that church, and to the party whichmeansto have a war in Europe for the restoration of the temporal power. To place impediments in their way has been my principal purpose.”He told Acton (Dec. 18),“When you were putting in caveats and warnings, you did not say to me,‘Now mind, this affair will absorb some, perhaps many, months of your life.’It has been so up to the present moment, and it evidently will be so for some time.”With Acton he carried on elaborate correspondence[pg 520]upon some of the questions raised by the Syllabus, notably on the effect of the pope's disciplinary judgment on anglican marriages, converting them into relations that were not marriage at all. He fears that he has conceded too much to the papal party in not treating the Syllabus asex cathedra; in allowing that the popes had been apt to claim dogmatic infallibility for wellnigh a thousand years; as to the ecumenicity of the Vatican council. Among other matters he was reading“the curious volumes ofDiscorsi di Pio IX., published at Rome, and he might find it his duty to write collaterally upon them.”This duty he performed with much fidelity in theQuarterly Reviewfor January 1875. He is active in interest about translations; keen to enlist auxiliaries in every camp and all countries; delighted with all utterances from Italy or elsewhere that make in his direction, even noting with satisfaction that the agnostic Huxley was warm in approval.“I pass my days and nights,”he tells the Duke of Argyll (Dec. 19),“in the Vatican. Already the pope has given me two months of incessant correspondence and other hard work, and it may very well last two more. Nor is this work pleasant; but I am as far as possible from repenting of it, as no one else to whom the public would listen saved me the trouble. It is full of intense interest. Every post brings a mass of general reading, writing, or both. Forty covers of one kind or another to-day, and all my time is absorbed. But the subject is well worth the pains.”The Italians, Lord Granville told him,“generally approved, but were puzzled why you should have thought it necessary.”Retorts and replies arose in swarms, including one from Manning and another from Newman. He was accused by some of introducing a BismarckianKulturkampfinto England, of seeking to recover his lost popularity by pandering to no-popery, of disregarding the best interests of the country for the sake of his own restoration to power.323I have now finished reading—he said at the beginning of February—the 20th reply to my pamphlet, They cover 1000 pages. And I am hard at work preparing mine with a good[pg 521]conscience and I think a good argument. Manning has been, I think, as civil as he could.Feb. 5.—All this morning I have had to spend in hunting up one important statement of Manning's which I am almost convinced is a gross mis-statement....Feb. 6.—Manning in his 200 pages has not, I venture to say, made a single point against me. But I shall have to show up his quotations very seriously. We have exchanged one or two friendly notes. 8.—Worked on Vaticanism nearly all day and (an exception to my rule) late at night. 14.—Eight hours' work on my proof sheets. 15.—Went through Acton's corrections and notes on my proofs. 19.—Worked much in evening on finishing up my tract, Dr. Döllinger's final criticisms having arrived. He thinks highly of the work, which he observes will cut deeper than the former one, and be more difficult to deal with. By midnight I had the revises ready with the corrections. 20.—Inserted one or two references and wrote“Press”on the 2nd revises. May the power and blessing of God go with the work.The second tract was more pungent than the first, and it gave pleasure to an important minister abroad who had now entangled himself by Falk laws and otherwise in a quarrel with the papacy.“I have had a letter of thanks,”Mr. Gladstone writes to Hawarden (March 6),“from Bismarck. This pamphlet is stouter, sharper, and cheaper than the last, but is only in its eleventh thousand, I believe.”Among others who replied toVaticanismwas Dr. Newman; he appended a new postscript of four-and-twenty pages to his former answer to the first of Mr. Gladstone's pamphlets. Its tone is courteous and argumentative—far too much so to please the ultras who had the pope's ear—and without the wild hitting that Mr. Gladstone found in Manning.Newman wrote to thank him (Jan. 17, 1875) for a letter that he described as“forbearing and generous.”“It has been a great grief to me,”said Newman,“to have had to write against one whose career I have followed from first to last with so much (I may say) loyal interest and admiration. I had known about you from others, and had looked at you with kindly curiosity, before you came up to Christ Church, and from the time that you were launched into public life,[pg 522]you have retained a hold on my thoughts and on my gratitude by the various marks of attention which every now and then you have shown me, when you had an opportunity, and I could not fancy my ever standing towards you in any other relation than that which had lasted so long. What a fate it is, that now when so memorable a career has reached its formal termination [retirement from leadership], I should be the man, on the very day on which it closed, to present to you amid the many expressions of public sympathy which it elicits, a controversial pamphlet as my offering.”But he could not help writing it, he was called upon from such various quarters; and his conscience told him that he who had been in great measure the cause of so many becoming catholics, had no right to leave them in the lurch, when charges were made against them as serious as unexpected.“I do not think,”he concluded,“I ever can be sorry for what I have done, but I never can cease to be sorry for the necessity of doing it.”

