Book X. 1886-1892

Book X. 1886-1892Chapter I. The Morrow Of Defeat. (1886-1887)Charity rendereth a man truly great, enlarging his mind into a vast circumference, and to a capacity nearly infinite; so that it by a general care doth reach all things, by an universal affection doth embrace and grace the world.... Even a spark of it in generosity of dealing breedeth admiration; a glimpse of it in formal courtesy of behaviour procureth much esteem, being deemed to accomplish and adorn a man.—Barrow.IAfter the rejection of his Irish policy in the summer of 1886, Mr. Gladstone had a period of six years before him, the life of the new parliament. Strangely dramatic years they were, in some respects unique in our later history. The party schism among liberals grew deeper and wider. The union between tories and seceders became consolidated and final. The alternative policy of coercion was passed through parliament in an extreme form and with violent strain on the legislative machinery, and it was carried out in Ireland in a fashion that pricked the consciences of many thousands of voters who had resisted the proposals of 1886. A fierce storm rent the Irish phalanx in two, and its leader vanished from the field where for sixteen years he had fought so bold and uncompromising a fight. During this period Mr. Gladstone stood in the most trying of all the varied positions of his life, and without flinching he confronted it in the strong faith that the national honour as well as the assuagement[pg 351]At Tegernseeof the inveterate Irish wound in the flank of his country, were the issues at stake.This intense pre-occupation in the political struggle did not for a single week impair his other interests, nor stay his ceaseless activity in controversies that were not touched by politics. Not even now, when the great cause to which he had so daringly committed himself was in decisive issue, could he allow it to dull or sever what had been the standing concerns of life and thought to him for so long a span of years. As from his youth up, so now behind the man of public action was the diligent, eager, watchful student, churchman, apologist, divine. And what is curious and delightful is that he never set a more admirable example of the tone and temper in which literary and religious controversy should be conducted, than in these years when in politics exasperation was at its worst. It was about this time that he wrote:“Certainly one of the lessons life has taught me is that where there is known to be a common object, the pursuit of truth, there should also be a studious desire to interpret the adversary in the best sense his words will fairly bear; to avoid whatever widens the breach; and to make the most of whatever tends to narrow it. These I hold to be part of the laws of knightly tournament.”And to these laws he sedulously conformed. Perhaps at some happy time before the day of judgment they may be transferred from the tournament to the battle-fields of philosophy, criticism, and even politics.IIAfter the defeat in which his tremendous labours had for the moment ended, he made his way to what was to him the most congenial atmosphere in the world, to the company of Döllinger and Acton, at Tegernsee in Bavaria.“Tegernsee,”Lord Acton wrote to me (Sept. 7),“is an out-of-the-way place, peaceful and silent, and as there is a good library in the house, I have taken some care of his mind, leading in the direction of little French comedies, and away from the tragedy of existence. It has done him good, and he has just started with Döllinger to climb a high mountain in the neighbourhood.”[pg 352]To Mrs. Gladstone.Tegernsee, Aug. 28, 1886.—We found Döllinger reading in the garden. The course of his life is quite unchanged. His constitution does not appear at all to have given way. He beats me utterly in standing, but that is not saying much, as it never was one of my gifts; and he is not conscious (eighty-seven last February) of any difficulty with the heart in going up hill. His deafness has increased materially, but not so that he cannot carry on very well conversation with a single person. We have talked much together even on disestablishment which he detests, and Ireland as to which he is very apprehensive, but he never seems to shut up his mind by prejudice. I had a good excuse for giving him my pamphlet,213but I do not know whether he will tell us what he thinks of it. He was reading it this morning. He rises at six and breakfasts alone. Makes agooddinner at two and has nothing more till the next morning. He does not appear after dark. On the whole one sees no reason why he should not last for several years yet.“When Dr. Döllinger was eighty-seven,”Mr. Gladstone wrote later,“he walked with me seven miles across the hill that separates the Tegernsee from the next valley to the eastward. At that time he began to find his sleep subject to occasional interruptions, and he had armed himself against them by committing to memory the first three books of theOdysseyfor recital.”214Of Mr. Gladstone Döllinger had said in 1885,“I have known Gladstone for thirty years, and would stand security for him any day; his character is a very fine one, and he possesses a rare capability for work. I differ from him in his political views on many points, and it is difficult to convince him, for he is clad in triple steel.”215Another high personage in the Roman catholic world sent him letters through Acton, affectionately written and with signs of serious as well as sympathising study of his Irish policy. A little later (Sept. 21) Mr. Gladstone writes to his wife at Hawarden:—Bishop Strossmayer may make a journey all the way to[pg 353]Hawarden, and it seems that Acton may even accompany him, which would make it much more manageable. His coming would be a great compliment, and cannot be discouraged or refused. It would, however, be a serious affair, for he speaks no language with which as a spoken tongue we are familiar, his great cards being Slavonic and Latin. Unfortunately I have a very great increase of difficulty inhearingthe words in foreign tongues, a difficulty which I hope has hardly begun with you as yet.Like a good host, Lord Acton kept politics out of his way as well as he could, but some letter of mine“set him on fire, and he is full of ——'s blunder and of Parnell's bill.”Parliamentary duty was always a sting to him, and by September 20 he was back in the House of Commons, speaking on the Tenants Relief (Ireland) bill. Then to the temple of peace at Hawarden for the rest of the year, to read theIliad“for the twenty-fifth or thirtieth time, and every time richer and more glorious than before”; to write elaborately on Homeric topics; to receive a good many visitors; and to compose the admirable article on Tennyson's secondLocksley Hall. On this last let us pause for an instant. The moment was hardly one in which, from a man of nature less great and powerful than Mr. Gladstone, we should have counted on a buoyant vindication of the spirit of his time. He had just been roughly repulsed in the boldest enterprise of his career; his name was a target for infinite obloquy; his motives were largely denounced as of the basest; the conflict into which he had plunged and from which he could not withdraw was hard; friends had turned away from him; he was old; the issue was dubious and dark. Yet the personal, or even what to him were the national discomfitures of the hour, were not allowed to blot the sun out of the heavens. His whole soul rose in challenge against the tragic tones of Tennyson's poem, as he recalled the solid tale of the vast improvements, the enormous mitigation of the sorrows and burdens of mankind, that had been effected in the land by public opinion and public authority, operative in the exhilarating sphere of self-government during the sixty years between the first and secondLocksley Hall.[pg 354]The sum of the matter seems to be that upon the whole, and in a degree, we who lived fifty, sixty, seventy years back, and are living now, have lived into a gentler time; that the public conscience has grown more tender, as indeed was very needful; and that in matters of practice, at sight of evils formerly regarded with indifference or even connivance, it now not only winces but rebels; that upon the whole the race has been reaping, and not scattering; earning and not wasting; and that without its being said that the old Prophet is wrong, it may be said that the young Prophet was unquestionably right.Here is the way in which a man of noble heart and high vision as of a circling eagle, transcends his individual chagrins. All this optimism was the natural vein of a statesman who had lived a long life of effort in persuading opinion in so many regions, in overcoming difficulty upon difficulty, in content with a small reform where men would not let him achieve a great one, in patching where he could not build anew, in unquenchable faith, hope, patience, endeavour. Mr. Gladstone knew as well as Tennyson that“every blessing has its drawbacks, and every age its dangers”; he was as sensitive as Tennyson or Ruskin or any of them, to the implacable tragedy of industrial civilisation—the city children“blackening soul and sense in city slime,”progress halting on palsied feet“among the glooming alleys,”crime and hunger casting maidens on the street, and all the other recesses of human life depicted by the poetic prophet in his sombre hours. But the triumphs of the past inspired confidence in victories for the future, and meanwhile he thought it well to remind Englishmen that“their country is still young as well as old, and that in these latest days it has not been unworthy of itself.”216On his birthday he enters in his diary:—Dec. 29, 1886.—This day in its outer experience recalls the Scotch usage which would say,“terrible pleasant.”In spite of the ruin of telegraph wires by snow, my letters and postal arrivals of to-day have much exceeded those of last year. Even my share of[pg 355]the reading was very heavy. The day was gone before it seemed to have begun, all amidst stir and festivity. The estimate was nine hundred arrivals. O for a birthday of recollection. It is long since I have had one. There is so much to say on the soul's history, but bracing is necessary to say it, as it is for reading Dante. It has been a year of shock and strain. I think a year of some progress; but of greater absorption in interests which, though profoundly human, are quite off the line of an old man's direct preparation for passing the River of Death. I have not had a chance given me of creeping from this whirlpool, for I cannot abandon a cause which is so evidently that of my fellow-men, and in which a particular part seems to be assigned to me. Therefore am I not disturbed“though the hills be carried into the middle of the sea.”IIITo Lord Acton.Hawarden, Jan. 13, 1887.—It is with much pleasure that I read your estimate of Chamberlain. His character is remarkable, as are in a very high degree his talents. It is one of my common sayings that to me characters of the political class are the most mysterious of all I meet, so that I am obliged to travel the road of life surrounded by an immense number of judgments more or less in suspense, and getting on for practical purposes as well as I can.I have with a clear mind and conscience not only assented to but promoted the present conferences, and I had laboured in that sense long before Mr. Chamberlain made his speech at Birmingham. It will surprise as well as grieve me if they do harm; if indeed they do not do some little good. Large and final arrangements, it would be rash I think to expect.The tide is flowing, though perhaps not rapidly, in our favour. Without our lifting a finger, a crumbling process has begun in both the opposite parties.