His is not one of the cases, like Pascal, or Baxter, or Rutherford, or a hundred others, where a man's theological history is to the world, however it may seem to himself, the most important aspect of his career or character. This is not the place for an exploration of Mr. Gladstone's strictly theological history, nor is mine the hand by which such exploration could be attempted. In the sphere of dogmatic faith, apart from ecclesiastical politics and all the war of principles connected with such politics, Mr. Gladstone, by the time when he was thirty, had become a man of settled questions. Nor was he for his own part, with a remarkable exception in respect of one particular doctrine towards the end of his life, ever ready to re-open them. What is extraordinary in the career of this far-shining and dominant character of his age, is not a development of specific opinions on dogma, or discipline, or ordinance, on article or sacrament, but the fact that with a steadfast tread he marched along the high anglican road to the summits of that liberalism which it was the original object of the new anglicans to resist and overthrow.
The years from 1831 to 1840 Mr. Gladstone marked as an era of a marvellous uprising of religious energy throughout the land; it saved the church, he says. Not only in Oxford but in England he declares that party spirit within the church had fallen to a low ebb. Coming hurricanes were not foreseen. In Lord Liverpool's government patronage was considered to have been respectably dispensed, and church reform was never heard of.81 This dreamless composure was rudely broken. The repeal of the test and corporation Acts in 1828 first roused the church; and her sons rubbed their eyes when they beheld parliament bringing frankly to an end the odious monopoly of office under the crown, all corporate office, all magistracy, in men willing to take the communion at the altar of the privileged establishment. The next year a deadlier blow fell after a more embittered fight—the admission of Roman catholics to parliament and place. The Reform bill of 1832 followed. Even when half spent, the forces that had been gathering for many years in the direction of parliamentary reform, and had at last achieved more than one immense result, rolled heavily forward against the church. The opening of parliament and of close corporations was taken to involve an opening to correspond in the grandest and closest of all corporations. The resounding victory of the constitutional bill of 1832 was followed by a drastic handling of the church in Ireland, and by a proposal to divert a surplus of its property to purposes not ecclesiastical. A long and peculiarly unedifying crisis ensued. Stanley and Graham, two of the most eminent members of the reforming whig cabinet, on this proposal at once resigned. The Grey ministry was thus split in 1834, and the Peel ministry ejected in 1835, on the ground of the absolute inviolability of the property of the Irish church. The tide of reaction set slowly in. The shock in political party was in no long time followed by shock after shock in the church. As has happened on more than one occasion in our history, alarm for the church kindled the conservative temper in the nation. Or to put it in another way, that spontaneous attachment to the old order of things, with all its symbols, institutes, and deep associations, which the radical reformers had both affronted and ignored, made the church its rallying-point. The three years of tortuous proceedings on the famous Appropriation clause—proceedings that political philosophers declared to have disgraced this country in the face of Europe, and that were certainly an ignominy and a scandal in a party called reforming—were among the things that helped most to prepare the way for the fall of the whigs and the conservative triumph of 1841. Within ten years from the death of Canning the church transfixed the attention of the politician. The Duke of Wellington was hardly a wizard in political foresight, but he had often a good soldier's eye for things that stood straight up in front of him. 'The real question,' said the duke in 1838, 'that now divides the country and which truly divides the House of Commons, is church or no church. People talk of the war in Spain, and the Canada question. But all that is of little moment. The real question is church or no church.'
CHANGED POSITION OF THE CHURCH
The position of the tory party as seen by its powerful recruit was, when he entered public life, a state of hopeless defeat and discomfiture. 'But in my imagination,' wrote Mr. Gladstone, 'I cast over that party a prophetic mantle and assigned to it a mission distinctly religious as the champion in the state field of that divine truth which it was the office of the Christian ministry to uphold in the church. Neither then did I, nor now can I, see on what ground this inviolability could for a moment be maintained, except the belief that the state had such a mission.' He soon discovered how hard it is to adjust to the many angles of an English political party the seamless mantle of ecclesiastical predominance.
The changes in the political constitution in 1828, in 1829, and in 1832, carried with them a deliberate recognition that the church was not the nation; that it was not identical with the parliament who spoke for the nation; that it had no longer a title to compose the governing order; and—a more startling disclosure still to the minds of churchmen—that laws affecting the church would henceforth be made by men of all churches and creeds, or even men of none. This hateful circumstance it was that inevitably began in multitudes of devout and earnest minds to produce a revolution in their conception of a church, and a resurrection in curiously altered forms of that old ideal of Milton's austere and lofty school—the ideal of a purely spiritual association that should leave each man's soul and conscience free from 'secular chains' and 'hireling wolves.'
CHANGED SOCIAL CONDITIONS
Strange social conditions were emerging on every side. The factory system established itself on a startling scale. Huge aggregates of population collected with little regard to antique divisions of diocese and parish. Colonies over the sea extended in boundaries and numbers, and churchmen were zealous that these infant societies should be blessed by the same services, rites, ecclesiastical ordering and exhortation, as were believed to elevate and sanctify the parent community at home. The education of the people grew to be a formidable problem, the field of angry battles and campaigns that never end. Trade, markets, wages, hours, and all the gaunt and haggard economics of the labour question, added to the statesman's load. Pauperism was appalling. In a word, the need for social regeneration both material and moral was in the spirit of the time. Here were the hopes, vague, blind, unmeasured, formless, that had inspired the wild clamour for the bill, the whole bill, and nothing but the bill. The whig patricians carried away the prizes of great office, though the work had been done by men of a very different stamp. It was the utilitarian radicals who laid the foundations of social improvement in a reasoned creed. With admirable ability, perseverance, unselfishness, and public spirit, Bentham and his disciples had regenerated political opinion, and fought the battle against debt, pauperism, class-privilege, class-monopoly, abusive patronage, a monstrous criminal law, and all the host of sinister interests.82 As in every reforming age, men approached the work from two sides. Evangelical religion divides with rationalism the glory of more than one humanitarian struggle. Brougham, a more potent force than we now realise, plunged with the energy of a Titan into a thousand projects, all taking for granted that ignorance is the disease and useful knowledge the universal healer, all of them secular, all dealing with man from the outside, none touching imagination or the heart. March-of-mind became to many almost as wearisome a cry as wisdom-of-our-ancestors had been. According to some eager innovators, dogma and ceremony were to go, the fabrics to be turned into mechanics' institutes, the clergy to lecture on botany and statistics. The reaction against this dusty dominion of secularity kindled new life in rival schools. They insisted that if society is to be improved and civilisation saved, it can only be through improvement in the character of man, and character is moulded and inspired by more things than are dreamed of by societies for useful knowledge. The building up of the inward man in all his parts, faculties, and aspirations, was seen to be, what in every age it is, the problem of problems. This thought turned the eyes of many—of Mr. Gladstone first among them—to the church, and stirred an endeavour to make out of the church what Coleridge describes as the sustaining, correcting, befriending opposite of the world, the compensating counterforce to the inherent and inevitable defects of the state as a state. Such was the new movement of the time between 1835 and 1845.
'It is surprising,' said Proudhon, the trenchant genius of French socialism in 1840 and onwards,