Labours Of The Controversy

Labours Of The Controversy

At the end of the year the total number printed of the tract was 145,000, and of these 120,000 were in a people's edition.“My pamphlet,”he tells Lacaita,“has brought upon me such a mass of work as I can hardly cope with, and I am compelled to do all things as succinctly as possible, though my work is with little intermission from morning till night. I agree with you that the pamphlet in the main tells its own story; and I am glad there is no need to select in a hurry some one to write on the difference between papism and Catholicism.... There is no doubt that the discussion opens,i.e.makes a breach in the walls of the papal theology, and it ought to be turned to account. But I shall have enough to do with all my hands, if I am to work properly through the task I have undertaken. Not, I trust, for long, for I think another pamphlet should suffice to end it on my side. But I am vexed that Manning (as if he had been pulled up at Rome), after having announced his formal reply six weeks ago, hangs fire and now talks of delaying it.”The result, he assures Lord Granville (Nov. 25),“must be injurious to the pestilent opinions that have so grievously obtained the upper hand in that church, and to the party whichmeansto have a war in Europe for the restoration of the temporal power. To place impediments in their way has been my principal purpose.”

He told Acton (Dec. 18),“When you were putting in caveats and warnings, you did not say to me,‘Now mind, this affair will absorb some, perhaps many, months of your life.’It has been so up to the present moment, and it evidently will be so for some time.”With Acton he carried on elaborate correspondence[pg 520]upon some of the questions raised by the Syllabus, notably on the effect of the pope's disciplinary judgment on anglican marriages, converting them into relations that were not marriage at all. He fears that he has conceded too much to the papal party in not treating the Syllabus asex cathedra; in allowing that the popes had been apt to claim dogmatic infallibility for wellnigh a thousand years; as to the ecumenicity of the Vatican council. Among other matters he was reading“the curious volumes ofDiscorsi di Pio IX., published at Rome, and he might find it his duty to write collaterally upon them.”This duty he performed with much fidelity in theQuarterly Reviewfor January 1875. He is active in interest about translations; keen to enlist auxiliaries in every camp and all countries; delighted with all utterances from Italy or elsewhere that make in his direction, even noting with satisfaction that the agnostic Huxley was warm in approval.“I pass my days and nights,”he tells the Duke of Argyll (Dec. 19),“in the Vatican. Already the pope has given me two months of incessant correspondence and other hard work, and it may very well last two more. Nor is this work pleasant; but I am as far as possible from repenting of it, as no one else to whom the public would listen saved me the trouble. It is full of intense interest. Every post brings a mass of general reading, writing, or both. Forty covers of one kind or another to-day, and all my time is absorbed. But the subject is well worth the pains.”The Italians, Lord Granville told him,“generally approved, but were puzzled why you should have thought it necessary.”Retorts and replies arose in swarms, including one from Manning and another from Newman. He was accused by some of introducing a BismarckianKulturkampfinto England, of seeking to recover his lost popularity by pandering to no-popery, of disregarding the best interests of the country for the sake of his own restoration to power.323

I have now finished reading—he said at the beginning of February—the 20th reply to my pamphlet, They cover 1000 pages. And I am hard at work preparing mine with a good[pg 521]conscience and I think a good argument. Manning has been, I think, as civil as he could.Feb. 5.—All this morning I have had to spend in hunting up one important statement of Manning's which I am almost convinced is a gross mis-statement....Feb. 6.—Manning in his 200 pages has not, I venture to say, made a single point against me. But I shall have to show up his quotations very seriously. We have exchanged one or two friendly notes. 8.—Worked on Vaticanism nearly all day and (an exception to my rule) late at night. 14.—Eight hours' work on my proof sheets. 15.—Went through Acton's corrections and notes on my proofs. 19.—Worked much in evening on finishing up my tract, Dr. Döllinger's final criticisms having arrived. He thinks highly of the work, which he observes will cut deeper than the former one, and be more difficult to deal with. By midnight I had the revises ready with the corrections. 20.—Inserted one or two references and wrote“Press”on the 2nd revises. May the power and blessing of God go with the work.

