MR. GLADSTONE'S PUBLICATIONS.
When George III. was King, two of his servants, as retired Ministers, met
one another at Bath. Said one of them, Lord Mendip, to the other, Lord
Camden, 'I hope you are well and in the enjoyment of a happy old age.'
Lord Camden replied in a querulous tone: 'Happy! How can a man be happy
who has survived all his passions and enjoyments?' 'Oh, my dear lord,'
was the reply of his old antagonist, 'do not talk so; while God is
pleased to enable me to read my Homer and my Bible, I cannot but be
thankful and happy.' It is easy to imagine Mr. Gladstone making a
similar reply. His love of Homer is only equalled by his love of the
Bible. Porson used to say of Bishop Pearson that, if he had not muddled
his head with theology, he would have been a first-class critic in Greek.
Mr. Gladstone, as we have seen, has had a good deal to do with theology,
but that he has not muddled his brains with it is clear, not merely from
his active life as a statesman, but from the perusal of the many valuable
works he has written on Homer, and his life and time and work. The
subject seems to have endless attractions for him. Charles James Fox
used to read Homer through every year. Mr. Gladstone displays a still
greater enthusiasm. In this department of human inquiry he has been
emphatically distinguished, and his works on Homer, to do them adequate
justice, would require a volume by no means small to themselves. In 1838
his first great work on the subject appeared. It was entitled 'Studies
of Homer and the Homeric Age,' and consisted of three large volumes. In
1869 he republished and rewrote a great part of the previous volumes in
his 'Juventus Mundi: the Gods and Men of the Heroic Age.' 'I am
anxious,' he writes, 'to commend to inquirers and readers generally
conclusions from the Homeric poems which appear to me to be of great
interest with reference to the general history of human culture, and in
connection therewith with the Providential government of the world. But
I am much more anxious to encourage and facilitate the access of educated
persons to the actual contents of the text. The amount and variety of
these contents have not been fully apparent. The delight received from
the poems has possibly had some influence in disposing the generality of
readers to rest satisfied with their enjoyment. The doubts cast upon
their origin must have assisted in producing and fostering a vague
instinctive indisposition to further laborious examination. The very
splendour of the poems dazzles the eyes with whole sheets of lightning,
and may almost give to analysis the character of vulgarity or
impertinence.' In his preface Mr. Gladstone tells us that his ideas have
been considerably modified in the ethnological and mythological portions
of his inquiry. The chief source of modification in the former has been
that a further prosecution of the subject with respect to the Phoenicians
has brought out more clearly and fully what he had only ventured to
suspect--a highly influential function in forming the Greek element. A
fuller view of this element in its composition naturally aids in an
important manner upon any estimate of Pelasgians and Hellenes
respectively. This Phoenician influence reaches far into the sphere of
mythology, and tends, as he thinks, greatly to clear the views we may
reasonably take of that curious and interesting subject. The aim of this
revised edition of his Homeric studies was to assist Homeric studies in
our schools and Universities, and to convey a practical knowledge of the
subject to persons who are not habitual students.
Few men have found time to appear in print so frequently as Mr.
Gladstone. His latest publication bears the date of 1898; his earliest
appeared in 1837. One of his great topics has been Homer. The old Greek
poet ought to be, according to Mr. Gladstone, in everyone's hands. His
latest work on the subject was the 'Landmarks of Homeric Study, together
with an Essay on the Points of Contact between the Assyrian Tablets and
the Homeric Text,' which appeared in 1890. Among the numberless
solutions of the Homeric question since the days of Wolff, he still
maintains the traditional view that there was but one Homer, that he
wrote both poems, and that the poems themselves should be regarded as a
historic whole. In Mr. Gladstone's view one of Homer's chief functions
was to weld the diverse elements of the Hellenic nation into one.
