The best form of government is that which doth actuate and dispose
every part and member of a state to the common good. If, instead
of concord and interchange of support, one part seeks to uphold an
old form of government, and the other part introduce a new, they
will miserably consume one and other. Histories are full of the
calamities of entire states and nations in such cases. It is,
nevertheless, equally true that time must needs bring about some
alterations.... Therefore have those commonwealths been ever the
most durable and perpetual which have often formed and recomposed
themselves according to their first institution and
ordinance.—PYM.
I
A rapid and extraordinary change began to take place in Mr. Gladstone’s
position after the year 1863. With this was associated an internal
development of his political ideas and an expansion of social feeling,
still more remarkable and interesting. As we have seen, he reckoned that a
little earlier than this he had reached his lowest point in public
estimation. He had now been more than thirty years in parliament. He had
sat in three cabinets, each of a different colour and different
connections from the other two. It was not until he had seen half a
century of life on our planet, and more than quarter of a century of life
in the House of Commons, that it was at all certain whether he would be
conservative or liberal, to what species of either genus he would attach
himself, or whether there might not from his progressive transmutations be
evolved some variety wholly new.
I have already given his picture of the Palmerston cabinet as a
kaleidoscope, and the same simile would be no bad account of his own
relation to the political groups and parties around him. The Manchester
men and the young radicals from the West Riding of Yorkshire were his
ardent adherents when he preached economy and peace, but they were chilled
to the core by his neutrality or worse upon the life and death struggle
across the Atlantic. His bold and confident finance was doubted by the
whigs, and disliked by the tories. But then the tories, apart from their
wiser leader, were delighted by his friendly words about the Confederates,
and the whigs were delighted with his unflagging zeal for the deliverance
of Italy. Only, zeal for the deliverance of Italy lost him the friendship
of those children of the Holy Father who came from Ireland. Then again the
City was not easy at the flash of activity and enterprise at the
exchequer, and the money-changers did not know what disturbance this
intrepid genius might bring into the traffic of their tables. On the other
hand, the manufacturers and the merchants of the midlands and the north
adored a chancellor whose budgets were associated with expanding trade and
a prosperity that advanced by leaps and bounds. The nonconformists were
attracted by his personal piety, though repelled by its ecclesiastical
apparel. The high churchmen doubtless knew him for their own, yet even
they resented his confederacy with an erastian and a latitudinarian like
John Russell, or a Gallio like Lord Palmerston, who distributed mitres and
crown benefices at the ultra-evangelical bidding of Lord Shaftesbury. To
borrow a figure from a fine observer of those days,—the political
molecules were incessantly forming and re-forming themselves into shifting
aggregates, now attracted, now repelled by his central force; now the
nucleus of an organised party, then resolved again in loose and distant
satellites.
The great families still held ostensibly the predominance in the liberal
party which they had earned by their stout and persistent fidelity to
parliamentary reform. Their days of leadership, however, were drawing
towards an end, though the process has not been rapid. They produced some
good administrators, but nobody with the gifts of freshness and political
genius. The three originating statesmen of that era, after all, were
Cobden, Gladstone, Disraeli, none of them (M35) born in the purple of the
directing class. A Yorkshire member, destined to a position of prominence,
entered the House in 1861, and after he had been there a couple of years
he wrote to his wife, that “the want of the liberal party of a new man was
great, and felt to be great; the old whig leaders were worn out; there
were no new whigs; Cobden and Bright were impracticable and un-English,
and there were hardly any hopeful radicals. There was a great prize of
power and influence to be aimed at.”(95)
This parliamentary situation was the least part of it. No man could guide
the new advance, now so evidently approaching, unless he clearly united
fervour and capacity for practical improvements in government to broad and
glowing sympathies, alike with the needs and the elemental instincts of
the labouring mass. Mr. Gladstone offered that wonderful combination. “If
ever there was a statesman,” said Mill, about this time, “in whom the
spirit of improvement is incarnate, and in whose career as a minister the
characteristic feature has been to seek out things that require or admit
of improvement, instead of waiting to be pressed or driven to do them, Mr.