The second tract was more pungent than the first, and it gave pleasure to an important minister abroad who had now entangled himself by Falk laws and otherwise in a quarrel with the papacy.“I have had a letter of thanks,”Mr. Gladstone writes to Hawarden (March 6),“from Bismarck. This pamphlet is stouter, sharper, and cheaper than the last, but is only in its eleventh thousand, I believe.”Among others who replied toVaticanismwas Dr. Newman; he appended a new postscript of four-and-twenty pages to his former answer to the first of Mr. Gladstone's pamphlets. Its tone is courteous and argumentative—far too much so to please the ultras who had the pope's ear—and without the wild hitting that Mr. Gladstone found in Manning.

Newman wrote to thank him (Jan. 17, 1875) for a letter that he described as“forbearing and generous.”“It has been a great grief to me,”said Newman,“to have had to write against one whose career I have followed from first to last with so much (I may say) loyal interest and admiration. I had known about you from others, and had looked at you with kindly curiosity, before you came up to Christ Church, and from the time that you were launched into public life,[pg 522]you have retained a hold on my thoughts and on my gratitude by the various marks of attention which every now and then you have shown me, when you had an opportunity, and I could not fancy my ever standing towards you in any other relation than that which had lasted so long. What a fate it is, that now when so memorable a career has reached its formal termination [retirement from leadership], I should be the man, on the very day on which it closed, to present to you amid the many expressions of public sympathy which it elicits, a controversial pamphlet as my offering.”But he could not help writing it, he was called upon from such various quarters; and his conscience told him that he who had been in great measure the cause of so many becoming catholics, had no right to leave them in the lurch, when charges were made against them as serious as unexpected.“I do not think,”he concluded,“I ever can be sorry for what I have done, but I never can cease to be sorry for the necessity of doing it.”