“In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength”is a blessed maxim, often applicable to temporals as well as spirituals. I have indeed one temptation to haste, namely, that the hour may come for me to say farewell and claim my retirement; but inasmuch as I remainin situfor the Irish question only, I cannot be so foolish as to allow myself to ruin by precipitancy my own purpose. Though I am writing a paper[pg 356]on the Irish question for Mr. Knowles, it is no trumpet-blast, but is meant to fill and turn to account a season of comparative quietude.The death of Iddesleigh has shocked and saddened us all. He was full of excellent qualities, but had not the backbone and strength of fibre necessary to restore the tone of a party demoralised by his former leader. In gentleness, temper, sacrifice of himself to the common purpose of his friends, knowledge, quickness of perception, general integrity of intention, freedom from personal aims, he was admirable.... I have been constantly struggling to vindicate a portion of my time for the pursuits I want to follow, but with very little success indeed. Some rudiments of Olympian religion have partially taken shape. I have a paper ready for Knowles probably in his March number on the Poseidon of Homer, a most curious and exotic personage.... Williams and Norgate got me the books I wanted, but alack for the time to read them! In addition to want of time, I have to deplore my slowness in reading, declining sight, and declining memory; all very serious affairs for one who has such singular reason to be thankful as to general health and strength.I wish I could acknowledge duly or pay even in part your unsparing, untiring kindness in the discharge of your engagements as“Cook.”Come early to England—and stay long. We will try what we can to bind you.A few months later, he added to his multifarious exercises in criticism and controversy, a performance that attracted especial attention.217“Mamma and I,”he wrote to Mrs. Drew,“are each of us still separately engaged in a death-grapple withRobert Elsmere. I complained of some of the novels you gave me to read as too stiff, but they are nothing to this. It is wholly out of the common order. At present I regard with doubt and dread the idea of doing anything on it, but cannot yet be sure whether your observations will be verified or not. In any case it is a tremendous book.”And on April 1 (1888), he wrote,“By hard work I have finished and am correcting my article onRobert Elsmere.[pg 357]It is rather stiff work. I have had two letters from her. She is much to be liked personally, but is a fruit, I think, of what must be called Arnoldism.”To Lord Acton.Aston Clinton, Tring, Easter Day, April 1, '88.—I do not like to let too long a time elapse without some note of intercourse, even though that season approaches which brings you back to the shores of your country. Were you here I should have much to say on many things; but I will now speak, or first speak, of what is uppermost, and would, if a mind is like a portmanteau, be taken or tumble out first.You perhaps have not heard ofRobert Elsmere, for I find without surprise, that it makes its way slowly into public notice. It is not far from twice the length of an ordinary novel; and the labour and effort of reading it all, I should say, sixfold; while one could no more stop in it than in reading Thucydides. The idea of the book, perhaps of the writer, appears to be a movement of retreat from Christianity upon Theism: a Theism with a Christ glorified, always in the human sense, but beyond the ordinary measure. It is worked out through the medium of a being—one ought to say a character, but I withhold the word, for there is no sufficient substratum of character to uphold the qualities—gifted with much intellectual subtlety and readiness, and almost every conceivable moral excellence. He finds vent in an energetic attempt to carry his new gospel among the skilled artisans of London, whom the writer apparently considers as supplying thenormfor all right human judgment. He has extraordinary success, establishes a new church under the name of the new Christian brotherhood, kills himself with overwork, but leaves his project flourishing in a certain“Elgood Street.”It is in fact (like the Salvation Army), a new Kirche der Zukunft.I am always inclined to consider this Theism as among the least defensible of the positions alternative to Christianity. Robert Elsmere who has been a parish clergyman, is upset entirely, as it appears, by the difficulty of accepting miracles, and by the suggestion that the existing Christianity grew up in an age specially predisposed to them.[pg 358]I want as usual to betray you into helping the lame dog over the stile; and I should like to know whether you would think me violently wrong in holding that the period of the Advent was a period when the appetite for, or disposition to, the supernatural was declining and decaying; that in the region of human thought, speculation was strong and scepticism advancing; that if our Lord were a mere man, armed only with human means, His whereabouts was in this and many other ways misplaced by Providence; that the gospels and the New Testament must have much else besides miracle torn out of them, in order to get us down to thecaput mortuumof Elgood Street. This very remarkable work is in effect identical with the poor, thin, ineffectual production published with some arrogance by the Duke of Somerset, which found a quack remedy for difficulties in what he considered the impregnable citadel of belief in God.Knowles has brought this book before me, and being as strong as it is strange, it cannot perish still-born. I am tossed about with doubt as to writing upon it.To Lord Acton.Oxford, April 8, '88.—I am grateful for your most interesting letter, which contains very valuable warnings. On the other side is copied what I have written on two of the points raised by the book. Have I said too much of the Academy? I have spoken only of the first century. You refer to (apparently) about 250a.d.as a time of great progress? But I was astonished on first reading the census of Christian clergy in Rometemp.St. Cyprian, it was so slender. I am not certain, but does not Beugnot estimate the Christians, before Constantine's conversion, in the west at one-tenth of the population? Mrs. T. Arnold died yesterday here. Mrs. Ward had been summoned and she is coming to see me this evening. It is a very singular phase of the controversy which she has opened. When do yourepatriate?I am afraid that my kindness to the Positivists amounts only to a comparative approval of their not dropping the great human tradition out of view;plusa very high appreciation of the personal qualities of our friend ——.[pg 359]To Lord Acton.Dollis Hill, May 13, '88.—Your last letter was one of extreme interest. It raised such a multitude of points, after your perusal of my article on R. Elsmere, as to stimulate in the highest degree my curiosity to know how far you would carry into propositions, the ideas which you for the most part obliquely put forward. I gave the letter to Mary, who paid us a flying visit in London, that she might take it to Hawarden for full digestion. For myself I feed upon the hope that when (when ?) you come back to England we may go over the points, and I may reap further benefits from your knowledge. I will not now attempt anything of the kind. But I will say this generally, that I am not so much oppressed as you appear to be, with the notion that great difficulties have been imported by the researches of scientists into the religious and theological argument. As respects cosmogony andgeogony, the Scripture has, I think, taken much benefit from them. Whatever be the date of the early books, Pentateuch or Hexateuch in their presentedition, the Assyriological investigations seem to me to have fortified and accredited their substance by producing similar traditions in variant forms inferior to the Mosaic forms, and tending to throw them back to a higher antiquity, a fountainhead nearer the source. Then there is the great chapter of the Dispersal: which Renan (I think) treats as exhibiting the marvellous genius (!) of the Jews. As to unbroken sequences in the physical order, they do not trouble me, because we have to do not with the natural but the moral order, and over this science, or as I call it natural science, does not wave her sceptre. It is no small matter, again (if so it be, as I suppose), that, after warring for a century against miracle as unsustained by experience, the assailants should now have to abandon that ground, stand only upon sequence, and controvert the great facts of the New Testament only by raising to an extravagant and unnatural height the demands made under the law of testimony in order to [justify] a rational belief. One admission has to be made, that death did not come into the world by sin, namely the sin of Adam, and this sits inconveniently by the declaration of Saint Paul.Mrs. Ward wrote to thank me for the tone of my article. Her[pg 360]first intention was to make some reply in theNineteenth Centuryitself. It appears that —— advised her not to do it. But Knowles told me that he was labouring to bring her up to the scratch again. There, I said, you show the cloven foot; you want to keep theNineteenth Centurypot boiling.I own that your reasons for not being in England did not appear to me cogent, but it would be impertinent to make myself a judge of them. The worst of it was that you did not nameanydate. But I must assume that you are coming; and surely the time cannot now be far. Among other things, I want to speak with you about French novels, a subject on which there has for me been quite recently cast a most lurid light.Acton's letters in reply may have convinced Mr. Gladstone that there were depths in this supreme controversy that he had hardly sounded; and adversaria that he might have mocked from a professor of the school or schools of unbelief, he could not in his inner mind make light of, when coming from the pen of a catholic believer. Before and after the article onRobert Elsmereappeared, Acton, the student with his vast historic knowledge and his deep penetrating gaze, warned the impassioned critic of some historic point overstated or understated, some dangerous breach left all unguarded, some lack of nicety in definition. Acton's letters will one day see the light, and the reader may then know how candidly Mr. Gladstone was admonished as to the excess of his description of the moral action of Christianity; as to the risk of sending modern questions to ancient answers, for the apologists of an age can only meet the difficulties of their age; that there are leaps and bounds in the history of thought; how well did Newman once say that in theology you have to meet questions that the Fathers could hardly have been made to understand; how if you go to St. Thomas or Leibnitz or Paley for rescue from Hegel or Haeckel your apologetics will be a record of disaster. You insist broadly, says Acton, on belief in the divine nature of Christ as the soul, substance, and creative force of Christian religion; you assign to it very much of the good the church has done; all this with little or no qualification or drawback from the other side:—[pg 361]Enter Martineau or Stephen or —— (unattached), and loq.:—Is this the final judgment of the chief of liberals? the pontiff of a church whose fathers are the later Milton and the later Penn, Locke, Bayle, Toland, Franklin, Turgot, Adam Smith, Washington, Jefferson, Bentham, Dugald Stewart, Romilly, Tocqueville, Channing, Macaulay, Mill? These men and others like them disbelieved that doctrine established freedom, and they undid the work of orthodox Christianity, they swept away that appalling edifice of intolerance, tyranny, cruelty, which believers in Christ built up to perpetuate their belief.The philosophy of liberal history, Acton proceeds, which has to acknowledge the invaluable services of early Christianity, feels the anti-liberal and anti-social action of later Christianity, before the rise of the sects that rejected, some of them the divinity of Christ; others, the institutions of the church erected upon it. Liberalism if it admits these things as indifferent, surrenders its ownraison d'être, and ceases to strive for an ethical cause. If the doctrine of Torquemada make us condone his morality, there can be no public right and no wrong, no political sin, no secular cause to die for. So it might be said that—You do not work really from the principle of liberalism, but from the cognate, though distinct principles of democracy, nationality, progress, etc. To some extent, I fear, you will estrange valued friends, not assuredly by any expression of theological belief, but by seeming to ignore the great central problem of Christian politics. If I had to put my own doubts, instead of the average liberal's, I should state the case in other words, but not altogether differently.218[pg 362]