Gladstone deserves that signal honour.” Then his point of view was lofty;
he was keenly alive to the moving forces of the hour; his horizons were
wide; he was always amply founded in facts; he had generous hopes for
mankind; his oratory seized vast popular audiences, because it was the
expression of a glowing heart and a powerful brain. All this made him a
demagogue in the same high sense in which Pericles, Demosthenes, John Pym,
Patrick Henry were demagogues.
It is easy to see some at any rate of the influences that were bringing
Mr. Gladstone decisively into harmony with the movement of liberal
opinions, now gradually spreading over Great Britain. The resurrection of
Italy could only be vindicated on principles of liberty and the right of a
nation to choose its own rulers. The peers and the ten-pound householders
who held power in England were no Bourbon tyrants; but just as in 1830 the
overthrow of the Bourbon line in France was followed by the Reform bill
here, so the Italian revolution of 1860 gave new vitality to the popular
side in England. Another convulsion, far away from our own shores, was
still more directly potent alike in quickening popular feeling, and by a
strange paradox in creating as a great popular leader the very statesman
who had failed to understand it. It was impossible that a man so vigilant
and so impressionable as Mr. Gladstone was, should escape the influence of
the American war. Though too late to affect his judgment on the issues of
the war, he discerned after the event how, in his own language, the wide
participation of the people in the choice of their governors, by giving
force and expression to the national will in the United States, enabled
the governors thus freely chosen to marshal a power and develop an amount
of energy in the execution of that will, such as probably have never been
displayed in an equal time and among an equal number of men since the race
of mankind sprang into existence.(96) In this judgment of the American
civil war, he only shared in a general result of the salvation of the
Union; it reversed the fashionable habit of making American institutions
English bugbears, and gave a sweeping impulse to that steady but
resistless tide of liberal and popular sentiment that ended in the
parliamentary reform of 1867.
The lesson from the active resolution of America was confirmed by the
passive fortitude of Lancashire. “What are the questions,” Mr. Gladstone
asked in 1864, “that fit a man for the exercise of a privilege such as the
franchise? Self-command, self-control, respect for order, patience under
suffering, confidence in the law, regard for superiors; and when, I should
like to ask, were all these great qualities exhibited in a manner more
signal, even more illustrious, than in the conduct of the general body of
the operatives of Lancashire under the profound affliction of the winter
of 1862?” So on two sides the liberal channel was widened and deepened and
the speed of its currents accelerated.
Besides large common influences like these, Mr. Gladstone’s special
activities as a reformer brought him into contact with the conditions of
life and feeling among the workmen, (M36) and the closer he came to them,
the more did his humane and sympathetic temper draw him towards their
politics and the ranks of their party. Looking back, he said, upon the
years immediately succeeding the fall of Napoleon in 1815, he saw the
reign of ideas that did not at all belong to the old currents of English
history, but were a reaction against the excesses of the French
revolution. This reaction seemed to set up the doctrine that the masses
must be in standing antagonism to the law, and it resulted in severities
that well justified antagonism. “To-day the scene was transformed; the
fixed traditional sentiment of the working man had become one of
confidence in the law, in parliament, even in the executive government.”
In 1863 he was busy in the erection of the post office savings banks. A
deputation of a powerful trades union asked him to modify his rules so as
to enable them to place their funds in the hands of the government. A
generation before, such confidence would have been inconceivable. In
connection with the Government Annuities bill a deputation of workmen came
to him, and said, “If there had been any suspicion or disinclination
towards it on the part of the working classes, it was due to the
dissatisfaction with parliament as to suffrage.” When he replied with
something about the alleged indifference and apparent inaction of the
working classes as to suffrage, they said, “Since the abolition of the
corn laws we have given up political agitation; we felt we might place
confidence in parliament; instead of political action, we tried to spend
our evenings in the improvement of our minds.” This convinced him that it
was not either want of faith in parliament, or indifference to a vote,
that explained the absence of agitation.