VIIChange Of AbodeThis fierce controversial episode was enough to show that the habit and temperament of action still followed him in the midst of all his purposes of retreat. Withdrawal from parliamentary leadership was accompanied by other steps, apparently all making in the same direction. He sold the house in Carlton House Terrace, where he had passed eight-and-twenty years of work and power and varied sociability.“I had grown to the house,”he says (April 15),“having lived more time in it than in any other since I was born, and mainly by reason of all that was done in it.”To Mrs. Gladstone he wrote (Feb. 28):—I do not wonder that you feel parting from the house will be a blow and a pang. It is nothing less than this to me, but it must be faced and you will face it gallantly. So much has occurred there; and thus it is leaving not the house only but the neighbourhood, where I have been with you for more than thirty-five years, and altogether nearly forty. The truth is that innocently and from special causes we have on the whole been housed better than according to our circumstances. All along Carlton House[pg 523]Terrace I think you would not find any one with less than £20,000 a year, and most of them with, much more.He sold his collection of china and his Wedgwood ware.324He despatched his books to Hawarden. He can hardly have resolved on retirement that should be effective and complete, or else he must have arranged to quit the House of Commons. In his diary he entered (March 30, 1875):—Views about the future and remaining section of my life. In outline they are undefined but in substance definite. The main point is this: that setting aside exceptional circumstances which would have to provide for themselves, my prospective work is not parliamentary. My ties will be slight to an assembly with whose tendencies I am little in harmony at the present time; nor can I flatter myself that what is called the public out of doors is more sympathetic. But there is much to be done with the pen, all bearing much on high and sacred ends, for even Homeric study as I view it, is in this very sense of high importance; and what lies beyond this is concerned directly with the great subject of belief.To Mrs. Gladstone he wrote (May 19, 1875):“I am feeling as it were my way towards the purposes of the rest of my life. It will I dare say clear by degrees. For the general business of the country, my ideas and temper are thoroughly out of harmony with the ideas and temper of the day, especially as they are represented in London.”The movement of negation had been in full swing for a dozen years before the force and weight of it had, amid the stress and absorption of daily business, reached his inner mind. In May 1872, in a speech as member of the council of King's College—“averse from, and little used to platform speaking,”as he described himself to Manning—he used some strong language about those who promulgate as science what is not science and as religion what is not religion; but he took care to sever himself from the recent Roman decrees, which“seemed much to resemble the proclamation of a[pg 524]perpetual war against the progress and the movement of the human mind.”325In December 1872, he caused a marked sensation by an address at Liverpool, in which he spoke of Strauss's book onNew and Old Belief.326He had become a member of the metaphysical society, where eminent representatives of every faith and of no faith discussed every aspect of the foundations of human creeds. He was of too masculine and energetic a cast of mind to feel mere shock as he listened to Huxley, Tyndall, Clifford, Harrison, firmly arguing materialism or positivism or agnosticism or other unhistoric forms. That his whole soul was energetically oppugnant, I need not say. His reverence for freedom never wavered. He wrote to an editor who had criticised his Liverpool address (Jan. 3, 1873):—In the interest of my address, I wish to say that not a word to my knowledge fell from me limiting the range of free inquiry, nor have I ever supposed St. Paul to say anything so silly as“Prove all things: but some you must not prove.”Doubtless some obscurity of mine, I know not what, has led to an error into which the able writer of the article has fallen, not alone.To the Duke of Argyll he wrote:—Dec. 28, '72.—I have been touching upon deep and dangerous subjects at Liverpool. Whether I went beyond my province many may doubt. But of the extent of the mischief I do not doubt any more than of its virulence. All that I hear from day to day convinces me of the extension of this strange epidemic, for it is not, considering how it comes, worthy of being called a rational or scientific process. Be it however, what it may, we politicians are children playing with toys in comparison to that great work of and for manhood, which has to be done, and will yet be done, in restoring belief.[pg 525]Sir Robert Morier sent him from Munich Frohschammer's reply to Strauss.“If I understand him aright,”said Mr. Gladstone,“he is a Unitarian, minus Miracle and Inspiration.”The whole book seemed to him able, honest, and diligent:—But, he adds, I am one of those who think the Christianity of Frohschammer (as I have described it) is like a tall tree scientifically prepared for the saw by the preliminary process, well known to wood-cutters, of clearing away with the axe all projecting roots, which as long as they remained rendered the final operation impossible. This first process leaves the tree standing in a very trim condition, much more mathematical in form, as it is more near a cylinder, than in its native state. The business of the saw, when the horse and the man arrive, is soon accomplished.To his article on ritualism he prefixed as motto two short lines of Pindar, about days that are to come being wisest witnesses.327In spite of retreat, it was impossible that he should forget the vast responsibility imposed upon him, both by his gifts and by the popular ascendency into which they had brought him. His was not the retreat of self-indulgence, and the days that were to come speedily brought him duties that were to bear him far into regions of storm and conflict now unforeseen. Meanwhile, with occasional visits to Westminster, he lived even and industrious days at Hawarden, felling trees, working at Greek mythology and ethnology, delighting in the woods and glades of the park, above all delighting in the tranquillity of his“temple of peace.”Besides being the bookroom of a student, this was still a far-shining beacon in the popular eye. If sages, scholars, heroes, saints, with time's serene and hallowed gravity looked upon him from their shelves, yet loud echoes sounded in his ear from roaring surges of an outer world—from turbid ebb and flow of all the struggle and clamorous hopes and half-blind mysterious instincts of the nations.

Change Of Abode

Change Of Abode

This fierce controversial episode was enough to show that the habit and temperament of action still followed him in the midst of all his purposes of retreat. Withdrawal from parliamentary leadership was accompanied by other steps, apparently all making in the same direction. He sold the house in Carlton House Terrace, where he had passed eight-and-twenty years of work and power and varied sociability.“I had grown to the house,”he says (April 15),“having lived more time in it than in any other since I was born, and mainly by reason of all that was done in it.”To Mrs. Gladstone he wrote (Feb. 28):—

I do not wonder that you feel parting from the house will be a blow and a pang. It is nothing less than this to me, but it must be faced and you will face it gallantly. So much has occurred there; and thus it is leaving not the house only but the neighbourhood, where I have been with you for more than thirty-five years, and altogether nearly forty. The truth is that innocently and from special causes we have on the whole been housed better than according to our circumstances. All along Carlton House[pg 523]Terrace I think you would not find any one with less than £20,000 a year, and most of them with, much more.