National unity necessarily involved religious unity, and so Mr. Gladstone
goes on to propound the theory that Homer endeavoured to find a place in
his heaven for all the gods that had been worshipped by the different
races he was welding together, and that with this view he created a
composite system of religion. It affords us matter for wonder, he says,
as well as admiration, how Homer excluded from this new composite system
the most degrading ingredients in which the religions around him
abounded. Though forced to admit Aphrodite, he only admitted her to a
lower place, and presented her in an unfavourable light. She is, in
fact, only the Assyrian Ishtar, the Ashtoreth of the Hebrews and
Phoenicians. He also elaborately contends that there was a good deal of
morality among Homer's Greeks, far more than is generally supposed. The
Politics of Homer form another chapter, and he finds high praise for the
value the poet attached to personal freedom, and in the extraordinary
power for those times he attached to the spoken word. Except in the
concluding chapter on Assyrian Tablets and the Homeric Texts, Mr.
Gladstone added little to what is to be found in one or other of his
previous books.
In 1896 appeared 'The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture,' revised and
enlarged from _Good Words_. The argument appears to be that in the
science and history of the Holy Bible there may be detected a degree of
accuracy plainly supernatural and miraculous. With great warmth he owns
his desire to prevent his countrymen from relaxing their hold on the
Bible, which Christendom regards as 'an inestimable treasure,' and thus
bringing on themselves 'inexpressible calamity.' He adopts towards
Hebrew specialists an attitude neither defiant nor abjectly submissive.
The meaning of Hebrew words must, of course, be determined by Hebrew
scholars; but he argues that we must not forget the risks to which
specialists themselves are exposed. 'Among them,' he writes, 'as with
other men, there may be fashions of the time and school, which Lord Bacon
called idols of the market-place, and currents of prejudice below the
surface, such as to detract somewhat from the authority which each
inquirer may justly claim in his own field, and from their title to
impose these conclusions upon mankind.' And so often has it already
happened that the Bible was supposed to be submerged by some wave of
opinion, which proved, after all, to be passing and ephemeral, that we
may have confidence in its power of weathering storms. He holds that if,
even for argument's sake, one concession were to be made to specialists
of all they can be entitled to ask respecting the age, the authorship,
the text of the books, he may still invite his readers to stand with him
on the impregnable rock of Holy Scripture. Apart from all that science
or criticism may say, he can still challenge men to accept the Scriptures
on the moral and spiritual and historical ground of their character in
themselves. In the course of his work he treats successively of the
creation story as told in the first chapter of Genesis, of the Psalms, of
the Mosaic legislation, of the Deluge, and of recent corroborations of
Scripture from history and natural science.
In 1848 Mr. Gladstone wrote a Latin version of Toplady's hymn, 'Rock of
Ages,' though it did not appear till 1861, when it was published in a
volume of translations by himself and Lord Lyttelton, issued by them in
memory of their marriage to two sisters. The following is the
translation:
'Jesu, pro me perforatus,
Condar intra Tuum latus.
Tu per lympham profluentem,
Tu per sanguinem tepentem,
In peccata mi redunda,
Tolle culpam, sordes munda.
'Coram Te, nec justus forem,
Quamvis tota vi laborem,
Nec si fide nunquam cesso,
Fletu stillans indefesso,
Tibi soli tantum munus;
Salva me, Salvator unus!
'Nil in manu mecum fero,
Sed me versus crucem gero;
Vestimenta nudus oro,
Opem debilis imploro;
Fontem Christi quaero immundus
Nisi laves, moribundus.
'Dum hos artus vita regit;
Quando nox sepulchro tegit;
Mortuos cum stare jubes,
Sedens Judex inter nubes;
Jesu, pro me perforatus,
Condar intra Tuum latus.'
In 1863 Mr. Gladstone printed his translation of the first book of the
'Iliad.' He sent a copy to Lord Lyndhurst, then in his ninety-first
year. The aged critic replied in the following letter. The accident to
which it alludes was one which had happened some days before to Mr.
Gladstone when riding in the Park:
'MY DEAR GLADSTONE,
'We are very sorry for your accident, but rejoice that the
consequence is not likely to be serious. What should we do with the
surplus without you? I return with thanks the translation. It is a
remarkable effort of ingenuity, literal almost to a fault, and in a
poetical form. But is the trochee suited to our heroic verse? Its
real character is in some degree disguised by your mode of printing
the lines. If the usual mode were adopted, the defect would at once
appear:
'"Of Achilles, son of Peleus,
How the deadly wrath arose!