II
The outcome of this stream of new perceptions and new feeling in his mind
was a declaration that suddenly electrified the political world. A
Yorkshire liberal one afternoon (May 11, 1864) brought in a bill for
lowering the franchise, and Mr. Gladstone spoke for the government. He
dwelt upon the facts, historic and political. The parliamentary history of
reform for the thirteen years, since Locke King’s motion in 1851 upset a
government, had been most unsatisfactory, and to set aside all the solemn
and formal declarations from 1851 down to the abortive Reform bill of 1860
would be a scandal. Then, was not the state of the actual case something
of a scandal, with less than one-tenth of the constituencies composed of
working men, and with less than one-fiftieth of the working men in
possession of the franchise? How could you defend a system that let in the
lower stratum of the middle class and shut out the upper stratum of the
working class? In face of such dispositions as the workmen manifested
towards law, parliament, and government, was it right that the present
system of almost entire exclusion should prevail? Then came the sentence
that, in that stagnant or floundering hour of parliamentary opinion,
marked a crisis. “I call upon the adversary to show cause, and _I venture
to say that every man who is not presumably incapacitated by some
consideration of personal unfitness or of political danger, is morally
entitled to come within the pale of the constitution_. Of course, in
giving utterance to such a proposition, I do not recede from the protest I
have previously made against sudden, or violent, or excessive, or
intoxicating change.”
He concluded in words that covered much ground, though when closely
scrutinised they left large loopholes. “It is well,” he said, “that we
should be suitably provided with armies and fleets and fortifications; it
is well, too, that all these should rest upon and be sustained, as they
ought to be, by a sound system of finance, and out of a revenue not wasted
by a careless parliament or by a profligate administration. But that which
is better and more weighty still is that hearts should be bound together
by a reasonable extension, at fitting times and among _selected_ portions
of the people, of every benefit and every privilege that can be justly
conferred upon them.”
The thunderbolt of a sentence about every man’s moral title to a vote
startled the House with an amazement, half delight and half consternation,
that broke forth in loud volleys of cheering and counter-cheering. It was
to little (M37) purpose that the orator in the next breath interposed his
qualifications. One of the fated words had been spoken that gather up
wandering forces of time and occasion, and precipitate new eras. A
conservative speaker instantly deplored the absence of the prime minister,
and the substitution in his stead of his “intractable chancellor of the
exchequer.” An important liberal speaker, with equal promptitude, pointed
out that one effect of the speech would be, in the first place, loss of
conservative support to the government, and, in the second place, a very
great gain to the health and vigour of the liberal party. Two whigs ran
off to tell Phillimore that Gladstone had said something that would make
his hair stand on end. Speculations began to hum and buzz whether the
oracular deliverance would not upset the government. In the press a
tremendous storm broke. Mr. Gladstone was accused of ministering aliments
to popular turbulence and vanity, of preaching the divine right of
multitudes, and of encouraging, minister of the crown though he was, a
sweeping and levelling democracy. They charged him with surveying mankind
in the abstract and suffrage in the abstract, and in that kingdom of
shadows discovering or constructing vast universal propositions about
man’s moral rights. Mr. Disraeli told him that he had revived the doctrine
of Tom Paine. The radicals were as jubilant as whigs and tories were
furious. They declared that the banner he had raised aloft was not what
the tories denounced as the standard of domestic revolution, but the long
lost flag of the liberal party. “There is not a statesman in England of
the very first rank,” said one newspaper, “who has dared to say as much,
and Mr. Gladstone, in saying it, has placed himself at the head of the
party that will succeed the present administration.” This was true, but in
the meantime the head of the existing administration was still a marvel of
physical vigour, and though at the moment he was disabled by gout,
somebody must have hurried to Cambridge House and told him the desperate
tidings. On the very instant he sent down a note of inquiry to Mr.
Gladstone, asking what he had really said. A brisk correspondence
followed, neither heated nor unfriendly.
In the morning Lord Palmerston had written him a premonitory note, not to
commit himself or the government to any particular figure of borough
franchise; that a six pound franchise had gone to the bottom; that if they
should ever have to bring in a reform bill, they ought to be free from
fresh pledges; that the workmen would swamp the classes above them; that
their influx would discourage the classes above from voting at all; and
that the workmen were under the control of trade unions directed by a
small number of agitators. All this was the good conservative common form
of the time. The speech itself, when the prime minister came to see it,
proved no sedative.