He sold his collection of china and his Wedgwood ware.324He despatched his books to Hawarden. He can hardly have resolved on retirement that should be effective and complete, or else he must have arranged to quit the House of Commons. In his diary he entered (March 30, 1875):—

Views about the future and remaining section of my life. In outline they are undefined but in substance definite. The main point is this: that setting aside exceptional circumstances which would have to provide for themselves, my prospective work is not parliamentary. My ties will be slight to an assembly with whose tendencies I am little in harmony at the present time; nor can I flatter myself that what is called the public out of doors is more sympathetic. But there is much to be done with the pen, all bearing much on high and sacred ends, for even Homeric study as I view it, is in this very sense of high importance; and what lies beyond this is concerned directly with the great subject of belief.

To Mrs. Gladstone he wrote (May 19, 1875):“I am feeling as it were my way towards the purposes of the rest of my life. It will I dare say clear by degrees. For the general business of the country, my ideas and temper are thoroughly out of harmony with the ideas and temper of the day, especially as they are represented in London.”

The movement of negation had been in full swing for a dozen years before the force and weight of it had, amid the stress and absorption of daily business, reached his inner mind. In May 1872, in a speech as member of the council of King's College—“averse from, and little used to platform speaking,”as he described himself to Manning—he used some strong language about those who promulgate as science what is not science and as religion what is not religion; but he took care to sever himself from the recent Roman decrees, which“seemed much to resemble the proclamation of a[pg 524]perpetual war against the progress and the movement of the human mind.”325In December 1872, he caused a marked sensation by an address at Liverpool, in which he spoke of Strauss's book onNew and Old Belief.326He had become a member of the metaphysical society, where eminent representatives of every faith and of no faith discussed every aspect of the foundations of human creeds. He was of too masculine and energetic a cast of mind to feel mere shock as he listened to Huxley, Tyndall, Clifford, Harrison, firmly arguing materialism or positivism or agnosticism or other unhistoric forms. That his whole soul was energetically oppugnant, I need not say. His reverence for freedom never wavered. He wrote to an editor who had criticised his Liverpool address (Jan. 3, 1873):—

In the interest of my address, I wish to say that not a word to my knowledge fell from me limiting the range of free inquiry, nor have I ever supposed St. Paul to say anything so silly as“Prove all things: but some you must not prove.”Doubtless some obscurity of mine, I know not what, has led to an error into which the able writer of the article has fallen, not alone.

To the Duke of Argyll he wrote:—

Dec. 28, '72.—I have been touching upon deep and dangerous subjects at Liverpool. Whether I went beyond my province many may doubt. But of the extent of the mischief I do not doubt any more than of its virulence. All that I hear from day to day convinces me of the extension of this strange epidemic, for it is not, considering how it comes, worthy of being called a rational or scientific process. Be it however, what it may, we politicians are children playing with toys in comparison to that great work of and for manhood, which has to be done, and will yet be done, in restoring belief.

Sir Robert Morier sent him from Munich Frohschammer's reply to Strauss.“If I understand him aright,”said Mr. Gladstone,“he is a Unitarian, minus Miracle and Inspiration.”The whole book seemed to him able, honest, and diligent:—

But, he adds, I am one of those who think the Christianity of Frohschammer (as I have described it) is like a tall tree scientifically prepared for the saw by the preliminary process, well known to wood-cutters, of clearing away with the axe all projecting roots, which as long as they remained rendered the final operation impossible. This first process leaves the tree standing in a very trim condition, much more mathematical in form, as it is more near a cylinder, than in its native state. The business of the saw, when the horse and the man arrive, is soon accomplished.

To his article on ritualism he prefixed as motto two short lines of Pindar, about days that are to come being wisest witnesses.327In spite of retreat, it was impossible that he should forget the vast responsibility imposed upon him, both by his gifts and by the popular ascendency into which they had brought him. His was not the retreat of self-indulgence, and the days that were to come speedily brought him duties that were to bear him far into regions of storm and conflict now unforeseen. Meanwhile, with occasional visits to Westminster, he lived even and industrious days at Hawarden, felling trees, working at Greek mythology and ethnology, delighting in the woods and glades of the park, above all delighting in the tranquillity of his“temple of peace.”Besides being the bookroom of a student, this was still a far-shining beacon in the popular eye. If sages, scholars, heroes, saints, with time's serene and hallowed gravity looked upon him from their shelves, yet loud echoes sounded in his ear from roaring surges of an outer world—from turbid ebb and flow of all the struggle and clamorous hopes and half-blind mysterious instincts of the nations.

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