How the hosts of the Achaians
Rued it with ten thousand woes!"
Written and read in this way, it has a sort of ballad air. If I am
wrong, correct me. Perhaps I have been too long accustomed to the
iambic measure with variations, as best suited to English heroic
poetry, to be able to form a correct opinion. As an example of
trochaic lines, there are several in Dryden's "Alexander's Feast":
'"Bacchus, ever fair and young,
Drunken joys did first ordain," etc.'
Mr. Gladstone thought so highly of this criticism that he wrote back
asking permission to print it in a contemplated preface to his
translation. 'It is not,' he said, 'from a mere wish to parade you as my
correspondent, though this wish may have its share. Your observation on
my metre, which has great force, cuts, I think, deep into the
matter--into the principles of Homeric translation. So pray let me have
your permission.'
As an illustration of Mr. Gladstone's skill as a translator, let me add
some verses from his version of the 'Hecuba' of Euripides, seven pages of
which appeared in the _Contemporary Review_ a few years since, though the
translation was made in his Eton days:
'ANTISTROPHE I.
''Twas dead of night, and silence deep
Buried all in dewy sleep,
For feast, and dance, and slaughter done,
Soft slumber's season had begun.
The lyre was hushed, the altar cold,
The sword, the lance, all bloodless lay;
My husband, softly resting, told
The toils and dangers of the day:
No longer watching for the foe
Sworn to lay proud Ilion low.
'STROPHE II.
'I strove my flowing hair to bind
With many a festal chaplet twin'd;
The mirror's rays of glittering hue
Betrayed me to my virgin view,
Hast'ning to rest--Then peal'd on high
O'er Ilion's walls the victor's cry;
Troy heard the shout that sounded then,
"Dash'd down the turrets of the foe,
Shall sons of Greece again, again
To home, and rest, and glory go."'
In 1892 appeared 'An Academic Sketch' by the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone,
M.P., being the Romanes Lecture delivered in the Sheldon Theatre, Oxford.
Whilst it did not detract from, it scarcely added to, Mr. Gladstone's
reputation. It was, in fact, a speech somewhat of the after-dinner type.
All the world knew that the Oxford of the past was a theme on which he
could pleasantly dilate.
In 1894 there appeared from Mr. Gladstone's pen an article in the
_Nineteenth Century_ on the 'Atonement,' occasioned by the study of Mrs.
Besant's 'Autobiography.' He says of her: 'Mrs. Besant passes from her
earliest to her latest stage of thought as lightly as a swallow skims the
surface of the lawn, and with just as little effort to ascertain what
lies beneath it. Her several schemes of belief or non-belief appear to
have been entertained one after another with the same undoubting
confidence, until the junctures successively arrived for their not
regretful, but rather contemptuous, rejection. They are nowhere based
upon reasoning, but on the authority of Mrs. Besant.' The special
proposition which Mr. Gladstone examines is one of four, the difficulties
of which led Mrs. Besant to reject Christianity--the nature of the
atonement of Christ. In dealing with this topic, Mr. Gladstone, after
condemning the crude utterances of some theologians and preachers, by
whom the New Testament doctrine has been travestied and misconceived,
lays down what he conceives to be the true teaching. 'What is here
enacted in the kingdom of grace only repeats a phenomenon with which we
are perfectly familiar in the natural and social order of the world,
where the good, at the expense of pain endured by them, procure benefits
for the unworthy.'
In the same year appeared Mr. Gladstone's Horace. It was on the whole a
failure. A critic writes: 'The uncouth diction, obscurity of expression
of the rendering, are patent evidences of the translator's being ill at
ease under the restraint of narrow bounds of rhyme and metre.' The same
writer observes: 'Mr. Gladstone's translation of the Odes of Horace will
escape oblivion. Historians will remember it as they remember the
hexameters of Cicero, the verses with which Frederick the Great pestered
Voltaire, and the daily poems Warren Hastings used to read at his
breakfast-table.' An ingenious contributor to _Blackwood_, on the
publication of the book, contributed a letter from 'Horace in the
Shades,' intimating that he had nothing to do with the matter. It is to
be questioned whether worse verses were ever written than the following
in the 'Horace':
'No; me the feast the war employs
Of maids (their nails well clipt) with boys,
Me fancy free; or something warm,
My playful use does no one harm.'