Book X. 1886-1892Chapter I. The Morrow Of Defeat. (1886-1887)Charity rendereth a man truly great, enlarging his mind into a vast circumference, and to a capacity nearly infinite; so that it by a general care doth reach all things, by an universal affection doth embrace and grace the world.... Even a spark of it in generosity of dealing breedeth admiration; a glimpse of it in formal courtesy of behaviour procureth much esteem, being deemed to accomplish and adorn a man.—Barrow.IAfter the rejection of his Irish policy in the summer of 1886, Mr. Gladstone had a period of six years before him, the life of the new parliament. Strangely dramatic years they were, in some respects unique in our later history. The party schism among liberals grew deeper and wider. The union between tories and seceders became consolidated and final. The alternative policy of coercion was passed through parliament in an extreme form and with violent strain on the legislative machinery, and it was carried out in Ireland in a fashion that pricked the consciences of many thousands of voters who had resisted the proposals of 1886. A fierce storm rent the Irish phalanx in two, and its leader vanished from the field where for sixteen years he had fought so bold and uncompromising a fight. During this period Mr. Gladstone stood in the most trying of all the varied positions of his life, and without flinching he confronted it in the strong faith that the national honour as well as the assuagement[pg 351]At Tegernseeof the inveterate Irish wound in the flank of his country, were the issues at stake.This intense pre-occupation in the political struggle did not for a single week impair his other interests, nor stay his ceaseless activity in controversies that were not touched by politics. Not even now, when the great cause to which he had so daringly committed himself was in decisive issue, could he allow it to dull or sever what had been the standing concerns of life and thought to him for so long a span of years. As from his youth up, so now behind the man of public action was the diligent, eager, watchful student, churchman, apologist, divine. And what is curious and delightful is that he never set a more admirable example of the tone and temper in which literary and religious controversy should be conducted, than in these years when in politics exasperation was at its worst. It was about this time that he wrote:“Certainly one of the lessons life has taught me is that where there is known to be a common object, the pursuit of truth, there should also be a studious desire to interpret the adversary in the best sense his words will fairly bear; to avoid whatever widens the breach; and to make the most of whatever tends to narrow it. These I hold to be part of the laws of knightly tournament.”And to these laws he sedulously conformed. Perhaps at some happy time before the day of judgment they may be transferred from the tournament to the battle-fields of philosophy, criticism, and even politics.IIAfter the defeat in which his tremendous labours had for the moment ended, he made his way to what was to him the most congenial atmosphere in the world, to the company of Döllinger and Acton, at Tegernsee in Bavaria.“Tegernsee,”Lord Acton wrote to me (Sept. 7),“is an out-of-the-way place, peaceful and silent, and as there is a good library in the house, I have taken some care of his mind, leading in the direction of little French comedies, and away from the tragedy of existence. It has done him good, and he has just started with Döllinger to climb a high mountain in the neighbourhood.”[pg 352]To Mrs. Gladstone.Tegernsee, Aug. 28, 1886.—We found Döllinger reading in the garden. The course of his life is quite unchanged. His constitution does not appear at all to have given way. He beats me utterly in standing, but that is not saying much, as it never was one of my gifts; and he is not conscious (eighty-seven last February) of any difficulty with the heart in going up hill. His deafness has increased materially, but not so that he cannot carry on very well conversation with a single person. We have talked much together even on disestablishment which he detests, and Ireland as to which he is very apprehensive, but he never seems to shut up his mind by prejudice. I had a good excuse for giving him my pamphlet,213but I do not know whether he will tell us what he thinks of it. He was reading it this morning. He rises at six and breakfasts alone. Makes agooddinner at two and has nothing more till the next morning. He does not appear after dark. On the whole one sees no reason why he should not last for several years yet.“When Dr. Döllinger was eighty-seven,”Mr. Gladstone wrote later,“he walked with me seven miles across the hill that separates the Tegernsee from the next valley to the eastward. At that time he began to find his sleep subject to occasional interruptions, and he had armed himself against them by committing to memory the first three books of theOdysseyfor recital.”214Of Mr. Gladstone Döllinger had said in 1885,“I have known Gladstone for thirty years, and would stand security for him any day; his character is a very fine one, and he possesses a rare capability for work. I differ from him in his political views on many points, and it is difficult to convince him, for he is clad in triple steel.”215Another high personage in the Roman catholic world sent him letters through Acton, affectionately written and with signs of serious as well as sympathising study of his Irish policy. A little later (Sept. 21) Mr. Gladstone writes to his wife at Hawarden:—Bishop Strossmayer may make a journey all the way to[pg 353]Hawarden, and it seems that Acton may even accompany him, which would make it much more manageable. His coming would be a great compliment, and cannot be discouraged or refused. It would, however, be a serious affair, for he speaks no language with which as a spoken tongue we are familiar, his great cards being Slavonic and Latin. Unfortunately I have a very great increase of difficulty inhearingthe words in foreign tongues, a difficulty which I hope has hardly begun with you as yet.Like a good host, Lord Acton kept politics out of his way as well as he could, but some letter of mine“set him on fire, and he is full of ——'s blunder and of Parnell's bill.”Parliamentary duty was always a sting to him, and by September 20 he was back in the House of Commons, speaking on the Tenants Relief (Ireland) bill. Then to the temple of peace at Hawarden for the rest of the year, to read theIliad“for the twenty-fifth or thirtieth time, and every time richer and more glorious than before”; to write elaborately on Homeric topics; to receive a good many visitors; and to compose the admirable article on Tennyson's secondLocksley Hall. On this last let us pause for an instant. The moment was hardly one in which, from a man of nature less great and powerful than Mr. Gladstone, we should have counted on a buoyant vindication of the spirit of his time. He had just been roughly repulsed in the boldest enterprise of his career; his name was a target for infinite obloquy; his motives were largely denounced as of the basest; the conflict into which he had plunged and from which he could not withdraw was hard; friends had turned away from him; he was old; the issue was dubious and dark. Yet the personal, or even what to him were the national discomfitures of the hour, were not allowed to blot the sun out of the heavens. His whole soul rose in challenge against the tragic tones of Tennyson's poem, as he recalled the solid tale of the vast improvements, the enormous mitigation of the sorrows and burdens of mankind, that had been effected in the land by public opinion and public authority, operative in the exhilarating sphere of self-government during the sixty years between the first and secondLocksley Hall.[pg 354]The sum of the matter seems to be that upon the whole, and in a degree, we who lived fifty, sixty, seventy years back, and are living now, have lived into a gentler time; that the public conscience has grown more tender, as indeed was very needful; and that in matters of practice, at sight of evils formerly regarded with indifference or even connivance, it now not only winces but rebels; that upon the whole the race has been reaping, and not scattering; earning and not wasting; and that without its being said that the old Prophet is wrong, it may be said that the young Prophet was unquestionably right.Here is the way in which a man of noble heart and high vision as of a circling eagle, transcends his individual chagrins. All this optimism was the natural vein of a statesman who had lived a long life of effort in persuading opinion in so many regions, in overcoming difficulty upon difficulty, in content with a small reform where men would not let him achieve a great one, in patching where he could not build anew, in unquenchable faith, hope, patience, endeavour. Mr. Gladstone knew as well as Tennyson that“every blessing has its drawbacks, and every age its dangers”; he was as sensitive as Tennyson or Ruskin or any of them, to the implacable tragedy of industrial civilisation—the city children“blackening soul and sense in city slime,”progress halting on palsied feet“among the glooming alleys,”crime and hunger casting maidens on the street, and all the other recesses of human life depicted by the poetic prophet in his sombre hours. But the triumphs of the past inspired confidence in victories for the future, and meanwhile he thought it well to remind Englishmen that“their country is still young as well as old, and that in these latest days it has not been unworthy of itself.”216On his birthday he enters in his diary:—Dec. 29, 1886.—This day in its outer experience recalls the Scotch usage which would say,“terrible pleasant.”In spite of the ruin of telegraph wires by snow, my letters and postal arrivals of to-day have much exceeded those of last year. Even my share of[pg 355]the reading was very heavy. The day was gone before it seemed to have begun, all amidst stir and festivity. The estimate was nine hundred arrivals. O for a birthday of recollection. It is long since I have had one. There is so much to say on the soul's history, but bracing is necessary to say it, as it is for reading Dante. It has been a year of shock and strain. I think a year of some progress; but of greater absorption in interests which, though profoundly human, are quite off the line of an old man's direct preparation for passing the River of Death. I have not had a chance given me of creeping from this whirlpool, for I cannot abandon a cause which is so evidently that of my fellow-men, and in which a particular part seems to be assigned to me. Therefore am I not disturbed“though the hills be carried into the middle of the sea.”IIITo Lord Acton.Hawarden, Jan. 13, 1887.—It is with much pleasure that I read your estimate of Chamberlain. His character is remarkable, as are in a very high degree his talents. It is one of my common sayings that to me characters of the political class are the most mysterious of all I meet, so that I am obliged to travel the road of life surrounded by an immense number of judgments more or less in suspense, and getting on for practical purposes as well as I can.I have with a clear mind and conscience not only assented to but promoted the present conferences, and I had laboured in that sense long before Mr. Chamberlain made his speech at Birmingham. It will surprise as well as grieve me if they do harm; if indeed they do not do some little good. Large and final arrangements, it would be rash I think to expect.The tide is flowing, though perhaps not rapidly, in our favour. Without our lifting a finger, a crumbling process has begun in both the opposite parties.“In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength”is a blessed maxim, often applicable to temporals as well as spirituals. I have indeed one temptation to haste, namely, that the hour may come for me to say farewell and claim my retirement; but inasmuch as I remainin situfor the Irish question only, I cannot be so foolish as to allow myself to ruin by precipitancy my own purpose. Though I am writing a paper[pg 356]on the Irish question for Mr. Knowles, it is no trumpet-blast, but is meant to fill and turn to account a season of comparative quietude.The death of Iddesleigh has shocked and saddened us all. He was full of excellent qualities, but had not the backbone and strength of fibre necessary to restore the tone of a party demoralised by his former leader. In gentleness, temper, sacrifice of himself to the common purpose of his friends, knowledge, quickness of perception, general integrity of intention, freedom from personal aims, he was admirable.... I have been constantly struggling to vindicate a portion of my time for the pursuits I want to follow, but with very little success indeed. Some rudiments of Olympian religion have partially taken shape. I have a paper ready for Knowles probably in his March number on the Poseidon of Homer, a most curious and exotic personage.... Williams and Norgate got me the books I wanted, but alack for the time to read them! In addition to want of time, I have to deplore my slowness in reading, declining sight, and declining memory; all very serious affairs for one who has such singular reason to be thankful as to general health and strength.I wish I could acknowledge duly or pay even in part your unsparing, untiring kindness in the discharge of your engagements as“Cook.”Come early to England—and stay long. We will try what we can to bind you.A few months later, he added to his multifarious exercises in criticism and controversy, a performance that attracted especial attention.217“Mamma and I,”he wrote to Mrs. Drew,“are each of us still separately engaged in a death-grapple withRobert Elsmere. I complained of some of the novels you gave me to read as too stiff, but they are nothing to this. It is wholly out of the common order. At present I regard with doubt and dread the idea of doing anything on it, but cannot yet be sure whether your observations will be verified or not. In any case it is a tremendous book.”And on April 1 (1888), he wrote,“By hard work I have finished and am correcting my article onRobert Elsmere.[pg 357]It is rather stiff work. I have had two letters from her. She is much to be liked personally, but is a fruit, I think, of what must be called Arnoldism.”To Lord Acton.Aston Clinton, Tring, Easter Day, April 1, '88.—I do not like to let too long a time elapse without some note of intercourse, even though that season approaches which brings you back to the shores of your country. Were you here I should have much to say on many things; but I will now speak, or first speak, of what is uppermost, and would, if a mind is like a portmanteau, be taken or tumble out first.You perhaps have not heard ofRobert Elsmere, for I find without surprise, that it makes its way slowly into public notice. It is not far from twice the length of an ordinary novel; and the labour and effort of reading it all, I should say, sixfold; while one could no more stop in it than in reading Thucydides. The idea of the book, perhaps of the writer, appears to be a movement of retreat from Christianity upon Theism: a Theism with a Christ glorified, always in the human sense, but beyond the ordinary measure. It is worked out through the medium of a being—one ought to say a character, but I withhold the word, for there is no sufficient substratum of character to uphold the qualities—gifted with much intellectual subtlety and readiness, and almost every conceivable moral excellence. He finds vent in an energetic attempt to carry his new gospel among the skilled artisans of London, whom the writer apparently considers as supplying thenormfor all right human judgment. He has extraordinary success, establishes a new church under the name of the new Christian brotherhood, kills himself with overwork, but leaves his project flourishing in a certain“Elgood Street.”It is in fact (like the Salvation Army), a new Kirche der Zukunft.I am always inclined to consider this Theism as among the least defensible of the positions alternative to Christianity. Robert Elsmere who has been a parish clergyman, is upset entirely, as it appears, by the difficulty of accepting miracles, and by the suggestion that the existing Christianity grew up in an age specially predisposed to them.[pg 358]I want as usual to betray you into helping the lame dog over the stile; and I should like to know whether you would think me violently wrong in holding that the period of the Advent was a period when the appetite for, or disposition to, the supernatural was declining and decaying; that in the region of human thought, speculation was strong and scepticism advancing; that if our Lord were a mere man, armed only with human means, His whereabouts was in this and many other ways misplaced by Providence; that the gospels and the New Testament must have much else besides miracle torn out of them, in order to get us down to thecaput mortuumof Elgood Street. This very remarkable work is in effect identical with the poor, thin, ineffectual production published with some arrogance by the Duke of Somerset, which found a quack remedy for difficulties in what he considered the impregnable citadel of belief in God.Knowles has brought this book before me, and being as strong as it is strange, it cannot perish still-born. I am tossed about with doubt as to writing upon it.To Lord Acton.Oxford, April 8, '88.—I am grateful for your most interesting letter, which contains very valuable warnings. On the other side is copied what I have written on two of the points raised by the book. Have I said too much of the Academy? I have spoken only of the first century. You refer to (apparently) about 250a.d.as a time of great progress? But I was astonished on first reading the census of Christian clergy in Rometemp.St. Cyprian, it was so slender. I am not certain, but does not Beugnot estimate the Christians, before Constantine's conversion, in the west at one-tenth of the population? Mrs. T. Arnold died yesterday here. Mrs. Ward had been summoned and she is coming to see me this evening. It is a very singular phase of the controversy which she has opened. When do yourepatriate?I am afraid that my kindness to the Positivists amounts only to a comparative approval of their not dropping the great human tradition out of view;plusa very high appreciation of the personal qualities of our friend ——.[pg 359]To Lord Acton.Dollis Hill, May 13, '88.—Your last letter was one of extreme interest. It raised such a multitude of points, after your perusal of my article on R. Elsmere, as to stimulate in the highest degree my curiosity to know how far you would carry into propositions, the ideas which you for the most part obliquely put forward. I gave the letter to Mary, who paid us a flying visit in London, that she might take it to Hawarden for full digestion. For myself I feed upon the hope that when (when ?) you come back to England we may go over the points, and I may reap further benefits from your knowledge. I will not now attempt anything of the kind. But I will say this generally, that I am not so much oppressed as you appear to be, with the notion that great difficulties have been imported by the researches of scientists into the religious and theological argument. As respects cosmogony andgeogony, the Scripture has, I think, taken much benefit from them. Whatever be the date of the early books, Pentateuch or Hexateuch in their presentedition, the Assyriological investigations seem to me to have fortified and accredited their substance by producing similar traditions in variant forms inferior to the Mosaic forms, and tending to throw them back to a higher antiquity, a fountainhead nearer the source. Then there is the great chapter of the Dispersal: which Renan (I think) treats as exhibiting the marvellous genius (!) of the Jews. As to unbroken sequences in the physical order, they do not trouble me, because we have to do not with the natural but the moral order, and over this science, or as I call it natural science, does not wave her sceptre. It is no small matter, again (if so it be, as I suppose), that, after warring for a century against miracle as unsustained by experience, the assailants should now have to abandon that ground, stand only upon sequence, and controvert the great facts of the New Testament only by raising to an extravagant and unnatural height the demands made under the law of testimony in order to [justify] a rational belief. One admission has to be made, that death did not come into the world by sin, namely the sin of Adam, and this sits inconveniently by the declaration of Saint Paul.Mrs. Ward wrote to thank me for the tone of my article. Her[pg 360]first intention was to make some reply in theNineteenth Centuryitself. It appears that —— advised her not to do it. But Knowles told me that he was labouring to bring her up to the scratch again. There, I said, you show the cloven foot; you want to keep theNineteenth Centurypot boiling.I own that your reasons for not being in England did not appear to me cogent, but it would be impertinent to make myself a judge of them. The worst of it was that you did not nameanydate. But I must assume that you are coming; and surely the time cannot now be far. Among other things, I want to speak with you about French novels, a subject on which there has for me been quite recently cast a most lurid light.Acton's letters in reply may have convinced Mr. Gladstone that there were depths in this supreme controversy that he had hardly sounded; and adversaria that he might have mocked from a professor of the school or schools of unbelief, he could not in his inner mind make light of, when coming from the pen of a catholic believer. Before and after the article onRobert Elsmereappeared, Acton, the student with his vast historic knowledge and his deep penetrating gaze, warned the impassioned critic of some historic point overstated or understated, some dangerous breach left all unguarded, some lack of nicety in definition. Acton's letters will one day see the light, and the reader may then know how candidly Mr. Gladstone was admonished as to the excess of his description of the moral action of Christianity; as to the risk of sending modern questions to ancient answers, for the apologists of an age can only meet the difficulties of their age; that there are leaps and bounds in the history of thought; how well did Newman once say that in theology you have to meet questions that the Fathers could hardly have been made to understand; how if you go to St. Thomas or Leibnitz or Paley for rescue from Hegel or Haeckel your apologetics will be a record of disaster. You insist broadly, says Acton, on belief in the divine nature of Christ as the soul, substance, and creative force of Christian religion; you assign to it very much of the good the church has done; all this with little or no qualification or drawback from the other side:—[pg 361]Enter Martineau or Stephen or —— (unattached), and loq.:—Is this the final judgment of the chief of liberals? the pontiff of a church whose fathers are the later Milton and the later Penn, Locke, Bayle, Toland, Franklin, Turgot, Adam Smith, Washington, Jefferson, Bentham, Dugald Stewart, Romilly, Tocqueville, Channing, Macaulay, Mill? These men and others like them disbelieved that doctrine established freedom, and they undid the work of orthodox Christianity, they swept away that appalling edifice of intolerance, tyranny, cruelty, which believers in Christ built up to perpetuate their belief.The philosophy of liberal history, Acton proceeds, which has to acknowledge the invaluable services of early Christianity, feels the anti-liberal and anti-social action of later Christianity, before the rise of the sects that rejected, some of them the divinity of Christ; others, the institutions of the church erected upon it. Liberalism if it admits these things as indifferent, surrenders its ownraison d'être, and ceases to strive for an ethical cause. If the doctrine of Torquemada make us condone his morality, there can be no public right and no wrong, no political sin, no secular cause to die for. So it might be said that—You do not work really from the principle of liberalism, but from the cognate, though distinct principles of democracy, nationality, progress, etc. To some extent, I fear, you will estrange valued friends, not assuredly by any expression of theological belief, but by seeming to ignore the great central problem of Christian politics. If I had to put my own doubts, instead of the average liberal's, I should state the case in other words, but not altogether differently.218[pg 362]