_Lord Palmerston to Mr. Gladstone._
_May 12, 1864._—I have read your speech, and I must frankly say,
with much regret; as there is little in it that I can agree with,
and much from which I differ. You lay down broadly the doctrine of
universal suffrage which I can never accept. I entirely deny that
every sane and not disqualified man has a moral right to a vote. I
use that expression instead of “the pale of the constitution,”
because I hold that all who enjoy the security and civil rights
which the constitution provides are within its pale. What every
man and woman too has a right to, is to be well governed and under
just laws, and they who propose a change ought to show that the
present organisation does not accomplish those objects....
You did not pronounce an opinion in favour of a specified
franchise; but is there any essential difference between naming a
six pound franchise and naming the additional numbers which a six
pound franchise was calculated to admit? I am not going to perform
the duty which Whiteside assigned to me of answering your speech,
but, if you will not take it amiss, I would say, that it was more
like the sort of speech with which Bright would have introduced
the Reform bill which he would like to propose, than the sort of
speech which might have been expected from the treasury bench in
the present state of things. Your speech may win Lancashire for
you, though that is doubtful, but I fear it will tend to lose
England for you.
_Mr. Gladstone to Lord Palmerston._
_11 Carlton House Terrace, May 13, 1864._—It is not easy to take
ill anything that proceeds from you; and, moreover, frankness
between all men, and especially between those who are politically
associated, removes, as I believe, many more difficulties than it
causes. In this spirit I will endeavour to write. I agree in your
denial “that every sane and not disqualified man has a moral right
to vote.” But I am at a loss to know how, as you have read my
speech, you can ascribe this opinion to me. My declaration was,
taken generally, that all persons ought to be admitted to the
franchise, who can be admitted to it with safety.... I hold by
this proposition. It seems to me neither strange, nor new, nor
extreme. It requires, I admit, to be construed; but I contend that
the interpretation is amply given in the speech, where I have
declared (for example) that the admission I desire is of the same
character or rather extent as was proposed in 1860.... I have
never exhorted the working man to agitate for the franchise, and I
am at a loss to conceive what report of my speech can have been
construed by you in such a sense.
Having said this much to bring down to its true limits the
difference between us, I do not deny that difference. I regret it,
and I should regret it much more if it were likely to have (at
least as far as I can see) an early bearing upon practice. In the
cabinet I argued as strongly as I could against the withdrawal of
the bill in 1860, and in favour of taking the opinion of the House
of Commons upon that bill. I think the party which supports your
government has suffered, and is suffering, and will much more
seriously suffer, from the part which as a party it has played
within these recent years, in regard to the franchise. I have no
desire to press the question forward. I hope no government will
ever again take it up except with the full knowledge of its own
mind and a reasonable probability of carrying it. But such
influence as argument and statement without profession of
political intentions can exercise upon the public mind, I heartily
desire to see exercised in favour of extension of the
franchise....
On the following day Lord Palmerston wrote to him, “I have no doubt that
you have yourself heard a great deal about the bad effect of your speech,
but I can assure you that I hear from many quarters the unfavourable
impression it has produced even upon many of the liberal party, and upon
all persons who value the maintenance of our institutions.”
To others, Mr. Gladstone wrote in less formal style, for instance to an
eminent nonconformist minister: “May 14. I have unwarily, it seems, set
the Thames on fire. But I have great hopes that the Thames will, on
reflection perceive that he had no business or title to catch the flame,
and will revert to his ordinary temperature accordingly.” And to his
brother Robertson, he writes from Brighton, three days later:—
Many thanks for all you say respecting my speech on the franchise
bill. I have been astounded to find it the cause or occasion of
such a row. It would have been quite as intelligible to me had
people said, “Under the exceptions of personal unfitness and
political danger you exclude or may exclude almost everybody, and
you reduce your declaration to a shadow.”
In the diary he says: “_May 11._—Spoke on the franchise bill. Some
sensation. It appears to me that it was due less to me, than to the change
in the hearers and in the public mind from the professions at least if not
the principles of 1859.” Much against Lord Palmerston’s wish, the speech
was published, with a short preface that even staunch friends like
Phillimore found obscure and not well written.