Again,
'Then shalt thou with flagrant passion
Like the beasts be torn,
And with fire of cankered entrails
Thou shalt grieve forlorn.'
Or,
'The Furies grant in war no scant;
Devouring seas o'er sailors roll;
Young funerals hold their place with old;
Proserpine spares no breathing soul.'
Thus is the death of Cleopatra recorded:
'Bold to survey with eye serene,
The void that had her palace been;
She lodged the vipers in her skin
Where best to drink the poison in.'
When 'Ecce Homo' appeared--a book which dear Lord Shaftesbury, Exeter
Hall applauding, described as the worst book ever vomited out of the jaws
of hell--Mr. Gladstone, in an article in _Good Words_, gave in his
adherence to the book. He described the author as at once passing into
the presence of Jesus of Nazareth, and then, without any foregone
conclusion, either of submission or dissent, giving that heed to the acts
and words of the unfriended teacher which the truest Jews did when those
words were spoken and those acts done.
Mr. Gladstone found time, amid his preoccupations, to write a long
article for the _English Historical Review_ on the last portion of the
'Greville Memoirs,' chiefly justifying the action of the parties with
which he was associated at the time of the 'death and obsequies of
Protection,' in 1852, and during the Crimean War. Mr. Gladstone
traverses Mr. Greville's statement that in 1852 the Peelites were
indisposed to join the Whigs, under the delusive belief that they could
form a Government of their own. He can say positively that, with the
single exception of the Duke of Newcastle, none of the party entertained
this belief. 'They knew that dichotomy, and not trichotomy, was for our
times the law of the nation's life.' Their sympathies in regard to
economy and peace lay rather with one of the Liberal wings than with the
main body. In some cases they were divided between their Liberal
opinions and their Conservative traditions and associations. For many a
man to leave the party in which he was brought up is like the stroke of a
sword dividing bone and marrow. But the intermediate position is
essentially a false position, and nothing can long disguise its
falseness. The right hon. gentleman confesses that he himself frankly
stated to Lord Derby that the Peelites were a public nuisance, for while
rapid migrations from camp to camp may be less creditable, slow ones not
only are more painful, but are attended with protracted public
inconvenience. The lessons of this political drama, he says--and the
statement is significant at the present time--are of the present and the
future. It entails a heavy responsibility to embark political parties in
controversies certain to end in defeat where there is a silent sense of
what is coming--a latent intention to accept defeat--and where the
postponement of the final issue means only the enhancement of the price
to be paid at the close. Mr. Gladstone deprecates the tone generally
assumed in speaking of the Crimean War. He denies the assumptions that
we drifted into that war; that the Cabinet of the day was in continual
conflict with itself at the various stages of the negotiations; and that
if it had adopted a bolder course at an earlier stage the Emperor
Nicholas would have succumbed. The first of these assertions he
characterizes as untrue, the second as ridiculous, and the third as
speculative and highly improbable. Lord Clarendon did say that we
drifted into war; but his meaning was simply that the time of war had not
come, but the time of measures for averting it had expired; and Lord
Clarendon, not less expressively than truly, said that, while the
intermediate days were gliding by, we were drifting into war. 'But the
fable is brazen-fronted, and, like Pope Joan, still holds her place.' As
regards the Cabinet, Mr. Gladstone has witnessed much more sharp or warm
argument in almost every other of the seven Cabinets to which he has had
the honour to belong. In regard to the assumption that the war was not
justifiable, he makes the 'inconvenient admission' that those who
approved of the war at the time approved of it on very different grounds.