Book X. 1886-1892Chapter I. The Morrow Of Defeat. (1886-1887)Charity rendereth a man truly great, enlarging his mind into a vast circumference, and to a capacity nearly infinite; so that it by a general care doth reach all things, by an universal affection doth embrace and grace the world.... Even a spark of it in generosity of dealing breedeth admiration; a glimpse of it in formal courtesy of behaviour procureth much esteem, being deemed to accomplish and adorn a man.—Barrow.IAfter the rejection of his Irish policy in the summer of 1886, Mr. Gladstone had a period of six years before him, the life of the new parliament. Strangely dramatic years they were, in some respects unique in our later history. The party schism among liberals grew deeper and wider. The union between tories and seceders became consolidated and final. The alternative policy of coercion was passed through parliament in an extreme form and with violent strain on the legislative machinery, and it was carried out in Ireland in a fashion that pricked the consciences of many thousands of voters who had resisted the proposals of 1886. A fierce storm rent the Irish phalanx in two, and its leader vanished from the field where for sixteen years he had fought so bold and uncompromising a fight. During this period Mr. Gladstone stood in the most trying of all the varied positions of his life, and without flinching he confronted it in the strong faith that the national honour as well as the assuagement[pg 351]At Tegernseeof the inveterate Irish wound in the flank of his country, were the issues at stake.This intense pre-occupation in the political struggle did not for a single week impair his other interests, nor stay his ceaseless activity in controversies that were not touched by politics. Not even now, when the great cause to which he had so daringly committed himself was in decisive issue, could he allow it to dull or sever what had been the standing concerns of life and thought to him for so long a span of years. As from his youth up, so now behind the man of public action was the diligent, eager, watchful student, churchman, apologist, divine. And what is curious and delightful is that he never set a more admirable example of the tone and temper in which literary and religious controversy should be conducted, than in these years when in politics exasperation was at its worst. It was about this time that he wrote:“Certainly one of the lessons life has taught me is that where there is known to be a common object, the pursuit of truth, there should also be a studious desire to interpret the adversary in the best sense his words will fairly bear; to avoid whatever widens the breach; and to make the most of whatever tends to narrow it. These I hold to be part of the laws of knightly tournament.”And to these laws he sedulously conformed. Perhaps at some happy time before the day of judgment they may be transferred from the tournament to the battle-fields of philosophy, criticism, and even politics.IIAfter the defeat in which his tremendous labours had for the moment ended, he made his way to what was to him the most congenial atmosphere in the world, to the company of Döllinger and Acton, at Tegernsee in Bavaria.“Tegernsee,”Lord Acton wrote to me (Sept. 7),“is an out-of-the-way place, peaceful and silent, and as there is a good library in the house, I have taken some care of his mind, leading in the direction of little French comedies, and away from the tragedy of existence. It has done him good, and he has just started with Döllinger to climb a high mountain in the neighbourhood.”[pg 352]To Mrs. Gladstone.Tegernsee, Aug. 28, 1886.—We found Döllinger reading in the garden. The course of his life is quite unchanged. His constitution does not appear at all to have given way. He beats me utterly in standing, but that is not saying much, as it never was one of my gifts; and he is not conscious (eighty-seven last February) of any difficulty with the heart in going up hill. His deafness has increased materially, but not so that he cannot carry on very well conversation with a single person. We have talked much together even on disestablishment which he detests, and Ireland as to which he is very apprehensive, but he never seems to shut up his mind by prejudice. I had a good excuse for giving him my pamphlet,213but I do not know whether he will tell us what he thinks of it. He was reading it this morning. He rises at six and breakfasts alone. Makes agooddinner at two and has nothing more till the next morning. He does not appear after dark. On the whole one sees no reason why he should not last for several years yet.“When Dr. Döllinger was eighty-seven,”Mr. Gladstone wrote later,“he walked with me seven miles across the hill that separates the Tegernsee from the next valley to the eastward. At that time he began to find his sleep subject to occasional interruptions, and he had armed himself against them by committing to memory the first three books of theOdysseyfor recital.”214Of Mr. Gladstone Döllinger had said in 1885,“I have known Gladstone for thirty years, and would stand security for him any day; his character is a very fine one, and he possesses a rare capability for work. I differ from him in his political views on many points, and it is difficult to convince him, for he is clad in triple steel.”215Another high personage in the Roman catholic world sent him letters through Acton, affectionately written and with signs of serious as well as sympathising study of his Irish policy. A little later (Sept. 21) Mr. Gladstone writes to his wife at Hawarden:—Bishop Strossmayer may make a journey all the way to[pg 353]Hawarden, and it seems that Acton may even accompany him, which would make it much more manageable. His coming would be a great compliment, and cannot be discouraged or refused. It would, however, be a serious affair, for he speaks no language with which as a spoken tongue we are familiar, his great cards being Slavonic and Latin. Unfortunately I have a very great increase of difficulty inhearingthe words in foreign tongues, a difficulty which I hope has hardly begun with you as yet.Like a good host, Lord Acton kept politics out of his way as well as he could, but some letter of mine“set him on fire, and he is full of ——'s blunder and of Parnell's bill.”Parliamentary duty was always a sting to him, and by September 20 he was back in the House of Commons, speaking on the Tenants Relief (Ireland) bill. Then to the temple of peace at Hawarden for the rest of the year, to read theIliad“for the twenty-fifth or thirtieth time, and every time richer and more glorious than before”; to write elaborately on Homeric topics; to receive a good many visitors; and to compose the admirable article on Tennyson's secondLocksley Hall. On this last let us pause for an instant. The moment was hardly one in which, from a man of nature less great and powerful than Mr. Gladstone, we should have counted on a buoyant vindication of the spirit of his time. He had just been roughly repulsed in the boldest enterprise of his career; his name was a target for infinite obloquy; his motives were largely denounced as of the basest; the conflict into which he had plunged and from which he could not withdraw was hard; friends had turned away from him; he was old; the issue was dubious and dark. Yet the personal, or even what to him were the national discomfitures of the hour, were not allowed to blot the sun out of the heavens. His whole soul rose in challenge against the tragic tones of Tennyson's poem, as he recalled the solid tale of the vast improvements, the enormous mitigation of the sorrows and burdens of mankind, that had been effected in the land by public opinion and public authority, operative in the exhilarating sphere of self-government during the sixty years between the first and secondLocksley Hall.[pg 354]The sum of the matter seems to be that upon the whole, and in a degree, we who lived fifty, sixty, seventy years back, and are living now, have lived into a gentler time; that the public conscience has grown more tender, as indeed was very needful; and that in matters of practice, at sight of evils formerly regarded with indifference or even connivance, it now not only winces but rebels; that upon the whole the race has been reaping, and not scattering; earning and not wasting; and that without its being said that the old Prophet is wrong, it may be said that the young Prophet was unquestionably right.Here is the way in which a man of noble heart and high vision as of a circling eagle, transcends his individual chagrins. All this optimism was the natural vein of a statesman who had lived a long life of effort in persuading opinion in so many regions, in overcoming difficulty upon difficulty, in content with a small reform where men would not let him achieve a great one, in patching where he could not build anew, in unquenchable faith, hope, patience, endeavour. Mr. Gladstone knew as well as Tennyson that“every blessing has its drawbacks, and every age its dangers”; he was as sensitive as Tennyson or Ruskin or any of them, to the implacable tragedy of industrial civilisation—the city children“blackening soul and sense in city slime,”progress halting on palsied feet“among the glooming alleys,”crime and hunger casting maidens on the street, and all the other recesses of human life depicted by the poetic prophet in his sombre hours. But the triumphs of the past inspired confidence in victories for the future, and meanwhile he thought it well to remind Englishmen that“their country is still young as well as old, and that in these latest days it has not been unworthy of itself.”216On his birthday he enters in his diary:—Dec. 29, 1886.—This day in its outer experience recalls the Scotch usage which would say,“terrible pleasant.”In spite of the ruin of telegraph wires by snow, my letters and postal arrivals of to-day have much exceeded those of last year. Even my share of[pg 355]the reading was very heavy. The day was gone before it seemed to have begun, all amidst stir and festivity. The estimate was nine hundred arrivals. O for a birthday of recollection. It is long since I have had one. There is so much to say on the soul's history, but bracing is necessary to say it, as it is for reading Dante. It has been a year of shock and strain. I think a year of some progress; but of greater absorption in interests which, though profoundly human, are quite off the line of an old man's direct preparation for passing the River of Death. I have not had a chance given me of creeping from this whirlpool, for I cannot abandon a cause which is so evidently that of my fellow-men, and in which a particular part seems to be assigned to me. Therefore am I not disturbed“though the hills be carried into the middle of the sea.”IIITo Lord Acton.Hawarden, Jan. 13, 1887.—It is with much pleasure that I read your estimate of Chamberlain. His character is remarkable, as are in a very high degree his talents. It is one of my common sayings that to me characters of the political class are the most mysterious of all I meet, so that I am obliged to travel the road of life surrounded by an immense number of judgments more or less in suspense, and getting on for practical purposes as well as I can.I have with a clear mind and conscience not only assented to but promoted the present conferences, and I had laboured in that sense long before Mr. Chamberlain made his speech at Birmingham. It will surprise as well as grieve me if they do harm; if indeed they do not do some little good. Large and final arrangements, it would be rash I think to expect.The tide is flowing, though perhaps not rapidly, in our favour. Without our lifting a finger, a crumbling process has begun in both the opposite parties.“In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength”is a blessed maxim, often applicable to temporals as well as spirituals. I have indeed one temptation to haste, namely, that the hour may come for me to say farewell and claim my retirement; but inasmuch as I remainin situfor the Irish question only, I cannot be so foolish as to allow myself to ruin by precipitancy my own purpose. Though I am writing a paper[pg 356]on the Irish question for Mr. Knowles, it is no trumpet-blast, but is meant to fill and turn to account a season of comparative quietude.The death of Iddesleigh has shocked and saddened us all. He was full of excellent qualities, but had not the backbone and strength of fibre necessary to restore the tone of a party demoralised by his former leader. In gentleness, temper, sacrifice of himself to the common purpose of his friends, knowledge, quickness of perception, general integrity of intention, freedom from personal aims, he was admirable.... I have been constantly struggling to vindicate a portion of my time for the pursuits I want to follow, but with very little success indeed. Some rudiments of Olympian religion have partially taken shape. I have a paper ready for Knowles probably in his March number on the Poseidon of Homer, a most curious and exotic personage.... Williams and Norgate got me the books I wanted, but alack for the time to read them! In addition to want of time, I have to deplore my slowness in reading, declining sight, and declining memory; all very serious affairs for one who has such singular reason to be thankful as to general health and strength.I wish I could acknowledge duly or pay even in part your unsparing, untiring kindness in the discharge of your engagements as“Cook.”Come early to England—and stay long. We will try what we can to bind you.A few months later, he added to his multifarious exercises in criticism and controversy, a performance that attracted especial attention.217“Mamma and I,”he wrote to Mrs. Drew,“are each of us still separately engaged in a death-grapple withRobert Elsmere. I complained of some of the novels you gave me to read as too stiff, but they are nothing to this. It is wholly out of the common order. At present I regard with doubt and dread the idea of doing anything on it, but cannot yet be sure whether your observations will be verified or not. In any case it is a tremendous book.”And on April 1 (1888), he wrote,“By hard work I have finished and am correcting my article onRobert Elsmere.[pg 357]It is rather stiff work. I have had two letters from her. She is much to be liked personally, but is a fruit, I think, of what must be called Arnoldism.”To Lord Acton.Aston Clinton, Tring, Easter Day, April 1, '88.—I do not like to let too long a time elapse without some note of intercourse, even though that season approaches which brings you back to the shores of your country. Were you here I should have much to say on many things; but I will now speak, or first speak, of what is uppermost, and would, if a mind is like a portmanteau, be taken or tumble out first.You perhaps have not heard ofRobert Elsmere, for I find without surprise, that it makes its way slowly into public notice. It is not far from twice the length of an ordinary novel; and the labour and effort of reading it all, I should say, sixfold; while one could no more stop in it than in reading Thucydides. The idea of the book, perhaps of the writer, appears to be a movement of retreat from Christianity upon Theism: a Theism with a Christ glorified, always in the human sense, but beyond the ordinary measure. It is worked out through the medium of a being—one ought to say a character, but I withhold the word, for there is no sufficient substratum of character to uphold the qualities—gifted with much intellectual subtlety and readiness, and almost every conceivable moral excellence. He finds vent in an energetic attempt to carry his new gospel among the skilled artisans of London, whom the writer apparently considers as supplying thenormfor all right human judgment. He has extraordinary success, establishes a new church under the name of the new Christian brotherhood, kills himself with overwork, but leaves his project flourishing in a certain“Elgood Street.”It is in fact (like the Salvation Army), a new Kirche der Zukunft.I am always inclined to consider this Theism as among the least defensible of the positions alternative to Christianity. Robert Elsmere who has been a parish clergyman, is upset entirely, as it appears, by the difficulty of accepting miracles, and by the suggestion that the existing Christianity grew up in an age specially predisposed to them.[pg 358]I want as usual to betray you into helping the lame dog over the stile; and I should like to know whether you would think me violently wrong in holding that the period of the Advent was a period when the appetite for, or disposition to, the supernatural was declining and decaying; that in the region of human thought, speculation was strong and scepticism advancing; that if our Lord were a mere man, armed only with human means, His whereabouts was in this and many other ways misplaced by Providence; that the gospels and the New Testament must have much else besides miracle torn out of them, in order to get us down to thecaput mortuumof Elgood Street. This very remarkable work is in effect identical with the poor, thin, ineffectual production published with some arrogance by the Duke of Somerset, which found a quack remedy for difficulties in what he considered the impregnable citadel of belief in God.Knowles has brought this book before me, and being as strong as it is strange, it cannot perish still-born. I am tossed about with doubt as to writing upon it.To Lord Acton.Oxford, April 8, '88.—I am grateful for your most interesting letter, which contains very valuable warnings. On the other side is copied what I have written on two of the points raised by the book. Have I said too much of the Academy? I have spoken only of the first century. You refer to (apparently) about 250a.d.as a time of great progress? But I was astonished on first reading the census of Christian clergy in Rometemp.St. Cyprian, it was so slender. I am not certain, but does not Beugnot estimate the Christians, before Constantine's conversion, in the west at one-tenth of the population? Mrs. T. Arnold died yesterday here. Mrs. Ward had been summoned and she is coming to see me this evening. It is a very singular phase of the controversy which she has opened. When do yourepatriate?I am afraid that my kindness to the Positivists amounts only to a comparative approval of their not dropping the great human tradition out of view;plusa very high appreciation of the personal qualities of our friend ——.[pg 359]To Lord Acton.Dollis Hill, May 13, '88.—Your last letter was one of extreme interest. It raised such a multitude of points, after your perusal of my article on R. Elsmere, as to stimulate in the highest degree my curiosity to know how far you would carry into propositions, the ideas which you for the most part obliquely put forward. I gave the letter to Mary, who paid us a flying visit in London, that she might take it to Hawarden for full digestion. For myself I feed upon the hope that when (when ?) you come back to England we may go over the points, and I may reap further benefits from your knowledge. I will not now attempt anything of the kind. But I will say this generally, that I am not so much oppressed as you appear to be, with the notion that great difficulties have been imported by the researches of scientists into the religious and theological argument. As respects cosmogony andgeogony, the Scripture has, I think, taken much benefit from them. Whatever be the date of the early books, Pentateuch or Hexateuch in their presentedition, the Assyriological investigations seem to me to have fortified and accredited their substance by producing similar traditions in variant forms inferior to the Mosaic forms, and tending to throw them back to a higher antiquity, a fountainhead nearer the source. Then there is the great chapter of the Dispersal: which Renan (I think) treats as exhibiting the marvellous genius (!) of the Jews. As to unbroken sequences in the physical order, they do not trouble me, because we have to do not with the natural but the moral order, and over this science, or as I call it natural science, does not wave her sceptre. It is no small matter, again (if so it be, as I suppose), that, after warring for a century against miracle as unsustained by experience, the assailants should now have to abandon that ground, stand only upon sequence, and controvert the great facts of the New Testament only by raising to an extravagant and unnatural height the demands made under the law of testimony in order to [justify] a rational belief. One admission has to be made, that death did not come into the world by sin, namely the sin of Adam, and this sits inconveniently by the declaration of Saint Paul.Mrs. Ward wrote to thank me for the tone of my article. Her[pg 360]first intention was to make some reply in theNineteenth Centuryitself. It appears that —— advised her not to do it. But Knowles told me that he was labouring to bring her up to the scratch again. There, I said, you show the cloven foot; you want to keep theNineteenth Centurypot boiling.I own that your reasons for not being in England did not appear to me cogent, but it would be impertinent to make myself a judge of them. The worst of it was that you did not nameanydate. But I must assume that you are coming; and surely the time cannot now be far. Among other things, I want to speak with you about French novels, a subject on which there has for me been quite recently cast a most lurid light.Acton's letters in reply may have convinced Mr. Gladstone that there were depths in this supreme controversy that he had hardly sounded; and adversaria that he might have mocked from a professor of the school or schools of unbelief, he could not in his inner mind make light of, when coming from the pen of a catholic believer. Before and after the article onRobert Elsmereappeared, Acton, the student with his vast historic knowledge and his deep penetrating gaze, warned the impassioned critic of some historic point overstated or understated, some dangerous breach left all unguarded, some lack of nicety in definition. Acton's letters will one day see the light, and the reader may then know how candidly Mr. Gladstone was admonished as to the excess of his description of the moral action of Christianity; as to the risk of sending modern questions to ancient answers, for the apologists of an age can only meet the difficulties of their age; that there are leaps and bounds in the history of thought; how well did Newman once say that in theology you have to meet questions that the Fathers could hardly have been made to understand; how if you go to St. Thomas or Leibnitz or Paley for rescue from Hegel or Haeckel your apologetics will be a record of disaster. You insist broadly, says Acton, on belief in the divine nature of Christ as the soul, substance, and creative force of Christian religion; you assign to it very much of the good the church has done; all this with little or no qualification or drawback from the other side:—[pg 361]Enter Martineau or Stephen or —— (unattached), and loq.:—Is this the final judgment of the chief of liberals? the pontiff of a church whose fathers are the later Milton and the later Penn, Locke, Bayle, Toland, Franklin, Turgot, Adam Smith, Washington, Jefferson, Bentham, Dugald Stewart, Romilly, Tocqueville, Channing, Macaulay, Mill? These men and others like them disbelieved that doctrine established freedom, and they undid the work of orthodox Christianity, they swept away that appalling edifice of intolerance, tyranny, cruelty, which believers in Christ built up to perpetuate their belief.The philosophy of liberal history, Acton proceeds, which has to acknowledge the invaluable services of early Christianity, feels the anti-liberal and anti-social action of later Christianity, before the rise of the sects that rejected, some of them the divinity of Christ; others, the institutions of the church erected upon it. Liberalism if it admits these things as indifferent, surrenders its ownraison d'être, and ceases to strive for an ethical cause. If the doctrine of Torquemada make us condone his morality, there can be no public right and no wrong, no political sin, no secular cause to die for. So it might be said that—You do not work really from the principle of liberalism, but from the cognate, though distinct principles of democracy, nationality, progress, etc. To some extent, I fear, you will estrange valued friends, not assuredly by any expression of theological belief, but by seeming to ignore the great central problem of Christian politics. If I had to put my own doubts, instead of the average liberal's, I should state the case in other words, but not altogether differently.218[pg 362]