(M38) An address, significant of the general feeling in the unenfranchised
classes, was presented to him from the workmen of York a month after his
speech in parliament. They recalled his services to free trade when he
stood by the side of Peel; his budget of 1860; his conspicuous and
honourable share in abolishing the taxes on knowledge. “We have marked,”
they said, “your manifestations of sympathy with the down-trodden and
oppressed of every clime. You have advanced the cause of freedom in
foreign lands by the power and courage with which you have assailed and
exposed the misdeeds and cruelties of continental tyrants. To the
provident operative you have by your Post Office Savings Bank bill given
security for his small savings, and your Government Annuities bill of this
session is a measure which will stimulate the people to greater thrift and
forethought. These acts, together with your speeches on the last named,
and on the Borough Franchise bill, make up a life that commands our
lasting gratitude.” Such was the new popular estimate of him. In framing
his reply to this address Mr. Gladstone did his best to discourage the
repetition of like performances from other places; he submitted the draft
to Lord Palmerston, and followed his advice in omitting certain portions
of it. It was reduced to the conventional type of such acknowledgment.
III
In the autumn of 1864 Mr. Gladstone made a series of speeches in his
native county, which again showed the sincerity and the simplicity of his
solicitude for the masses of his countrymen. The sentiment is common. Mr.
Disraeli and the Young Englanders had tried to inscribe it upon a party
banner twenty years before. But Mr. Gladstone had given proof that he knew
how to embody sentiment in acts of parliament, and he associated it with
the broadest ideas of citizenship and policy. These speeches were not a
manifesto or a programme; they were a survey of the principles of the
statesmanship that befitted the period.
At Bolton (Oct. 11) he discoursed to audiences of the working class upon
the progress of thirty years, with such freshness of spirit as awoke
energetic hopes of the progress for the thirty years that were to follow.
The next day he opened a park with words from the heart about the modern
sense of the beauties of nature. The Greeks, he said, however much beauty
they might have discerned in nature, had no sympathy with the delight in
detached natural objects—a tree, or a stream, or a hill—which was so often
part of the common life of the poorest Englishman. Even a century or less
ago “communion with nature” would have sounded an affected and unnatural
phrase. Now it was a sensible part of the life of the working classes.
Then came moralising, at that date less trite than it has since become,
about the social ties that ought to mark the relations between master and
workman.
(M39) The same night at a banquet in Liverpool, and two days later at
Manchester, he advanced to high imperial ground. He told them how, after
an experience now becoming long, the one standing pain to the political
man in England is a sense of the inequality of his best exertions to the
arduous duty of government and legislation. England had undertaken
responsibilities of empire such as never before lay on the shoulders or
the minds of men. We governed distant millions many times outnumbering
ourselves. We were responsible for the welfare of forty or forty-five
separate states. Again, what other nation was charged with the same
responsibility in the exercise of its moral influence abroad, in the
example it is called upon to set, in the sympathy it must feel with the
cause of right and justice and constitutional freedom wherever that cause
is at issue? As for our fellow subjects abroad, we had given them
practical freedom. It was our duty to abstain as far as may be from
interference with their affairs, to afford them the shelter and protection
of the empire, and at the same time to impress upon them that there is no
grosser mistake in politics than to suppose you can separate the blessings
and benefits of freedom from its burdens. In other words, the colonies
should pay their own way, and if the old dream of making their interests
subservient to those of the mother country had passed away, it was just as
little reasonable that the mother country should bear charges that in
equity belonged to them, and all the more if the colonies set up against
the industry and productions of England the mischiefs and obstructions of
an exploded protective system. On foreign policy he enforced the
principles that, after all, had given to Europe forty years of peace, and
to England forty years of diplomatic authority and pre-eminence. “It is
impossible that to a country like England the affairs of foreign nations
can ever be indifferent. It is impossible that England, in my opinion,
ever should forswear the interest she must naturally feel in the cause of
truth, of justice, of order, and of good government.” The final word was
an admonition against “political lethargy.” For the first time, I think,
he put into the forefront the tormenting question that was to haunt him to
the end. “They could not look at Ireland,” he told them, “and say that the
state of feeling there was for the honour and the advantage of the united
kingdom.”
_Oct. 14, ’64._—So ended in peace an exhausting, flattering, I
hope not intoxicating circuit. God knows I have not courted them.
I hope I do not rest on them. I pray I may turn them to account
for good. It is, however, impossible not to love the people from
whom such manifestations come, as meet me in every quarter....