Some favoured it as an Arthurian enterprise, the general defence of the
weak against the strong; some because they had faith in the restorative
energies of Turkey, if time were obtained by warding off the foe; some
thought the power of Russia was exorbitant, and dangerous to Europe and
to England. This last was the sentiment which most captivated the
popular imagination. 'It was feeling, and not argument, that raised the
Crimean War into popularity.' It is feeling, Mr. Gladstone thinks, which
has plunged it into the abyss of odium. The war proceeded, as he
conceives, upon a more just and noble idea expressed by Lord Russell
when, on the outbreak of hostilities, he denounced the Emperor Nicholas
as 'the wanton disturber of the peace of Europe.' The policy which led
to the war was a European protest against the wrongdoing of a single
State. His belief is that, compared with most wars, the war of 1854-56
will hold in history no dishonourable place. For its policy must be
regarded _a parte ante_. He confesses, however, that the result of the
war was exceedingly unsatisfactory.
The May number of the _Nineteenth Century_, 1887, contained an article by
Mr. Gladstone reviewing the fifth and sixth volumes of Mr. Lecky's
'History of England in the Eighteenth Century.' Towards the conclusion
of the article Mr. Gladstone quotes the following sentence:
'Mr. Lecky writes as follows: "We have seen a Minister going to the
country on the promise that if he was returned to office he would abolish
the principal direct tax paid by the class which was then predominant in
the constituencies."'
This sentence refers, of course, to Mr. Gladstone's promise in his
election address in 1874 to repeal the income tax. Mr. Gladstone replies
that Mr. Lecky seems to be unaware that it is the practice of candidates
for a seat in Parliament to announce to those whose votes they desire
their views on political questions, either pending, proximate, or
sometimes remote. He proceeds:
'The accusing sentence is inaccurately written. In January, 1874, the
date to which it refers, there was no question of returning to office. I
addressed a constituency as Minister, and in a double capacity as
Chancellor of the Exchequer and as head of the Administration, proposed
to repeal the income tax. But it is also untruly written. It is untrue
that the payers of income tax were then the predominant class in the
constituencies. In Ireland, the payers of income tax had ceased, since
the ballot was introduced, to rule elections. In England and Scotland, a
very large majority of members were returned by the towns. In the towns,
then as now, household suffrage was in full force, and the voters were as
a body more independent of the wealthy than are the rural population.
The repeal of the income tax, whether proper or improper in itself, was
not then a thing improper in respect of the persons to whom it was
announced.
'It has been held by some that there should never be an appeal to the
people by a Ministry on the subject of taxation. But why not? The
rights of the people in respect to taxation are older, higher, clearer,
than in respect to any other subject of government. Now, appeals on many
such subjects have been properly made--on Reform in 1831; on the China
War in 1857; on the Irish Church in 1868; on Home Rule in 1886; lastly,
in 1852, by the Tories, whose creed Mr. Lecky appears in other matters to
have adopted, on the finance proper to be proposed by Mr. Disraeli after,
and in connection with, the repeal of the Corn Law.
'Undoubtedly, although right in principle, such appeals and promises are
eminently liable to abuse. But there is one touchstone by which the
peccant element in them may be at once detected. If the promise launches
into the far future, it may straightway be condemned. If, on the other
hand, it is one certain to be tested within a few weeks, the case is
different. A Minister casually pitchforked, so to speak, into office,
and living from hand to mouth, might be tempted to a desperate venture.
But can Mr. Lecky suppose that the Ministry of 1868-74, which had
outlived the ordinary term, and (may it be said?) had made its mark in
history, would thus have gambled with false coin, and have sought to add
so ignobly, and with such compromise of character, a respite almost
infinitesimal to its duration?
'Was the engagement to the repeal of the income tax one either obligatory
or proper in itself? Was the time well chosen? Was the proposer morally
bound to the proposal? I will answer "Yes" to all these questions, and I
will prove my affirmative, though my short recital will lead Mr. Lecky,
if he reads it, into a field of contemporary history which it is quite
plain that he has never traversed.'
In 1895 it was announced that Mr. Gladstone had written a book on 'The
Psalter, according to the Prayer-book Version.' It was commenced by Mr.