Chapter I. The Morrow Of Defeat. (1886-1887)Charity rendereth a man truly great, enlarging his mind into a vast circumference, and to a capacity nearly infinite; so that it by a general care doth reach all things, by an universal affection doth embrace and grace the world.... Even a spark of it in generosity of dealing breedeth admiration; a glimpse of it in formal courtesy of behaviour procureth much esteem, being deemed to accomplish and adorn a man.—Barrow.IAfter the rejection of his Irish policy in the summer of 1886, Mr. Gladstone had a period of six years before him, the life of the new parliament. Strangely dramatic years they were, in some respects unique in our later history. The party schism among liberals grew deeper and wider. The union between tories and seceders became consolidated and final. The alternative policy of coercion was passed through parliament in an extreme form and with violent strain on the legislative machinery, and it was carried out in Ireland in a fashion that pricked the consciences of many thousands of voters who had resisted the proposals of 1886. A fierce storm rent the Irish phalanx in two, and its leader vanished from the field where for sixteen years he had fought so bold and uncompromising a fight. During this period Mr. Gladstone stood in the most trying of all the varied positions of his life, and without flinching he confronted it in the strong faith that the national honour as well as the assuagement[pg 351]At Tegernseeof the inveterate Irish wound in the flank of his country, were the issues at stake.This intense pre-occupation in the political struggle did not for a single week impair his other interests, nor stay his ceaseless activity in controversies that were not touched by politics. Not even now, when the great cause to which he had so daringly committed himself was in decisive issue, could he allow it to dull or sever what had been the standing concerns of life and thought to him for so long a span of years. As from his youth up, so now behind the man of public action was the diligent, eager, watchful student, churchman, apologist, divine. And what is curious and delightful is that he never set a more admirable example of the tone and temper in which literary and religious controversy should be conducted, than in these years when in politics exasperation was at its worst. It was about this time that he wrote:“Certainly one of the lessons life has taught me is that where there is known to be a common object, the pursuit of truth, there should also be a studious desire to interpret the adversary in the best sense his words will fairly bear; to avoid whatever widens the breach; and to make the most of whatever tends to narrow it. These I hold to be part of the laws of knightly tournament.”And to these laws he sedulously conformed. Perhaps at some happy time before the day of judgment they may be transferred from the tournament to the battle-fields of philosophy, criticism, and even politics.IIAfter the defeat in which his tremendous labours had for the moment ended, he made his way to what was to him the most congenial atmosphere in the world, to the company of Döllinger and Acton, at Tegernsee in Bavaria.“Tegernsee,”Lord Acton wrote to me (Sept. 7),“is an out-of-the-way place, peaceful and silent, and as there is a good library in the house, I have taken some care of his mind, leading in the direction of little French comedies, and away from the tragedy of existence. It has done him good, and he has just started with Döllinger to climb a high mountain in the neighbourhood.”[pg 352]To Mrs. Gladstone.Tegernsee, Aug. 28, 1886.—We found Döllinger reading in the garden. The course of his life is quite unchanged. His constitution does not appear at all to have given way. He beats me utterly in standing, but that is not saying much, as it never was one of my gifts; and he is not conscious (eighty-seven last February) of any difficulty with the heart in going up hill. His deafness has increased materially, but not so that he cannot carry on very well conversation with a single person. We have talked much together even on disestablishment which he detests, and Ireland as to which he is very apprehensive, but he never seems to shut up his mind by prejudice. I had a good excuse for giving him my pamphlet,213but I do not know whether he will tell us what he thinks of it. He was reading it this morning. He rises at six and breakfasts alone. Makes agooddinner at two and has nothing more till the next morning. He does not appear after dark. On the whole one sees no reason why he should not last for several years yet.“When Dr. Döllinger was eighty-seven,”Mr. Gladstone wrote later,“he walked with me seven miles across the hill that separates the Tegernsee from the next valley to the eastward. At that time he began to find his sleep subject to occasional interruptions, and he had armed himself against them by committing to memory the first three books of theOdysseyfor recital.”214Of Mr. Gladstone Döllinger had said in 1885,“I have known Gladstone for thirty years, and would stand security for him any day; his character is a very fine one, and he possesses a rare capability for work. I differ from him in his political views on many points, and it is difficult to convince him, for he is clad in triple steel.”215Another high personage in the Roman catholic world sent him letters through Acton, affectionately written and with signs of serious as well as sympathising study of his Irish policy. A little later (Sept. 21) Mr. Gladstone writes to his wife at Hawarden:—Bishop Strossmayer may make a journey all the way to[pg 353]Hawarden, and it seems that Acton may even accompany him, which would make it much more manageable. His coming would be a great compliment, and cannot be discouraged or refused. It would, however, be a serious affair, for he speaks no language with which as a spoken tongue we are familiar, his great cards being Slavonic and Latin. Unfortunately I have a very great increase of difficulty inhearingthe words in foreign tongues, a difficulty which I hope has hardly begun with you as yet.Like a good host, Lord Acton kept politics out of his way as well as he could, but some letter of mine“set him on fire, and he is full of ——'s blunder and of Parnell's bill.”Parliamentary duty was always a sting to him, and by September 20 he was back in the House of Commons, speaking on the Tenants Relief (Ireland) bill. Then to the temple of peace at Hawarden for the rest of the year, to read theIliad“for the twenty-fifth or thirtieth time, and every time richer and more glorious than before”; to write elaborately on Homeric topics; to receive a good many visitors; and to compose the admirable article on Tennyson's secondLocksley Hall. On this last let us pause for an instant. The moment was hardly one in which, from a man of nature less great and powerful than Mr. Gladstone, we should have counted on a buoyant vindication of the spirit of his time. He had just been roughly repulsed in the boldest enterprise of his career; his name was a target for infinite obloquy; his motives were largely denounced as of the basest; the conflict into which he had plunged and from which he could not withdraw was hard; friends had turned away from him; he was old; the issue was dubious and dark. Yet the personal, or even what to him were the national discomfitures of the hour, were not allowed to blot the sun out of the heavens. His whole soul rose in challenge against the tragic tones of Tennyson's poem, as he recalled the solid tale of the vast improvements, the enormous mitigation of the sorrows and burdens of mankind, that had been effected in the land by public opinion and public authority, operative in the exhilarating sphere of self-government during the sixty years between the first and secondLocksley Hall.[pg 354]The sum of the matter seems to be that upon the whole, and in a degree, we who lived fifty, sixty, seventy years back, and are living now, have lived into a gentler time; that the public conscience has grown more tender, as indeed was very needful; and that in matters of practice, at sight of evils formerly regarded with indifference or even connivance, it now not only winces but rebels; that upon the whole the race has been reaping, and not scattering; earning and not wasting; and that without its being said that the old Prophet is wrong, it may be said that the young Prophet was unquestionably right.Here is the way in which a man of noble heart and high vision as of a circling eagle, transcends his individual chagrins. All this optimism was the natural vein of a statesman who had lived a long life of effort in persuading opinion in so many regions, in overcoming difficulty upon difficulty, in content with a small reform where men would not let him achieve a great one, in patching where he could not build anew, in unquenchable faith, hope, patience, endeavour. Mr. Gladstone knew as well as Tennyson that“every blessing has its drawbacks, and every age its dangers”; he was as sensitive as Tennyson or Ruskin or any of them, to the implacable tragedy of industrial civilisation—the city children“blackening soul and sense in city slime,”progress halting on palsied feet“among the glooming alleys,”crime and hunger casting maidens on the street, and all the other recesses of human life depicted by the poetic prophet in his sombre hours. But the triumphs of the past inspired confidence in victories for the future, and meanwhile he thought it well to remind Englishmen that“their country is still young as well as old, and that in these latest days it has not been unworthy of itself.”216On his birthday he enters in his diary:—Dec. 29, 1886.—This day in its outer experience recalls the Scotch usage which would say,“terrible pleasant.”In spite of the ruin of telegraph wires by snow, my letters and postal arrivals of to-day have much exceeded those of last year. Even my share of[pg 355]the reading was very heavy. The day was gone before it seemed to have begun, all amidst stir and festivity. The estimate was nine hundred arrivals. O for a birthday of recollection. It is long since I have had one. There is so much to say on the soul's history, but bracing is necessary to say it, as it is for reading Dante. It has been a year of shock and strain. I think a year of some progress; but of greater absorption in interests which, though profoundly human, are quite off the line of an old man's direct preparation for passing the River of Death. I have not had a chance given me of creeping from this whirlpool, for I cannot abandon a cause which is so evidently that of my fellow-men, and in which a particular part seems to be assigned to me. Therefore am I not disturbed“though the hills be carried into the middle of the sea.”IIITo Lord Acton.Hawarden, Jan. 13, 1887.—It is with much pleasure that I read your estimate of Chamberlain. His character is remarkable, as are in a very high degree his talents. It is one of my common sayings that to me characters of the political class are the most mysterious of all I meet, so that I am obliged to travel the road of life surrounded by an immense number of judgments more or less in suspense, and getting on for practical purposes as well as I can.I have with a clear mind and conscience not only assented to but promoted the present conferences, and I had laboured in that sense long before Mr. Chamberlain made his speech at Birmingham. It will surprise as well as grieve me if they do harm; if indeed they do not do some little good. Large and final arrangements, it would be rash I think to expect.The tide is flowing, though perhaps not rapidly, in our favour. Without our lifting a finger, a crumbling process has begun in both the opposite parties.“In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength”is a blessed maxim, often applicable to temporals as well as spirituals. I have indeed one temptation to haste, namely, that the hour may come for me to say farewell and claim my retirement; but inasmuch as I remainin situfor the Irish question only, I cannot be so foolish as to allow myself to ruin by precipitancy my own purpose. Though I am writing a paper[pg 356]on the Irish question for Mr. Knowles, it is no trumpet-blast, but is meant to fill and turn to account a season of comparative quietude.The death of Iddesleigh has shocked and saddened us all. He was full of excellent qualities, but had not the backbone and strength of fibre necessary to restore the tone of a party demoralised by his former leader. In gentleness, temper, sacrifice of himself to the common purpose of his friends, knowledge, quickness of perception, general integrity of intention, freedom from personal aims, he was admirable.... I have been constantly struggling to vindicate a portion of my time for the pursuits I want to follow, but with very little success indeed. Some rudiments of Olympian religion have partially taken shape. I have a paper ready for Knowles probably in his March number on the Poseidon of Homer, a most curious and exotic personage.... Williams and Norgate got me the books I wanted, but alack for the time to read them! In addition to want of time, I have to deplore my slowness in reading, declining sight, and declining memory; all very serious affairs for one who has such singular reason to be thankful as to general health and strength.I wish I could acknowledge duly or pay even in part your unsparing, untiring kindness in the discharge of your engagements as“Cook.”Come early to England—and stay long. We will try what we can to bind you.A few months later, he added to his multifarious exercises in criticism and controversy, a performance that attracted especial attention.217“Mamma and I,”he wrote to Mrs. Drew,“are each of us still separately engaged in a death-grapple withRobert Elsmere. I complained of some of the novels you gave me to read as too stiff, but they are nothing to this. It is wholly out of the common order. At present I regard with doubt and dread the idea of doing anything on it, but cannot yet be sure whether your observations will be verified or not. In any case it is a tremendous book.”And on April 1 (1888), he wrote,“By hard work I have finished and am correcting my article onRobert Elsmere.[pg 357]It is rather stiff work. I have had two letters from her. She is much to be liked personally, but is a fruit, I think, of what must be called Arnoldism.”To Lord Acton.Aston Clinton, Tring, Easter Day, April 1, '88.—I do not like to let too long a time elapse without some note of intercourse, even though that season approaches which brings you back to the shores of your country. Were you here I should have much to say on many things; but I will now speak, or first speak, of what is uppermost, and would, if a mind is like a portmanteau, be taken or tumble out first.You perhaps have not heard ofRobert Elsmere, for I find without surprise, that it makes its way slowly into public notice. It is not far from twice the length of an ordinary novel; and the labour and effort of reading it all, I should say, sixfold; while one could no more stop in it than in reading Thucydides. The idea of the book, perhaps of the writer, appears to be a movement of retreat from Christianity upon Theism: a Theism with a Christ glorified, always in the human sense, but beyond the ordinary measure. It is worked out through the medium of a being—one ought to say a character, but I withhold the word, for there is no sufficient substratum of character to uphold the qualities—gifted with much intellectual subtlety and readiness, and almost every conceivable moral excellence. He finds vent in an energetic attempt to carry his new gospel among the skilled artisans of London, whom the writer apparently considers as supplying thenormfor all right human judgment. He has extraordinary success, establishes a new church under the name of the new Christian brotherhood, kills himself with overwork, but leaves his project flourishing in a certain“Elgood Street.”It is in fact (like the Salvation Army), a new Kirche der Zukunft.I am always inclined to consider this Theism as among the least defensible of the positions alternative to Christianity. Robert Elsmere who has been a parish clergyman, is upset entirely, as it appears, by the difficulty of accepting miracles, and by the suggestion that the existing Christianity grew up in an age specially predisposed to them.[pg 358]I want as usual to betray you into helping the lame dog over the stile; and I should like to know whether you would think me violently wrong in holding that the period of the Advent was a period when the appetite for, or disposition to, the supernatural was declining and decaying; that in the region of human thought, speculation was strong and scepticism advancing; that if our Lord were a mere man, armed only with human means, His whereabouts was in this and many other ways misplaced by Providence; that the gospels and the New Testament must have much else besides miracle torn out of them, in order to get us down to thecaput mortuumof Elgood Street. This very remarkable work is in effect identical with the poor, thin, ineffectual production published with some arrogance by the Duke of Somerset, which found a quack remedy for difficulties in what he considered the impregnable citadel of belief in God.Knowles has brought this book before me, and being as strong as it is strange, it cannot perish still-born. I am tossed about with doubt as to writing upon it.To Lord Acton.Oxford, April 8, '88.—I am grateful for your most interesting letter, which contains very valuable warnings. On the other side is copied what I have written on two of the points raised by the book. Have I said too much of the Academy? I have spoken only of the first century. You refer to (apparently) about 250a.d.as a time of great progress? But I was astonished on first reading the census of Christian clergy in Rometemp.St. Cyprian, it was so slender. I am not certain, but does not Beugnot estimate the Christians, before Constantine's conversion, in the west at one-tenth of the population? Mrs. T. Arnold died yesterday here. Mrs. Ward had been summoned and she is coming to see me this evening. It is a very singular phase of the controversy which she has opened. When do yourepatriate?I am afraid that my kindness to the Positivists amounts only to a comparative approval of their not dropping the great human tradition out of view;plusa very high appreciation of the personal qualities of our friend ——.[pg 359]To Lord Acton.Dollis Hill, May 13, '88.—Your last letter was one of extreme interest. It raised such a multitude of points, after your perusal of my article on R. Elsmere, as to stimulate in the highest degree my curiosity to know how far you would carry into propositions, the ideas which you for the most part obliquely put forward. I gave the letter to Mary, who paid us a flying visit in London, that she might take it to Hawarden for full digestion. For myself I feed upon the hope that when (when ?) you come back to England we may go over the points, and I may reap further benefits from your knowledge. I will not now attempt anything of the kind. But I will say this generally, that I am not so much oppressed as you appear to be, with the notion that great difficulties have been imported by the researches of scientists into the religious and theological argument. As respects cosmogony andgeogony, the Scripture has, I think, taken much benefit from them. Whatever be the date of the early books, Pentateuch or Hexateuch in their presentedition, the Assyriological investigations seem to me to have fortified and accredited their substance by producing similar traditions in variant forms inferior to the Mosaic forms, and tending to throw them back to a higher antiquity, a fountainhead nearer the source. Then there is the great chapter of the Dispersal: which Renan (I think) treats as exhibiting the marvellous genius (!) of the Jews. As to unbroken sequences in the physical order, they do not trouble me, because we have to do not with the natural but the moral order, and over this science, or as I call it natural science, does not wave her sceptre. It is no small matter, again (if so it be, as I suppose), that, after warring for a century against miracle as unsustained by experience, the assailants should now have to abandon that ground, stand only upon sequence, and controvert the great facts of the New Testament only by raising to an extravagant and unnatural height the demands made under the law of testimony in order to [justify] a rational belief. One admission has to be made, that death did not come into the world by sin, namely the sin of Adam, and this sits inconveniently by the declaration of Saint Paul.Mrs. Ward wrote to thank me for the tone of my article. Her[pg 360]first intention was to make some reply in theNineteenth Centuryitself. It appears that —— advised her not to do it. But Knowles told me that he was labouring to bring her up to the scratch again. There, I said, you show the cloven foot; you want to keep theNineteenth Centurypot boiling.I own that your reasons for not being in England did not appear to me cogent, but it would be impertinent to make myself a judge of them. The worst of it was that you did not nameanydate. But I must assume that you are coming; and surely the time cannot now be far. Among other things, I want to speak with you about French novels, a subject on which there has for me been quite recently cast a most lurid light.Acton's letters in reply may have convinced Mr. Gladstone that there were depths in this supreme controversy that he had hardly sounded; and adversaria that he might have mocked from a professor of the school or schools of unbelief, he could not in his inner mind make light of, when coming from the pen of a catholic believer. Before and after the article onRobert Elsmereappeared, Acton, the student with his vast historic knowledge and his deep penetrating gaze, warned the impassioned critic of some historic point overstated or understated, some dangerous breach left all unguarded, some lack of nicety in definition. Acton's letters will one day see the light, and the reader may then know how candidly Mr. Gladstone was admonished as to the excess of his description of the moral action of Christianity; as to the risk of sending modern questions to ancient answers, for the apologists of an age can only meet the difficulties of their age; that there are leaps and bounds in the history of thought; how well did Newman once say that in theology you have to meet questions that the Fathers could hardly have been made to understand; how if you go to St. Thomas or Leibnitz or Paley for rescue from Hegel or Haeckel your apologetics will be a record of disaster. You insist broadly, says Acton, on belief in the divine nature of Christ as the soul, substance, and creative force of Christian religion; you assign to it very much of the good the church has done; all this with little or no qualification or drawback from the other side:—[pg 361]Enter Martineau or Stephen or —— (unattached), and loq.:—Is this the final judgment of the chief of liberals? the pontiff of a church whose fathers are the later Milton and the later Penn, Locke, Bayle, Toland, Franklin, Turgot, Adam Smith, Washington, Jefferson, Bentham, Dugald Stewart, Romilly, Tocqueville, Channing, Macaulay, Mill? These men and others like them disbelieved that doctrine established freedom, and they undid the work of orthodox Christianity, they swept away that appalling edifice of intolerance, tyranny, cruelty, which believers in Christ built up to perpetuate their belief.The philosophy of liberal history, Acton proceeds, which has to acknowledge the invaluable services of early Christianity, feels the anti-liberal and anti-social action of later Christianity, before the rise of the sects that rejected, some of them the divinity of Christ; others, the institutions of the church erected upon it. Liberalism if it admits these things as indifferent, surrenders its ownraison d'être, and ceases to strive for an ethical cause. If the doctrine of Torquemada make us condone his morality, there can be no public right and no wrong, no political sin, no secular cause to die for. So it might be said that—You do not work really from the principle of liberalism, but from the cognate, though distinct principles of democracy, nationality, progress, etc. To some extent, I fear, you will estrange valued friends, not assuredly by any expression of theological belief, but by seeming to ignore the great central problem of Christian politics. If I had to put my own doubts, instead of the average liberal's, I should state the case in other words, but not altogether differently.218

