Chapter X. Matters Ecclesiastical. (1864-1868)
—Eur., Troades, 884.
O thou, upholder of the earth, who upon earth hast an abiding place, whosoever thou art, inscrutable, thou Zeus, whether thou be necessity of nature, or intelligence of mortal men, on thee I call; for, treading a noiseless path, in righteousness dost thou direct all human things.
I
The reader will have surmised that amidst all the press and strain in affairs of state, Mr. Gladstone's intensity of interest in affairs of the church never for an instant slackened. Wide as the two spheres stood apart, his temper in respect of them was much the same. In church and state alike he prized institutions and the great organs of corporate life; but what he thought of most and cared for and sought after most, was not their mechanism, though on that too he set its value, but the living spirit within the institution. In church and state alike he moved cautiously and tentatively. In both alike he strove to unite order, whether temporal order in the state or spiritual order in the church, with his sovereign principle of freedom. Many are the difficulties in the way of applying Cavour's formula of a free church in a free state, as most countries and their governors have by now found out. Yet to have a vivid sense of the supreme importance of the line between temporal power and spiritual is the note of a statesman fit for modern [pg 159] times. “The whole of my public life,” he wrote to the Bishop of Oxford in 1863, “with respect to matters ecclesiastical, for the last twenty years and more, has been a continuing effort, though a very weak one, to extricate her in some degree from entangled relations without shock or violence.”
The general temper of his churchmanship on its political side during these years is admirably described in a letter to his eldest son, and some extracts from it furnish a key to his most characteristic frame of mind in attempting to guide the movements of his time:—
To W. H. Gladstone.
April 16, 1865.—You appeared to speak with the supposition, a very natural one, that it was matter of duty to defend all the privileges and possessions of the church; that concession would lead to concession; and that the end of the series would be its destruction.... Now, in the first place, it is sometimes necessary in politics to make surrenders of what, if not surrendered, will be wrested from us. And it is very wise, when a necessity of this kind is approaching, to anticipate it while it is yet a good way off; for then concession begets gratitude, and often brings a return. The kind of concession which is really mischievous is just that which is made under terror and extreme pressure; and unhappily this has been the kind of concession which for more than two hundred years, it has been the fashion of men who call (and who really think) themselves “friends of the church” to make.... I believe it would be a wise concession, upon grounds merely political, for the church of England to have the law of church rate abolished in all cases where it places her in fretting conflict with the dissenting bodies.... I say all this, however, not to form the groundwork of a conclusion, but only in illustration of a general maxim which is applicable to political questions.
But next, this surely is a political question. Were we asked to surrender an article of the creed in order to save the rest, or to consent to the abolition of the episcopal order, these things touch the faith of Christians and the life of the church, and cannot in any measure become the subject of compromise. But the external possessions of the church were given it for the more effectual promotion of its work, and may be lessened or abandoned [pg 160] with a view to the same end.... Now we have lived into a time when the great danger of the church is the sale of her faith for gold.... In demanding the money of dissenters for the worship of the church, we practically invest them with a title to demand that she should be adapted to their use in return, and we stimulate every kind of interference with her belief and discipline to that end. By judiciously waiving an undoubted legal claim, we not only do an act which the understood principles of modern liberty tend to favour and almost require, but we soothe ruffled minds and tempers, and what is more, we strengthen the case and claim of the church to be respected as a religious body.... I am convinced that the only hope of making it possible for her to discharge her high office as stewardess of divine truth, is to deal tenderly and gently with all the points at which her external privileges grate upon the feelings and interests of that unhappily large portion of the community who have almost ceased in any sense to care for her. This is a principle of broad application, broader far than the mere question of church rates. It is one not requiring precipitate or violent action, or the disturbance prematurely of anything established; but it supplies a rule of the first importance for dealing with the mixed questions of temporal and religious interest when they arise. I am very anxious to see it quietly but firmly rooted in your mind. It is connected with the dearest interests not only of my public life, but as I believe of our religion.... I am in no way anxious that you should take my opinions in politics as a model for your own. Your free concurrence will be a lively pleasure to me. But above all I wish you to be free. What I have now been dwelling upon is a matter higher and deeper than the region of mere opinion. It has fallen to my lot to take a share larger than that of many around me, though in itself slight, in bringing the principle I have described into use as a ground of action. I am convinced that if I have laboured to any purpose at all it has been in great part for this. It is part of that business of reconciling the past with the new time and order, which seems to belong particularly to our country and its rulers.
He then goes on to cite as cases where something had been done towards securing the action of the church as a [pg 161] religious body, Canada, where clergy and people now appointed their own bishop; a recent judgment of the privy council leading to widespread emancipation of the colonial church; the revival of convocation; the licence to convocation to alter the thirty-sixth canon; the bestowal of self-government on Oxford. “In these measures,” he says, “I have been permitted to take my part; but had I adopted the rigid rule of others in regard to the temporal prerogatives, real or supposed, of the church, I should at once have lost all power to promote them.”