Gladstone many years before, but it was not till his retirement from
office that he found time to finish it. He also compiled a Concordance,
and added a series of notes on the Psalter. In the same year the address
on the Armenian question, which was delivered by Mr. Gladstone at
Chester, was republished in pamphlet form by Mr. Fisher Unwin.
I may not omit to refer to Mr. Gladstone's utterance on the first chapter
of Genesis--that sublime exordium to the Bible--that its truth is in all
respects as fresh to-day as it was in the hour of its first enunciation,
and that it links the Church of Adam, Abraham, and Moses in living
fellowship and unity to the Church of to-day.
In 1894 Mr. Gladstone republished certain papers, which had already
appeared in various periodicals, under the title of 'Studies Subsidiary
to the Works of Bishop Butler.' He ridicules critics such as Matthew
Arnold, who held that the 'Analogy' is dead, with the eighteenth-century
Deism it opposed. He labours to show that it is as applicable to the
religious problems of to-day as to those a hundred years old. The
'Analogy,' he holds, is one of the finest of intellectual disciplines.
In the study of Butler's works the student finds himself in an
intellectual palaestra, where his best exertions are required thoroughly
to grapple with his teacher. Mainly, education is a process of
wrestling, and it is best to wrestle with the highest masters. The
chapters on the Censors of Butler shows all the ex-Premier's skill at
fence. On the subject of the Theology of Butler, Mr. Gladstone
attributes his habit of drawing it straight from the Scriptures, with
little reference to authorities, as due to his Nonconformist education.
In reply to the charges that the 'Analogy' tended to Romanism, he asks
for a single known case where the study of Butler had led to Rome. The
chapter on the influence of Butler is of great interest. In his second
part Mr. Gladstone is occupied largely with an elaborate discussion, on
the lines laid down by Butler, on the future life, and the condition of
man therein. He is especially severe on the Universalists. He regards a
period of future discipline for imperfect natures, 'not without an
admixture of salutary and accepted grace,' as in accord with both faith
and reason. The remaining chapters on Determinism, Teleology, Miracle,
and Probability are the toughest in the whole book, and are as hard to
understand as Butler himself. On miracles Mr. Gladstone follows the
orthodox lines.
Mr. Gladstone's latest utterances on the subject of Christianity appeared
in 1895. He pleads for an eternity of punishment. His latest article on
the subject appeared in the American Pictorial Bible. The following
passage, in which he surveys the world, is worth reprinting: 'The
Christian religion,' he says, 'is for mankind the greatest of all
phenomena. It is the dominant religion of the inhabitants of this planet
in at least two important respects. It commands the largest number of
professing adherents. If we estimate the population of the globe at
1,400,000,000--and some would state it at a higher figure--between 400
and 500 of these, or one-third of the whole, are professing Christians;
and at every point of the circuit the question is not one of losing
ground, but of gaining it. The fallacy which accepted the vast
population of China as Buddhists in the mass has been exploded, and it is
plain that no other religion approaches the numerical strength of
Christianity--doubtful, indeed, if there be any other which reaches
one-half of it. The second of the particulars now under view is perhaps
more important. Christianity is the religion in the command of whose
professors is lodged a proportion of power far exceeding its superiority
of numbers, and this power is both moral and material. In the area of
controversy it can be said to have hardly an antagonist. Force, secular
or physical, is accumulated in the hands of Christians in a proportion
almost overwhelming, and the accumulation of influence is not less
remarkable than that of force. This is not surprising, for all the
elements of influence have their home within the Christian precinct. The
art, the literature, the systematic industry, invention, and commerce--in
one word, the forces of the world are almost wholly Christian. In
Christendom alone there seems to be an inexhaustible energy of world-wide
expansion.'