Charity rendereth a man truly great, enlarging his mind into a vast circumference, and to a capacity nearly infinite; so that it by a general care doth reach all things, by an universal affection doth embrace and grace the world.... Even a spark of it in generosity of dealing breedeth admiration; a glimpse of it in formal courtesy of behaviour procureth much esteem, being deemed to accomplish and adorn a man.—Barrow.

IAfter the rejection of his Irish policy in the summer of 1886, Mr. Gladstone had a period of six years before him, the life of the new parliament. Strangely dramatic years they were, in some respects unique in our later history. The party schism among liberals grew deeper and wider. The union between tories and seceders became consolidated and final. The alternative policy of coercion was passed through parliament in an extreme form and with violent strain on the legislative machinery, and it was carried out in Ireland in a fashion that pricked the consciences of many thousands of voters who had resisted the proposals of 1886. A fierce storm rent the Irish phalanx in two, and its leader vanished from the field where for sixteen years he had fought so bold and uncompromising a fight. During this period Mr. Gladstone stood in the most trying of all the varied positions of his life, and without flinching he confronted it in the strong faith that the national honour as well as the assuagement[pg 351]At Tegernseeof the inveterate Irish wound in the flank of his country, were the issues at stake.This intense pre-occupation in the political struggle did not for a single week impair his other interests, nor stay his ceaseless activity in controversies that were not touched by politics. Not even now, when the great cause to which he had so daringly committed himself was in decisive issue, could he allow it to dull or sever what had been the standing concerns of life and thought to him for so long a span of years. As from his youth up, so now behind the man of public action was the diligent, eager, watchful student, churchman, apologist, divine. And what is curious and delightful is that he never set a more admirable example of the tone and temper in which literary and religious controversy should be conducted, than in these years when in politics exasperation was at its worst. It was about this time that he wrote:“Certainly one of the lessons life has taught me is that where there is known to be a common object, the pursuit of truth, there should also be a studious desire to interpret the adversary in the best sense his words will fairly bear; to avoid whatever widens the breach; and to make the most of whatever tends to narrow it. These I hold to be part of the laws of knightly tournament.”And to these laws he sedulously conformed. Perhaps at some happy time before the day of judgment they may be transferred from the tournament to the battle-fields of philosophy, criticism, and even politics.

After the rejection of his Irish policy in the summer of 1886, Mr. Gladstone had a period of six years before him, the life of the new parliament. Strangely dramatic years they were, in some respects unique in our later history. The party schism among liberals grew deeper and wider. The union between tories and seceders became consolidated and final. The alternative policy of coercion was passed through parliament in an extreme form and with violent strain on the legislative machinery, and it was carried out in Ireland in a fashion that pricked the consciences of many thousands of voters who had resisted the proposals of 1886. A fierce storm rent the Irish phalanx in two, and its leader vanished from the field where for sixteen years he had fought so bold and uncompromising a fight. During this period Mr. Gladstone stood in the most trying of all the varied positions of his life, and without flinching he confronted it in the strong faith that the national honour as well as the assuagement[pg 351]

At Tegernsee

At Tegernsee

of the inveterate Irish wound in the flank of his country, were the issues at stake.

This intense pre-occupation in the political struggle did not for a single week impair his other interests, nor stay his ceaseless activity in controversies that were not touched by politics. Not even now, when the great cause to which he had so daringly committed himself was in decisive issue, could he allow it to dull or sever what had been the standing concerns of life and thought to him for so long a span of years. As from his youth up, so now behind the man of public action was the diligent, eager, watchful student, churchman, apologist, divine. And what is curious and delightful is that he never set a more admirable example of the tone and temper in which literary and religious controversy should be conducted, than in these years when in politics exasperation was at its worst. It was about this time that he wrote:“Certainly one of the lessons life has taught me is that where there is known to be a common object, the pursuit of truth, there should also be a studious desire to interpret the adversary in the best sense his words will fairly bear; to avoid whatever widens the breach; and to make the most of whatever tends to narrow it. These I hold to be part of the laws of knightly tournament.”And to these laws he sedulously conformed. Perhaps at some happy time before the day of judgment they may be transferred from the tournament to the battle-fields of philosophy, criticism, and even politics.

IIAfter the defeat in which his tremendous labours had for the moment ended, he made his way to what was to him the most congenial atmosphere in the world, to the company of Döllinger and Acton, at Tegernsee in Bavaria.“Tegernsee,”Lord Acton wrote to me (Sept. 7),“is an out-of-the-way place, peaceful and silent, and as there is a good library in the house, I have taken some care of his mind, leading in the direction of little French comedies, and away from the tragedy of existence. It has done him good, and he has just started with Döllinger to climb a high mountain in the neighbourhood.”[pg 352]To Mrs. Gladstone.Tegernsee, Aug. 28, 1886.—We found Döllinger reading in the garden. The course of his life is quite unchanged. His constitution does not appear at all to have given way. He beats me utterly in standing, but that is not saying much, as it never was one of my gifts; and he is not conscious (eighty-seven last February) of any difficulty with the heart in going up hill. His deafness has increased materially, but not so that he cannot carry on very well conversation with a single person. We have talked much together even on disestablishment which he detests, and Ireland as to which he is very apprehensive, but he never seems to shut up his mind by prejudice. I had a good excuse for giving him my pamphlet,213but I do not know whether he will tell us what he thinks of it. He was reading it this morning. He rises at six and breakfasts alone. Makes agooddinner at two and has nothing more till the next morning. He does not appear after dark. On the whole one sees no reason why he should not last for several years yet.“When Dr. Döllinger was eighty-seven,”Mr. Gladstone wrote later,“he walked with me seven miles across the hill that separates the Tegernsee from the next valley to the eastward. At that time he began to find his sleep subject to occasional interruptions, and he had armed himself against them by committing to memory the first three books of theOdysseyfor recital.”214Of Mr. Gladstone Döllinger had said in 1885,“I have known Gladstone for thirty years, and would stand security for him any day; his character is a very fine one, and he possesses a rare capability for work. I differ from him in his political views on many points, and it is difficult to convince him, for he is clad in triple steel.”215Another high personage in the Roman catholic world sent him letters through Acton, affectionately written and with signs of serious as well as sympathising study of his Irish policy. A little later (Sept. 21) Mr. Gladstone writes to his wife at Hawarden:—Bishop Strossmayer may make a journey all the way to[pg 353]Hawarden, and it seems that Acton may even accompany him, which would make it much more manageable. His coming would be a great compliment, and cannot be discouraged or refused. It would, however, be a serious affair, for he speaks no language with which as a spoken tongue we are familiar, his great cards being Slavonic and Latin. Unfortunately I have a very great increase of difficulty inhearingthe words in foreign tongues, a difficulty which I hope has hardly begun with you as yet.Like a good host, Lord Acton kept politics out of his way as well as he could, but some letter of mine“set him on fire, and he is full of ——'s blunder and of Parnell's bill.”Parliamentary duty was always a sting to him, and by September 20 he was back in the House of Commons, speaking on the Tenants Relief (Ireland) bill. Then to the temple of peace at Hawarden for the rest of the year, to read theIliad“for the twenty-fifth or thirtieth time, and every time richer and more glorious than before”; to write elaborately on Homeric topics; to receive a good many visitors; and to compose the admirable article on Tennyson's secondLocksley Hall. On this last let us pause for an instant. The moment was hardly one in which, from a man of nature less great and powerful than Mr. Gladstone, we should have counted on a buoyant vindication of the spirit of his time. He had just been roughly repulsed in the boldest enterprise of his career; his name was a target for infinite obloquy; his motives were largely denounced as of the basest; the conflict into which he had plunged and from which he could not withdraw was hard; friends had turned away from him; he was old; the issue was dubious and dark. Yet the personal, or even what to him were the national discomfitures of the hour, were not allowed to blot the sun out of the heavens. His whole soul rose in challenge against the tragic tones of Tennyson's poem, as he recalled the solid tale of the vast improvements, the enormous mitigation of the sorrows and burdens of mankind, that had been effected in the land by public opinion and public authority, operative in the exhilarating sphere of self-government during the sixty years between the first and secondLocksley Hall.[pg 354]The sum of the matter seems to be that upon the whole, and in a degree, we who lived fifty, sixty, seventy years back, and are living now, have lived into a gentler time; that the public conscience has grown more tender, as indeed was very needful; and that in matters of practice, at sight of evils formerly regarded with indifference or even connivance, it now not only winces but rebels; that upon the whole the race has been reaping, and not scattering; earning and not wasting; and that without its being said that the old Prophet is wrong, it may be said that the young Prophet was unquestionably right.Here is the way in which a man of noble heart and high vision as of a circling eagle, transcends his individual chagrins. All this optimism was the natural vein of a statesman who had lived a long life of effort in persuading opinion in so many regions, in overcoming difficulty upon difficulty, in content with a small reform where men would not let him achieve a great one, in patching where he could not build anew, in unquenchable faith, hope, patience, endeavour. Mr. Gladstone knew as well as Tennyson that“every blessing has its drawbacks, and every age its dangers”; he was as sensitive as Tennyson or Ruskin or any of them, to the implacable tragedy of industrial civilisation—the city children“blackening soul and sense in city slime,”progress halting on palsied feet“among the glooming alleys,”crime and hunger casting maidens on the street, and all the other recesses of human life depicted by the poetic prophet in his sombre hours. But the triumphs of the past inspired confidence in victories for the future, and meanwhile he thought it well to remind Englishmen that“their country is still young as well as old, and that in these latest days it has not been unworthy of itself.”216On his birthday he enters in his diary:—Dec. 29, 1886.—This day in its outer experience recalls the Scotch usage which would say,“terrible pleasant.”In spite of the ruin of telegraph wires by snow, my letters and postal arrivals of to-day have much exceeded those of last year. Even my share of[pg 355]the reading was very heavy. The day was gone before it seemed to have begun, all amidst stir and festivity. The estimate was nine hundred arrivals. O for a birthday of recollection. It is long since I have had one. There is so much to say on the soul's history, but bracing is necessary to say it, as it is for reading Dante. It has been a year of shock and strain. I think a year of some progress; but of greater absorption in interests which, though profoundly human, are quite off the line of an old man's direct preparation for passing the River of Death. I have not had a chance given me of creeping from this whirlpool, for I cannot abandon a cause which is so evidently that of my fellow-men, and in which a particular part seems to be assigned to me. Therefore am I not disturbed“though the hills be carried into the middle of the sea.”

After the defeat in which his tremendous labours had for the moment ended, he made his way to what was to him the most congenial atmosphere in the world, to the company of Döllinger and Acton, at Tegernsee in Bavaria.“Tegernsee,”Lord Acton wrote to me (Sept. 7),“is an out-of-the-way place, peaceful and silent, and as there is a good library in the house, I have taken some care of his mind, leading in the direction of little French comedies, and away from the tragedy of existence. It has done him good, and he has just started with Döllinger to climb a high mountain in the neighbourhood.”

To Mrs. Gladstone.Tegernsee, Aug. 28, 1886.—We found Döllinger reading in the garden. The course of his life is quite unchanged. His constitution does not appear at all to have given way. He beats me utterly in standing, but that is not saying much, as it never was one of my gifts; and he is not conscious (eighty-seven last February) of any difficulty with the heart in going up hill. His deafness has increased materially, but not so that he cannot carry on very well conversation with a single person. We have talked much together even on disestablishment which he detests, and Ireland as to which he is very apprehensive, but he never seems to shut up his mind by prejudice. I had a good excuse for giving him my pamphlet,213but I do not know whether he will tell us what he thinks of it. He was reading it this morning. He rises at six and breakfasts alone. Makes agooddinner at two and has nothing more till the next morning. He does not appear after dark. On the whole one sees no reason why he should not last for several years yet.

To Mrs. Gladstone.

Tegernsee, Aug. 28, 1886.—We found Döllinger reading in the garden. The course of his life is quite unchanged. His constitution does not appear at all to have given way. He beats me utterly in standing, but that is not saying much, as it never was one of my gifts; and he is not conscious (eighty-seven last February) of any difficulty with the heart in going up hill. His deafness has increased materially, but not so that he cannot carry on very well conversation with a single person. We have talked much together even on disestablishment which he detests, and Ireland as to which he is very apprehensive, but he never seems to shut up his mind by prejudice. I had a good excuse for giving him my pamphlet,213but I do not know whether he will tell us what he thinks of it. He was reading it this morning. He rises at six and breakfasts alone. Makes agooddinner at two and has nothing more till the next morning. He does not appear after dark. On the whole one sees no reason why he should not last for several years yet.

“When Dr. Döllinger was eighty-seven,”Mr. Gladstone wrote later,“he walked with me seven miles across the hill that separates the Tegernsee from the next valley to the eastward. At that time he began to find his sleep subject to occasional interruptions, and he had armed himself against them by committing to memory the first three books of theOdysseyfor recital.”214Of Mr. Gladstone Döllinger had said in 1885,“I have known Gladstone for thirty years, and would stand security for him any day; his character is a very fine one, and he possesses a rare capability for work. I differ from him in his political views on many points, and it is difficult to convince him, for he is clad in triple steel.”215

Another high personage in the Roman catholic world sent him letters through Acton, affectionately written and with signs of serious as well as sympathising study of his Irish policy. A little later (Sept. 21) Mr. Gladstone writes to his wife at Hawarden:—

Bishop Strossmayer may make a journey all the way to[pg 353]Hawarden, and it seems that Acton may even accompany him, which would make it much more manageable. His coming would be a great compliment, and cannot be discouraged or refused. It would, however, be a serious affair, for he speaks no language with which as a spoken tongue we are familiar, his great cards being Slavonic and Latin. Unfortunately I have a very great increase of difficulty inhearingthe words in foreign tongues, a difficulty which I hope has hardly begun with you as yet.

Like a good host, Lord Acton kept politics out of his way as well as he could, but some letter of mine“set him on fire, and he is full of ——'s blunder and of Parnell's bill.”Parliamentary duty was always a sting to him, and by September 20 he was back in the House of Commons, speaking on the Tenants Relief (Ireland) bill. Then to the temple of peace at Hawarden for the rest of the year, to read theIliad“for the twenty-fifth or thirtieth time, and every time richer and more glorious than before”; to write elaborately on Homeric topics; to receive a good many visitors; and to compose the admirable article on Tennyson's secondLocksley Hall. On this last let us pause for an instant. The moment was hardly one in which, from a man of nature less great and powerful than Mr. Gladstone, we should have counted on a buoyant vindication of the spirit of his time. He had just been roughly repulsed in the boldest enterprise of his career; his name was a target for infinite obloquy; his motives were largely denounced as of the basest; the conflict into which he had plunged and from which he could not withdraw was hard; friends had turned away from him; he was old; the issue was dubious and dark. Yet the personal, or even what to him were the national discomfitures of the hour, were not allowed to blot the sun out of the heavens. His whole soul rose in challenge against the tragic tones of Tennyson's poem, as he recalled the solid tale of the vast improvements, the enormous mitigation of the sorrows and burdens of mankind, that had been effected in the land by public opinion and public authority, operative in the exhilarating sphere of self-government during the sixty years between the first and secondLocksley Hall.

The sum of the matter seems to be that upon the whole, and in a degree, we who lived fifty, sixty, seventy years back, and are living now, have lived into a gentler time; that the public conscience has grown more tender, as indeed was very needful; and that in matters of practice, at sight of evils formerly regarded with indifference or even connivance, it now not only winces but rebels; that upon the whole the race has been reaping, and not scattering; earning and not wasting; and that without its being said that the old Prophet is wrong, it may be said that the young Prophet was unquestionably right.