Somewhat haunted by dreams of halls, and lines of people, and
great assemblies.
It was observed of this Lancashire tour, by critics who hardly meant to
praise him, that he paid his hearers the high compliment of assuming that
they could both understand his arguments, and feel his appeal to their
moral sympathies. His speeches, men said, were in fact lay sermons of a
high order, as skilfully composed, as accurately expressed, as if they
were meant for the House of Commons. This was singularly true, and what an
eulogy it was for our modern British democracy that the man whom they made
their first great hero was an orator of such a school. Lord Lyttelton, his
brother-in-law, informed him of the alarm and odium that his new line of
policy was raising. Mr. Gladstone (April, 1865) replied: “After all, you
are a peer, and Peel used to say, speaking of his peer colleagues, that
they were beings of a different order. Please to recollect that we have
got to govern millions of hard hands; that it must be done by force,
fraud, or good will; that the latter has been tried and is answering; that
none have profited more by this change of system since the corn law and
the Six Acts, than those who complain of it. As to their misliking me, I
have no fault to find with them for that. It is the common lot in similar
circumstances, and the very things that I have done or omitted doing from
my extreme and almost irrational reluctance to part company with them,
become an aggravation when the parting is accomplished.” “Gladstone, I
think,” says Bishop Wilberforce (Dec. 7), “is certainly gaining power. You
hear now almost every one say he must be the future premier, and such
sayings tend greatly to accomplish themselves.”
IV
(M40) It was about this time that Mr. Gladstone first found himself
drawing to relations with the protestant dissenters, that were destined to
grow closer as years went on. These relations had no small share in the
extension of his public power; perhaps, too, no small share in the more
abiding work upon the dissenters themselves, of enlarging what was narrow,
softening what was hard and bitter, and promoting a healing union where
the existence of a church establishment turned ecclesiastical differences
into lines of social division. He had alarmed his friends by his action on
a measure (April 15, 1863) for remedying an old grievance about the burial
of dissenters. Having served on a select committee appointed in the rather
quixotic hope that a solution of the difficulty might be found by the
somewhat unparliamentary means of “friendly conversation among candid and
impartial men,” he had convinced himself that there was a wrong to be set
right, and he voted and spoke accordingly. “It will most rudely shake his
Oxford seat,” says Phillimore. The peril there was becoming daily more
apparent. Then in 1864 and on later occasions he met leading nonconformist
clergy at the house of Mr. Newman Hall—such men as Binney, Allon, Edward
White, Baldwin Brown, Henry Reynolds, and that most admirable friend,
citizen, and man, R.W. Dale, so well known as Dale of Birmingham. Their
general attitude was described by Mr. Newman Hall as this: they hoped for
the ultimate recognition of the free church theory, and meditated no
political action to bring it about; they looked for it to come as the
result of influence within the church of England, not of efforts from
without. “Many dissenters,” one of them told him (Nov. 20, 1864), “would
enter the church whatever their theory about establishment, if such slight
modifications were made as would allow them to do so
conscientiously—holding the essentials of the faith far more soundly than
many within the established church.” Another regretted, after one of these
gatherings, that they never got to the core of the subject, “namely that
there run through the prayer-book from beginning to end ideas that are not
accepted by numbers who subscribe, and which cannot _all_ be admitted by
any one.”
All this once more brought Mr. Gladstone into a curious position. Just as
at Oxford he had in 1847 been the common hope of ultra-clericals on one
hand and ultra-liberals on the other, so now he was the common hope of the
two antagonistic schools of religious comprehension—the right, who looked
towards the formularies, system, discipline, and tradition either of the
Orthodox church or the Latin, and the left, who sought reunion on the
basis of puritanism with a leaven of modern criticism. Always the devoted
friend of Dr. Pusey and his school, he was gradually welcomed as ally and
political leader by men like Dale and Allon, the independents, and
Spurgeon, the baptist, on the broad ground that it was possible for all
good men to hold, amid their differences about church government, the more
vital sympathies and charities of their common profession. They even
sounded him on one occasion about laying the foundation stone of one of
their chapels. The broad result of such intercourse of the nonconformist
leaders with this powerful and generous mind, enriched by historic
knowledge and tradition, strengthened by high political responsibility,
deepened by meditations long, strenuous, and systematic, was indeed
remarkable. Dr. Allon expressed it, with admirable point, in a letter to
him some fourteen years after our present date (April 15, 1878):—
The kind of intercourse that you have kindly permitted with
nonconformists, has helped more consciously to identify them with
movements of national life, and to diminish the stern feeling of
almost defiant witness-bearing that was strong a generation or two
ago. It is something gained if ecclesiastical and political
differences can he debated within a common circle of social
confidence and identity.... Their confidence in you has made them
amenable to your lead in respect of methods and movements needing
the guidance of political insight and experience.