In conclusion, we give a couple of extracts from Mr. Gladstone's more
recent articles of universal interest. In one he makes a noble
contribution to the praise of books. 'Books are,' he says, 'the voices
of the dead. They are a main instrument of communion with the vast human
procession of the other world. They are the allies of the thought of
men. They are in a certain sense at enmity with the world. Their work
is, at least, in the two higher compartments of our threefold life. In a
room well filled with them no one has felt or can feel solitary. Second
to none, as friends to the individual, they are first and foremost among
the _compages_, the bonds and rivets of the race.' But books want
housing and arranging, and they are multiplying so rapidly that they
threaten to get beyond all control. In an article in the _Nineteenth
Century_, from which we quote the above, Mr. Gladstone, with a
light-hearted relish of the subject it is pleasant to see, gives some of
his ideas on the subject of arrangement.
Another extract will give us his ideas of the Jews. He thinks that the
purport of the Old Testament can be best summed up in the words that it
is a history of sin and redemption. After explaining that the narrative
of the Fall is in accordance with the laws of a grand and comprehensive
philosophy, and that the objections taken to it are the product of
narrower and shallower modes of thought, he proceeds, passing by the
story of the Deluge and the dispersion, to consider the selection of
Abraham. 'Why,' he asks, 'were the Jews selected as the chosen people of
God?' Not, he thinks, because of their moral superiority. He contrasts
the Jewish ethics and those of the Greeks, considerably to the detriment
of the former, and then sums up the matter as follows: 'Enough has
perhaps been said to show that we cannot claim as a thing demonstrable a
great moral superiority for the Hebrew line generally over the whole of
the historically known contemporary races. I, nevertheless, cannot but
believe that there was an interior circle, known to us by its fruits in
the Psalter and the prophetic books, of morality and sanctity altogether
superior to what was to be found elsewhere, and due rather to the
pre-Mosaic than to the Mosaic religion of the race. But it remains to
answer with reverence the question, Why, if not for a distinctly superior
morality, nor as a full religious provision for the whole wants of man,
_why_ was the race chosen as a race to receive the promises, to guard the
oracles, and to fulfil the hopes of the great Redemption?
'The answer may, I believe, be conveyed in moderate compass. The design
of the Almighty, as we everywhere find, was to prepare the human race, by
a varied and a prolonged education, for the arrival of the great
Redemption. The immediate purposes of the Abrahamic selection may have
been to appoint, for the task of preserving in the world the fundamental
bases of religion, a race which possessed qualifications for that end
decisively surpassing those of all other races. We may easily indicate
two of these fundamental bases. The first was the belief in one God.
The second was the knowledge that the race had departed from His
laws--without which knowledge how should they welcome a Deliverer whose
object it was to bring them back? It may be stated with confidence that
among the dominant races of the world the belief in one God was speedily
destroyed by polytheism, and the idea of sin faded gradually but utterly
away. Is it audacious to say that what was wanted was a race so endowed
with the qualities of masculine tenacity and persistency, as to hold over
these all-important truths until that fulness of time when, by and with
them, the complete design of the Almighty would be revealed to the world?
A long experience of trials beyond all example has proved since the
Advent how the Jews, in this one essential quality, have surpassed every
other people upon earth. A marvellous and glorious experience has shown
how among their ancestors before the Advent were kept alive and in full
vigour the doctrine of belief in one God and the true idea of sin. These
our Lord found ready to His hand, essential preconditions of His
teaching. And in the exhibition of this great and unparalleled result of
a most elaborate and peculiar discipline we may perhaps recognise,
sufficiently for the present purpose, the office and work of the Old
Testament.'
In another article Mr. Gladstone objects to Universalism as a
contradiction of Divine utterance. He writes: 'To presume on overriding
the express declarations of the Lord Himself delivered upon His own
authority, is surely to break up revealed religion in its very
ground-work, and to substitute for it a flimsy speculation spun like a
spider's web by the private spirit, and as little capable as that web of
bearing the strain by which the false is to be severed from the true.'
Speaking of the theory which denies future punishment, he says: 'What is
this but to emasculate all the sanctions of religion, and to give
wickedness, already under a too feeble restraint, a new range of
license?'
It is vain to seek to chronicle Mr. Gladstone's publications. Even at
the time of his last illness he was said to have been engaged in a work
on the Fathers. His writings fill six columns in the library catalogue
of the British Museum.