Here is the way in which a man of noble heart and high vision as of a circling eagle, transcends his individual chagrins. All this optimism was the natural vein of a statesman who had lived a long life of effort in persuading opinion in so many regions, in overcoming difficulty upon difficulty, in content with a small reform where men would not let him achieve a great one, in patching where he could not build anew, in unquenchable faith, hope, patience, endeavour. Mr. Gladstone knew as well as Tennyson that“every blessing has its drawbacks, and every age its dangers”; he was as sensitive as Tennyson or Ruskin or any of them, to the implacable tragedy of industrial civilisation—the city children“blackening soul and sense in city slime,”progress halting on palsied feet“among the glooming alleys,”crime and hunger casting maidens on the street, and all the other recesses of human life depicted by the poetic prophet in his sombre hours. But the triumphs of the past inspired confidence in victories for the future, and meanwhile he thought it well to remind Englishmen that“their country is still young as well as old, and that in these latest days it has not been unworthy of itself.”216

On his birthday he enters in his diary:—

Dec. 29, 1886.—This day in its outer experience recalls the Scotch usage which would say,“terrible pleasant.”In spite of the ruin of telegraph wires by snow, my letters and postal arrivals of to-day have much exceeded those of last year. Even my share of[pg 355]the reading was very heavy. The day was gone before it seemed to have begun, all amidst stir and festivity. The estimate was nine hundred arrivals. O for a birthday of recollection. It is long since I have had one. There is so much to say on the soul's history, but bracing is necessary to say it, as it is for reading Dante. It has been a year of shock and strain. I think a year of some progress; but of greater absorption in interests which, though profoundly human, are quite off the line of an old man's direct preparation for passing the River of Death. I have not had a chance given me of creeping from this whirlpool, for I cannot abandon a cause which is so evidently that of my fellow-men, and in which a particular part seems to be assigned to me. Therefore am I not disturbed“though the hills be carried into the middle of the sea.”

IIITo Lord Acton.Hawarden, Jan. 13, 1887.—It is with much pleasure that I read your estimate of Chamberlain. His character is remarkable, as are in a very high degree his talents. It is one of my common sayings that to me characters of the political class are the most mysterious of all I meet, so that I am obliged to travel the road of life surrounded by an immense number of judgments more or less in suspense, and getting on for practical purposes as well as I can.I have with a clear mind and conscience not only assented to but promoted the present conferences, and I had laboured in that sense long before Mr. Chamberlain made his speech at Birmingham. It will surprise as well as grieve me if they do harm; if indeed they do not do some little good. Large and final arrangements, it would be rash I think to expect.The tide is flowing, though perhaps not rapidly, in our favour. Without our lifting a finger, a crumbling process has begun in both the opposite parties.“In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength”is a blessed maxim, often applicable to temporals as well as spirituals. I have indeed one temptation to haste, namely, that the hour may come for me to say farewell and claim my retirement; but inasmuch as I remainin situfor the Irish question only, I cannot be so foolish as to allow myself to ruin by precipitancy my own purpose. Though I am writing a paper[pg 356]on the Irish question for Mr. Knowles, it is no trumpet-blast, but is meant to fill and turn to account a season of comparative quietude.The death of Iddesleigh has shocked and saddened us all. He was full of excellent qualities, but had not the backbone and strength of fibre necessary to restore the tone of a party demoralised by his former leader. In gentleness, temper, sacrifice of himself to the common purpose of his friends, knowledge, quickness of perception, general integrity of intention, freedom from personal aims, he was admirable.... I have been constantly struggling to vindicate a portion of my time for the pursuits I want to follow, but with very little success indeed. Some rudiments of Olympian religion have partially taken shape. I have a paper ready for Knowles probably in his March number on the Poseidon of Homer, a most curious and exotic personage.... Williams and Norgate got me the books I wanted, but alack for the time to read them! In addition to want of time, I have to deplore my slowness in reading, declining sight, and declining memory; all very serious affairs for one who has such singular reason to be thankful as to general health and strength.I wish I could acknowledge duly or pay even in part your unsparing, untiring kindness in the discharge of your engagements as“Cook.”Come early to England—and stay long. We will try what we can to bind you.A few months later, he added to his multifarious exercises in criticism and controversy, a performance that attracted especial attention.217“Mamma and I,”he wrote to Mrs. Drew,“are each of us still separately engaged in a death-grapple withRobert Elsmere. I complained of some of the novels you gave me to read as too stiff, but they are nothing to this. It is wholly out of the common order. At present I regard with doubt and dread the idea of doing anything on it, but cannot yet be sure whether your observations will be verified or not. In any case it is a tremendous book.”And on April 1 (1888), he wrote,“By hard work I have finished and am correcting my article onRobert Elsmere.[pg 357]It is rather stiff work. I have had two letters from her. She is much to be liked personally, but is a fruit, I think, of what must be called Arnoldism.”To Lord Acton.Aston Clinton, Tring, Easter Day, April 1, '88.—I do not like to let too long a time elapse without some note of intercourse, even though that season approaches which brings you back to the shores of your country. Were you here I should have much to say on many things; but I will now speak, or first speak, of what is uppermost, and would, if a mind is like a portmanteau, be taken or tumble out first.You perhaps have not heard ofRobert Elsmere, for I find without surprise, that it makes its way slowly into public notice. It is not far from twice the length of an ordinary novel; and the labour and effort of reading it all, I should say, sixfold; while one could no more stop in it than in reading Thucydides. The idea of the book, perhaps of the writer, appears to be a movement of retreat from Christianity upon Theism: a Theism with a Christ glorified, always in the human sense, but beyond the ordinary measure. It is worked out through the medium of a being—one ought to say a character, but I withhold the word, for there is no sufficient substratum of character to uphold the qualities—gifted with much intellectual subtlety and readiness, and almost every conceivable moral excellence. He finds vent in an energetic attempt to carry his new gospel among the skilled artisans of London, whom the writer apparently considers as supplying thenormfor all right human judgment. He has extraordinary success, establishes a new church under the name of the new Christian brotherhood, kills himself with overwork, but leaves his project flourishing in a certain“Elgood Street.”It is in fact (like the Salvation Army), a new Kirche der Zukunft.I am always inclined to consider this Theism as among the least defensible of the positions alternative to Christianity. Robert Elsmere who has been a parish clergyman, is upset entirely, as it appears, by the difficulty of accepting miracles, and by the suggestion that the existing Christianity grew up in an age specially predisposed to them.[pg 358]I want as usual to betray you into helping the lame dog over the stile; and I should like to know whether you would think me violently wrong in holding that the period of the Advent was a period when the appetite for, or disposition to, the supernatural was declining and decaying; that in the region of human thought, speculation was strong and scepticism advancing; that if our Lord were a mere man, armed only with human means, His whereabouts was in this and many other ways misplaced by Providence; that the gospels and the New Testament must have much else besides miracle torn out of them, in order to get us down to thecaput mortuumof Elgood Street. This very remarkable work is in effect identical with the poor, thin, ineffectual production published with some arrogance by the Duke of Somerset, which found a quack remedy for difficulties in what he considered the impregnable citadel of belief in God.Knowles has brought this book before me, and being as strong as it is strange, it cannot perish still-born. I am tossed about with doubt as to writing upon it.To Lord Acton.Oxford, April 8, '88.—I am grateful for your most interesting letter, which contains very valuable warnings. On the other side is copied what I have written on two of the points raised by the book. Have I said too much of the Academy? I have spoken only of the first century. You refer to (apparently) about 250a.d.as a time of great progress? But I was astonished on first reading the census of Christian clergy in Rometemp.St. Cyprian, it was so slender. I am not certain, but does not Beugnot estimate the Christians, before Constantine's conversion, in the west at one-tenth of the population? Mrs. T. Arnold died yesterday here. Mrs. Ward had been summoned and she is coming to see me this evening. It is a very singular phase of the controversy which she has opened. When do yourepatriate?I am afraid that my kindness to the Positivists amounts only to a comparative approval of their not dropping the great human tradition out of view;plusa very high appreciation of the personal qualities of our friend ——.[pg 359]To Lord Acton.Dollis Hill, May 13, '88.—Your last letter was one of extreme interest. It raised such a multitude of points, after your perusal of my article on R. Elsmere, as to stimulate in the highest degree my curiosity to know how far you would carry into propositions, the ideas which you for the most part obliquely put forward. I gave the letter to Mary, who paid us a flying visit in London, that she might take it to Hawarden for full digestion. For myself I feed upon the hope that when (when ?) you come back to England we may go over the points, and I may reap further benefits from your knowledge. I will not now attempt anything of the kind. But I will say this generally, that I am not so much oppressed as you appear to be, with the notion that great difficulties have been imported by the researches of scientists into the religious and theological argument. As respects cosmogony andgeogony, the Scripture has, I think, taken much benefit from them. Whatever be the date of the early books, Pentateuch or Hexateuch in their presentedition, the Assyriological investigations seem to me to have fortified and accredited their substance by producing similar traditions in variant forms inferior to the Mosaic forms, and tending to throw them back to a higher antiquity, a fountainhead nearer the source. Then there is the great chapter of the Dispersal: which Renan (I think) treats as exhibiting the marvellous genius (!) of the Jews. As to unbroken sequences in the physical order, they do not trouble me, because we have to do not with the natural but the moral order, and over this science, or as I call it natural science, does not wave her sceptre. It is no small matter, again (if so it be, as I suppose), that, after warring for a century against miracle as unsustained by experience, the assailants should now have to abandon that ground, stand only upon sequence, and controvert the great facts of the New Testament only by raising to an extravagant and unnatural height the demands made under the law of testimony in order to [justify] a rational belief. One admission has to be made, that death did not come into the world by sin, namely the sin of Adam, and this sits inconveniently by the declaration of Saint Paul.Mrs. Ward wrote to thank me for the tone of my article. Her[pg 360]first intention was to make some reply in theNineteenth Centuryitself. It appears that —— advised her not to do it. But Knowles told me that he was labouring to bring her up to the scratch again. There, I said, you show the cloven foot; you want to keep theNineteenth Centurypot boiling.I own that your reasons for not being in England did not appear to me cogent, but it would be impertinent to make myself a judge of them. The worst of it was that you did not nameanydate. But I must assume that you are coming; and surely the time cannot now be far. Among other things, I want to speak with you about French novels, a subject on which there has for me been quite recently cast a most lurid light.Acton's letters in reply may have convinced Mr. Gladstone that there were depths in this supreme controversy that he had hardly sounded; and adversaria that he might have mocked from a professor of the school or schools of unbelief, he could not in his inner mind make light of, when coming from the pen of a catholic believer. Before and after the article onRobert Elsmereappeared, Acton, the student with his vast historic knowledge and his deep penetrating gaze, warned the impassioned critic of some historic point overstated or understated, some dangerous breach left all unguarded, some lack of nicety in definition. Acton's letters will one day see the light, and the reader may then know how candidly Mr. Gladstone was admonished as to the excess of his description of the moral action of Christianity; as to the risk of sending modern questions to ancient answers, for the apologists of an age can only meet the difficulties of their age; that there are leaps and bounds in the history of thought; how well did Newman once say that in theology you have to meet questions that the Fathers could hardly have been made to understand; how if you go to St. Thomas or Leibnitz or Paley for rescue from Hegel or Haeckel your apologetics will be a record of disaster. You insist broadly, says Acton, on belief in the divine nature of Christ as the soul, substance, and creative force of Christian religion; you assign to it very much of the good the church has done; all this with little or no qualification or drawback from the other side:—[pg 361]Enter Martineau or Stephen or —— (unattached), and loq.:—Is this the final judgment of the chief of liberals? the pontiff of a church whose fathers are the later Milton and the later Penn, Locke, Bayle, Toland, Franklin, Turgot, Adam Smith, Washington, Jefferson, Bentham, Dugald Stewart, Romilly, Tocqueville, Channing, Macaulay, Mill? These men and others like them disbelieved that doctrine established freedom, and they undid the work of orthodox Christianity, they swept away that appalling edifice of intolerance, tyranny, cruelty, which believers in Christ built up to perpetuate their belief.The philosophy of liberal history, Acton proceeds, which has to acknowledge the invaluable services of early Christianity, feels the anti-liberal and anti-social action of later Christianity, before the rise of the sects that rejected, some of them the divinity of Christ; others, the institutions of the church erected upon it. Liberalism if it admits these things as indifferent, surrenders its ownraison d'être, and ceases to strive for an ethical cause. If the doctrine of Torquemada make us condone his morality, there can be no public right and no wrong, no political sin, no secular cause to die for. So it might be said that—You do not work really from the principle of liberalism, but from the cognate, though distinct principles of democracy, nationality, progress, etc. To some extent, I fear, you will estrange valued friends, not assuredly by any expression of theological belief, but by seeming to ignore the great central problem of Christian politics. If I had to put my own doubts, instead of the average liberal's, I should state the case in other words, but not altogether differently.218

To Lord Acton.Hawarden, Jan. 13, 1887.—It is with much pleasure that I read your estimate of Chamberlain. His character is remarkable, as are in a very high degree his talents. It is one of my common sayings that to me characters of the political class are the most mysterious of all I meet, so that I am obliged to travel the road of life surrounded by an immense number of judgments more or less in suspense, and getting on for practical purposes as well as I can.I have with a clear mind and conscience not only assented to but promoted the present conferences, and I had laboured in that sense long before Mr. Chamberlain made his speech at Birmingham. It will surprise as well as grieve me if they do harm; if indeed they do not do some little good. Large and final arrangements, it would be rash I think to expect.The tide is flowing, though perhaps not rapidly, in our favour. Without our lifting a finger, a crumbling process has begun in both the opposite parties.“In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength”is a blessed maxim, often applicable to temporals as well as spirituals. I have indeed one temptation to haste, namely, that the hour may come for me to say farewell and claim my retirement; but inasmuch as I remainin situfor the Irish question only, I cannot be so foolish as to allow myself to ruin by precipitancy my own purpose. Though I am writing a paper[pg 356]on the Irish question for Mr. Knowles, it is no trumpet-blast, but is meant to fill and turn to account a season of comparative quietude.The death of Iddesleigh has shocked and saddened us all. He was full of excellent qualities, but had not the backbone and strength of fibre necessary to restore the tone of a party demoralised by his former leader. In gentleness, temper, sacrifice of himself to the common purpose of his friends, knowledge, quickness of perception, general integrity of intention, freedom from personal aims, he was admirable.... I have been constantly struggling to vindicate a portion of my time for the pursuits I want to follow, but with very little success indeed. Some rudiments of Olympian religion have partially taken shape. I have a paper ready for Knowles probably in his March number on the Poseidon of Homer, a most curious and exotic personage.... Williams and Norgate got me the books I wanted, but alack for the time to read them! In addition to want of time, I have to deplore my slowness in reading, declining sight, and declining memory; all very serious affairs for one who has such singular reason to be thankful as to general health and strength.I wish I could acknowledge duly or pay even in part your unsparing, untiring kindness in the discharge of your engagements as“Cook.”Come early to England—and stay long. We will try what we can to bind you.

To Lord Acton.

Hawarden, Jan. 13, 1887.—It is with much pleasure that I read your estimate of Chamberlain. His character is remarkable, as are in a very high degree his talents. It is one of my common sayings that to me characters of the political class are the most mysterious of all I meet, so that I am obliged to travel the road of life surrounded by an immense number of judgments more or less in suspense, and getting on for practical purposes as well as I can.

I have with a clear mind and conscience not only assented to but promoted the present conferences, and I had laboured in that sense long before Mr. Chamberlain made his speech at Birmingham. It will surprise as well as grieve me if they do harm; if indeed they do not do some little good. Large and final arrangements, it would be rash I think to expect.