V
A man’s mind seldom moves forward towards light and freedom on a single
line, and in Mr. Gladstone’s case the same impulses that made him tolerant
of formal differences as to church government led slowly to a still wider
liberality in respect of far deeper differences. Readers may remember the
shock with which in his youth he found that one person or another was a
Unitarian. To Mr. Darbishire, a member of the Unitarian body who was for
many years his friend, he wrote about some address of James Martineau’s
(Dec. 21, 1862):—
From, time to time I have read works of Mr. Martineau’s, or works
that I have taken for his, with great admiration, with warm
respect for the writer, and moreover, with a great deal of
sympathy. I should greatly like to make his acquaintance. But
attached as I am to the old Christian dogma, and believing it as I
do, or rather believing the Person whom it sets forth, to be the
real fountain of all the gifts and graces that are largely strewn
over society, and in which Mr. Martineau himself seems so amply to
share, I fear I am separated from him in the order of ideas by an
interval that must be called a gulf. My conviction is that the old
creeds have been, and are to be, the channel by which the
Christian religion is made a reality even for many who do not hold
it, and I think that when we leave them we shall leave them not
for something better, but something worse. Hence you will not be
surprised that I regard some of Mr. Martineau’s propositions as
unhistorical and untrue.
And to the same gentleman a year or two later (Jan. 2, 1865):—
I am sorry to say I have not yet been able to read Mr. Martineau’s
sermon, which I mean to do with care. I am, as you know, one
altogether attached to dogma, which I believe to be the skeleton
that carries the flesh, the blood, the life of the blessed thing
we call the Christian religion. But I do not believe that God’s
tender mercies are restricted to a small portion of the human
family. I dare not be responsible for Dr. Newman, nor would he
thank me; but I hope he does not so believe, and this the more
because I have lately been reading Dr. Manning’s letter to Dr.
Pusey; and, though Dr. Manning is far more exaggerated in his
religion than Dr. Newman, and seems to me almost to caricature it,
yet I think even he has by no means that limited view of the
mercies of God.
I have no mental difficulty in reconciling a belief in the Church,
and what may be called the high Christian doctrine, with that
comforting persuasion that those who do not receive the greatest
blessings (and each man must believe his religion to be greatest)
are notwithstanding the partakers, each in his measure, of other
gifts, and will be treated according to their use of them. I admit
there are schools of Christians who think otherwise. I was myself
brought up to think otherwise, and to believe that salvation
depended absolutely upon the reception of a particular and a very
narrow creed. But long, long have I cast those weeds behind me.
Unbelief may in given conditions be a moral offence; and only as
such, only like other disobedience, and on like principles, can it
be punishable.
To not a few the decisive change in Mr. Gladstone’s mental history is the
change from the “very narrow creed” of his youth to the “high Christian
doctrine” of his after life. Still more will regard as the real transition
the attainment of this “comforting persuasion,” this last word of
benignity and tolerance. Here we are on the foundations. Tolerance is far
more than the abandonment of civil usurpations over conscience. It is a
lesson often needed quite as much in the hearts of a minority as of a
majority. Tolerance means reverence for all the possibilities of Truth; it
means acknowledgment that she dwells in diverse mansions, and wears
vesture of many colours, and speaks in strange tongues; it means frank
respect for freedom of indwelling conscience against mechanic forms,
official conventions, social force; it means the charity that is greater
than even faith and hope. Marked is the day for a man when he can truly
say, as Mr. Gladstone here said, “Long, long have I cast those weeds
behind me.”