The tide is flowing, though perhaps not rapidly, in our favour. Without our lifting a finger, a crumbling process has begun in both the opposite parties.“In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength”is a blessed maxim, often applicable to temporals as well as spirituals. I have indeed one temptation to haste, namely, that the hour may come for me to say farewell and claim my retirement; but inasmuch as I remainin situfor the Irish question only, I cannot be so foolish as to allow myself to ruin by precipitancy my own purpose. Though I am writing a paper[pg 356]on the Irish question for Mr. Knowles, it is no trumpet-blast, but is meant to fill and turn to account a season of comparative quietude.

The death of Iddesleigh has shocked and saddened us all. He was full of excellent qualities, but had not the backbone and strength of fibre necessary to restore the tone of a party demoralised by his former leader. In gentleness, temper, sacrifice of himself to the common purpose of his friends, knowledge, quickness of perception, general integrity of intention, freedom from personal aims, he was admirable.... I have been constantly struggling to vindicate a portion of my time for the pursuits I want to follow, but with very little success indeed. Some rudiments of Olympian religion have partially taken shape. I have a paper ready for Knowles probably in his March number on the Poseidon of Homer, a most curious and exotic personage.... Williams and Norgate got me the books I wanted, but alack for the time to read them! In addition to want of time, I have to deplore my slowness in reading, declining sight, and declining memory; all very serious affairs for one who has such singular reason to be thankful as to general health and strength.

I wish I could acknowledge duly or pay even in part your unsparing, untiring kindness in the discharge of your engagements as“Cook.”Come early to England—and stay long. We will try what we can to bind you.

A few months later, he added to his multifarious exercises in criticism and controversy, a performance that attracted especial attention.217“Mamma and I,”he wrote to Mrs. Drew,“are each of us still separately engaged in a death-grapple withRobert Elsmere. I complained of some of the novels you gave me to read as too stiff, but they are nothing to this. It is wholly out of the common order. At present I regard with doubt and dread the idea of doing anything on it, but cannot yet be sure whether your observations will be verified or not. In any case it is a tremendous book.”And on April 1 (1888), he wrote,“By hard work I have finished and am correcting my article onRobert Elsmere.[pg 357]It is rather stiff work. I have had two letters from her. She is much to be liked personally, but is a fruit, I think, of what must be called Arnoldism.”

To Lord Acton.Aston Clinton, Tring, Easter Day, April 1, '88.—I do not like to let too long a time elapse without some note of intercourse, even though that season approaches which brings you back to the shores of your country. Were you here I should have much to say on many things; but I will now speak, or first speak, of what is uppermost, and would, if a mind is like a portmanteau, be taken or tumble out first.You perhaps have not heard ofRobert Elsmere, for I find without surprise, that it makes its way slowly into public notice. It is not far from twice the length of an ordinary novel; and the labour and effort of reading it all, I should say, sixfold; while one could no more stop in it than in reading Thucydides. The idea of the book, perhaps of the writer, appears to be a movement of retreat from Christianity upon Theism: a Theism with a Christ glorified, always in the human sense, but beyond the ordinary measure. It is worked out through the medium of a being—one ought to say a character, but I withhold the word, for there is no sufficient substratum of character to uphold the qualities—gifted with much intellectual subtlety and readiness, and almost every conceivable moral excellence. He finds vent in an energetic attempt to carry his new gospel among the skilled artisans of London, whom the writer apparently considers as supplying thenormfor all right human judgment. He has extraordinary success, establishes a new church under the name of the new Christian brotherhood, kills himself with overwork, but leaves his project flourishing in a certain“Elgood Street.”It is in fact (like the Salvation Army), a new Kirche der Zukunft.I am always inclined to consider this Theism as among the least defensible of the positions alternative to Christianity. Robert Elsmere who has been a parish clergyman, is upset entirely, as it appears, by the difficulty of accepting miracles, and by the suggestion that the existing Christianity grew up in an age specially predisposed to them.[pg 358]I want as usual to betray you into helping the lame dog over the stile; and I should like to know whether you would think me violently wrong in holding that the period of the Advent was a period when the appetite for, or disposition to, the supernatural was declining and decaying; that in the region of human thought, speculation was strong and scepticism advancing; that if our Lord were a mere man, armed only with human means, His whereabouts was in this and many other ways misplaced by Providence; that the gospels and the New Testament must have much else besides miracle torn out of them, in order to get us down to thecaput mortuumof Elgood Street. This very remarkable work is in effect identical with the poor, thin, ineffectual production published with some arrogance by the Duke of Somerset, which found a quack remedy for difficulties in what he considered the impregnable citadel of belief in God.Knowles has brought this book before me, and being as strong as it is strange, it cannot perish still-born. I am tossed about with doubt as to writing upon it.To Lord Acton.Oxford, April 8, '88.—I am grateful for your most interesting letter, which contains very valuable warnings. On the other side is copied what I have written on two of the points raised by the book. Have I said too much of the Academy? I have spoken only of the first century. You refer to (apparently) about 250a.d.as a time of great progress? But I was astonished on first reading the census of Christian clergy in Rometemp.St. Cyprian, it was so slender. I am not certain, but does not Beugnot estimate the Christians, before Constantine's conversion, in the west at one-tenth of the population? Mrs. T. Arnold died yesterday here. Mrs. Ward had been summoned and she is coming to see me this evening. It is a very singular phase of the controversy which she has opened. When do yourepatriate?I am afraid that my kindness to the Positivists amounts only to a comparative approval of their not dropping the great human tradition out of view;plusa very high appreciation of the personal qualities of our friend ——.[pg 359]To Lord Acton.Dollis Hill, May 13, '88.—Your last letter was one of extreme interest. It raised such a multitude of points, after your perusal of my article on R. Elsmere, as to stimulate in the highest degree my curiosity to know how far you would carry into propositions, the ideas which you for the most part obliquely put forward. I gave the letter to Mary, who paid us a flying visit in London, that she might take it to Hawarden for full digestion. For myself I feed upon the hope that when (when ?) you come back to England we may go over the points, and I may reap further benefits from your knowledge. I will not now attempt anything of the kind. But I will say this generally, that I am not so much oppressed as you appear to be, with the notion that great difficulties have been imported by the researches of scientists into the religious and theological argument. As respects cosmogony andgeogony, the Scripture has, I think, taken much benefit from them. Whatever be the date of the early books, Pentateuch or Hexateuch in their presentedition, the Assyriological investigations seem to me to have fortified and accredited their substance by producing similar traditions in variant forms inferior to the Mosaic forms, and tending to throw them back to a higher antiquity, a fountainhead nearer the source. Then there is the great chapter of the Dispersal: which Renan (I think) treats as exhibiting the marvellous genius (!) of the Jews. As to unbroken sequences in the physical order, they do not trouble me, because we have to do not with the natural but the moral order, and over this science, or as I call it natural science, does not wave her sceptre. It is no small matter, again (if so it be, as I suppose), that, after warring for a century against miracle as unsustained by experience, the assailants should now have to abandon that ground, stand only upon sequence, and controvert the great facts of the New Testament only by raising to an extravagant and unnatural height the demands made under the law of testimony in order to [justify] a rational belief. One admission has to be made, that death did not come into the world by sin, namely the sin of Adam, and this sits inconveniently by the declaration of Saint Paul.Mrs. Ward wrote to thank me for the tone of my article. Her[pg 360]first intention was to make some reply in theNineteenth Centuryitself. It appears that —— advised her not to do it. But Knowles told me that he was labouring to bring her up to the scratch again. There, I said, you show the cloven foot; you want to keep theNineteenth Centurypot boiling.I own that your reasons for not being in England did not appear to me cogent, but it would be impertinent to make myself a judge of them. The worst of it was that you did not nameanydate. But I must assume that you are coming; and surely the time cannot now be far. Among other things, I want to speak with you about French novels, a subject on which there has for me been quite recently cast a most lurid light.

To Lord Acton.

Aston Clinton, Tring, Easter Day, April 1, '88.—I do not like to let too long a time elapse without some note of intercourse, even though that season approaches which brings you back to the shores of your country. Were you here I should have much to say on many things; but I will now speak, or first speak, of what is uppermost, and would, if a mind is like a portmanteau, be taken or tumble out first.

You perhaps have not heard ofRobert Elsmere, for I find without surprise, that it makes its way slowly into public notice. It is not far from twice the length of an ordinary novel; and the labour and effort of reading it all, I should say, sixfold; while one could no more stop in it than in reading Thucydides. The idea of the book, perhaps of the writer, appears to be a movement of retreat from Christianity upon Theism: a Theism with a Christ glorified, always in the human sense, but beyond the ordinary measure. It is worked out through the medium of a being—one ought to say a character, but I withhold the word, for there is no sufficient substratum of character to uphold the qualities—gifted with much intellectual subtlety and readiness, and almost every conceivable moral excellence. He finds vent in an energetic attempt to carry his new gospel among the skilled artisans of London, whom the writer apparently considers as supplying thenormfor all right human judgment. He has extraordinary success, establishes a new church under the name of the new Christian brotherhood, kills himself with overwork, but leaves his project flourishing in a certain“Elgood Street.”It is in fact (like the Salvation Army), a new Kirche der Zukunft.

I am always inclined to consider this Theism as among the least defensible of the positions alternative to Christianity. Robert Elsmere who has been a parish clergyman, is upset entirely, as it appears, by the difficulty of accepting miracles, and by the suggestion that the existing Christianity grew up in an age specially predisposed to them.

I want as usual to betray you into helping the lame dog over the stile; and I should like to know whether you would think me violently wrong in holding that the period of the Advent was a period when the appetite for, or disposition to, the supernatural was declining and decaying; that in the region of human thought, speculation was strong and scepticism advancing; that if our Lord were a mere man, armed only with human means, His whereabouts was in this and many other ways misplaced by Providence; that the gospels and the New Testament must have much else besides miracle torn out of them, in order to get us down to thecaput mortuumof Elgood Street. This very remarkable work is in effect identical with the poor, thin, ineffectual production published with some arrogance by the Duke of Somerset, which found a quack remedy for difficulties in what he considered the impregnable citadel of belief in God.

Knowles has brought this book before me, and being as strong as it is strange, it cannot perish still-born. I am tossed about with doubt as to writing upon it.

To Lord Acton.

Oxford, April 8, '88.—I am grateful for your most interesting letter, which contains very valuable warnings. On the other side is copied what I have written on two of the points raised by the book. Have I said too much of the Academy? I have spoken only of the first century. You refer to (apparently) about 250a.d.as a time of great progress? But I was astonished on first reading the census of Christian clergy in Rometemp.St. Cyprian, it was so slender. I am not certain, but does not Beugnot estimate the Christians, before Constantine's conversion, in the west at one-tenth of the population? Mrs. T. Arnold died yesterday here. Mrs. Ward had been summoned and she is coming to see me this evening. It is a very singular phase of the controversy which she has opened. When do yourepatriate?

I am afraid that my kindness to the Positivists amounts only to a comparative approval of their not dropping the great human tradition out of view;plusa very high appreciation of the personal qualities of our friend ——.

To Lord Acton.

Dollis Hill, May 13, '88.—Your last letter was one of extreme interest. It raised such a multitude of points, after your perusal of my article on R. Elsmere, as to stimulate in the highest degree my curiosity to know how far you would carry into propositions, the ideas which you for the most part obliquely put forward. I gave the letter to Mary, who paid us a flying visit in London, that she might take it to Hawarden for full digestion. For myself I feed upon the hope that when (when ?) you come back to England we may go over the points, and I may reap further benefits from your knowledge. I will not now attempt anything of the kind. But I will say this generally, that I am not so much oppressed as you appear to be, with the notion that great difficulties have been imported by the researches of scientists into the religious and theological argument. As respects cosmogony andgeogony, the Scripture has, I think, taken much benefit from them. Whatever be the date of the early books, Pentateuch or Hexateuch in their presentedition, the Assyriological investigations seem to me to have fortified and accredited their substance by producing similar traditions in variant forms inferior to the Mosaic forms, and tending to throw them back to a higher antiquity, a fountainhead nearer the source. Then there is the great chapter of the Dispersal: which Renan (I think) treats as exhibiting the marvellous genius (!) of the Jews. As to unbroken sequences in the physical order, they do not trouble me, because we have to do not with the natural but the moral order, and over this science, or as I call it natural science, does not wave her sceptre. It is no small matter, again (if so it be, as I suppose), that, after warring for a century against miracle as unsustained by experience, the assailants should now have to abandon that ground, stand only upon sequence, and controvert the great facts of the New Testament only by raising to an extravagant and unnatural height the demands made under the law of testimony in order to [justify] a rational belief. One admission has to be made, that death did not come into the world by sin, namely the sin of Adam, and this sits inconveniently by the declaration of Saint Paul.

Mrs. Ward wrote to thank me for the tone of my article. Her[pg 360]first intention was to make some reply in theNineteenth Centuryitself. It appears that —— advised her not to do it. But Knowles told me that he was labouring to bring her up to the scratch again. There, I said, you show the cloven foot; you want to keep theNineteenth Centurypot boiling.

I own that your reasons for not being in England did not appear to me cogent, but it would be impertinent to make myself a judge of them. The worst of it was that you did not nameanydate. But I must assume that you are coming; and surely the time cannot now be far. Among other things, I want to speak with you about French novels, a subject on which there has for me been quite recently cast a most lurid light.

Acton's letters in reply may have convinced Mr. Gladstone that there were depths in this supreme controversy that he had hardly sounded; and adversaria that he might have mocked from a professor of the school or schools of unbelief, he could not in his inner mind make light of, when coming from the pen of a catholic believer. Before and after the article onRobert Elsmereappeared, Acton, the student with his vast historic knowledge and his deep penetrating gaze, warned the impassioned critic of some historic point overstated or understated, some dangerous breach left all unguarded, some lack of nicety in definition. Acton's letters will one day see the light, and the reader may then know how candidly Mr. Gladstone was admonished as to the excess of his description of the moral action of Christianity; as to the risk of sending modern questions to ancient answers, for the apologists of an age can only meet the difficulties of their age; that there are leaps and bounds in the history of thought; how well did Newman once say that in theology you have to meet questions that the Fathers could hardly have been made to understand; how if you go to St. Thomas or Leibnitz or Paley for rescue from Hegel or Haeckel your apologetics will be a record of disaster. You insist broadly, says Acton, on belief in the divine nature of Christ as the soul, substance, and creative force of Christian religion; you assign to it very much of the good the church has done; all this with little or no qualification or drawback from the other side:—

Enter Martineau or Stephen or —— (unattached), and loq.:—Is this the final judgment of the chief of liberals? the pontiff of a church whose fathers are the later Milton and the later Penn, Locke, Bayle, Toland, Franklin, Turgot, Adam Smith, Washington, Jefferson, Bentham, Dugald Stewart, Romilly, Tocqueville, Channing, Macaulay, Mill? These men and others like them disbelieved that doctrine established freedom, and they undid the work of orthodox Christianity, they swept away that appalling edifice of intolerance, tyranny, cruelty, which believers in Christ built up to perpetuate their belief.

The philosophy of liberal history, Acton proceeds, which has to acknowledge the invaluable services of early Christianity, feels the anti-liberal and anti-social action of later Christianity, before the rise of the sects that rejected, some of them the divinity of Christ; others, the institutions of the church erected upon it. Liberalism if it admits these things as indifferent, surrenders its ownraison d'être, and ceases to strive for an ethical cause. If the doctrine of Torquemada make us condone his morality, there can be no public right and no wrong, no political sin, no secular cause to die for. So it might be said that—

You do not work really from the principle of liberalism, but from the cognate, though distinct principles of democracy, nationality, progress, etc. To some extent, I fear, you will estrange valued friends, not assuredly by any expression of theological belief, but by seeming to ignore the great central problem of Christian politics. If I had to put my own doubts, instead of the average liberal's, I should state the case in other words, but not altogether differently.218

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