“As to disruption,” he wrote in these days, “that is the old cry by means of which in all times the temporal interests of the English church have been upheld in preference to the spiritual. The church of England is much more likely of the two, to part with her faith than with her funds. It is the old question, which is the greater, the gold or the altar that sanctifies the gold. Had this question been more boldly asked and more truly answered in other times, we should not have been where we now are. And by continually looking to the gold and not the altar, the dangers of the future will be not diminished but increased.”111
In 1866 Mr. Gladstone for the first time voted for the abolition of church rates. Later in the session he introduced his own plan, not in his capacity as minister, but with the approval of the Russell cabinet. After this cabinet had gone out, Mr. Gladstone in 1868 introduced a bill, abolishing all legal proceedings for the recovery of church rates, except in cases of rates already made, or where money had been borrowed on the security of the rates. But it permitted voluntary assessments to be made, and all agreements to make such payments on the faith of which any expense was incurred, remained enforcible in the same manner as contracts of a like character. Mr. Gladstone's bill became law in the course of the summer, and a struggle that had been long and bitter ended.
In another movement in the region of ecclesiastical machinery, from which much was hoped, though little is believed to have come, Mr. Gladstone was concerned, though [pg 162] I do not gather from the papers that he watched it with the zealous interest of some of his friends. Convocation, the ancient assembly or parliament of the clergy of the church of England, was permitted in 1852 to resume the active functions that had been suspended since 1717. To Mr. Gladstone some revival or institution of the corporate organisation of the church, especially after the Gorham judgment, was ever a cherished object. Bishop Wilberforce, long one of the most intimate of his friends, was chief mover in proceedings that, as was hoped, were to rescue the church from the anarchy in which one branch of her sons regarded her as plunged. Some of Mr. Gladstone's correspondence on the question of convocation has already been made public.112 Here it is enough to print a passage or two from a letter addressed by him to the bishop (Jan. 1, 1854) setting out his view of the real need of the time. After a generous exaltation of the zeal and devotion of the clergy, he goes on to the gains that might be expected from their effective organisation:—
First as to her pastoral work, her warfare against sin, she would put forth a strength, not indeed equal to it, but at least so much less unequal than it now is, that the good fight would everywhere be maintained, and she would not be as she now is, either hated or unknown among the myriads who form the right arm of England's industry and skill. As to her doctrine and all that hangs upon it, such questions as might arise would be determined by the deliberate and permanent sense of the body. Some unity in belief is necessary to justify association in a Christian communion. Will that unity in belief be promoted or impaired by the free action of mind within her, subjected to order? If her case really were so desperate that her children had no common faith, then the sooner that imposture were detected the better; but if she has, then her being provided with legitimate, orderly, and authentic channels, for expressing and bringing to a head, as need arises, the sentiments of her people, will far more clearly manifest, and while manifesting will extend, deepen, and consolidate, that unity. It is all very well to sneer at councils: but who among us [pg 163] will deny that the councils which we acknowledge as lawful representatives of the universal church, were great and to all appearance necessary providential instruments in the establishment of the Christian faith?
But, say some, we cannot admit the laity into convocation, as it would be in derogation of the rights of the clergy; or as others say, it would separate the church from the state. And others, more numerous and stronger, in their fear of the exclusive constitution of the convocation, resist every attempt at organising the church, and suffer, and even by suffering promote, the growth of all our evils. I will not touch the question of convocation except by saying that, in which I think you concur, that while the present use is unsatisfactory and even scandalous, no form of church government that does not distinctly and fully provide for the expression of the voice of the laity either can be had, or if it could would satisfy the needs of the church of England. But in my own mind as well as in this letter, I am utterly against all premature, all rapid conclusions.... It will be much in our day if, towards the cure of such evils, when we die we can leave to our children the precious knowledge that a beginning has been made—a beginning not only towards enabling the bishops and clergy to discharge their full duty, but also, and yet more, towards raising the real character of membership in those millions upon millions, the whole bulk of our community, who now have its name and its name alone.
II
In 1860 a volume appeared containing seven “essays and reviews” by seven different writers, six of them clergymen of the church of England. The topics were miscellaneous, the treatment of them, with one exception,113 was neither learned nor weighty, the tone was not absolutely uniform, but it was as a whole mildly rationalistic, and the negations, such as they were, exhibited none of the fierceness or aggression that had marked the old controversies about Hampden, or Tract Ninety, or Ward's Ideal. A storm broke upon the seven writers, that they little intended to provoke. To the apparent partnership among them was severely imputed a [pg 164] sinister design. They were styled “the Septem contra Christum”—six ministers of religion combining to assail the faith they outwardly professed—seven authors of an immoral rationalistic conspiracy. Two of them were haled into the courts, one for casting doubt upon the inspiration of the Bible, the other for impugning the eternity of the future punishment of the wicked. The Queen in council upon appeal was advised to reverse a hostile judgment in the court below (1864), and Lord Chancellor Westbury delivered the decision in a tone described in the irreverent epigram of the day as “dismissing eternal punishment with costs.” This carried further, or completed, the principle of the Gorham judgment fourteen years before, and just as that memorable case determined that neither the evangelical nor the high anglican school should drive out the other, so the judgment in the case of Essays and Reviews determined that neither should those two powerful sections drive out the new critical, rationalistic, liberal, or latitudinarian school. “It appears to me,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to the Bishop of London (April 26, 1864), “that the spirit of this judgment has but to be consistently and cautiously followed up, in order to establish, as far as the court can establish it, a complete indifference between the Christian faith and the denial of it. I do not believe it is in the power of human language to bind the understanding and conscience of man with any theological obligations, which the mode of argument used and the principles assumed [in the judgment] would not effectually unloose.” To Bishop Hamilton of Salisbury, who had taken part in one of the two cases, he wrote:—
In the same connection he wrote to Sir W. Farquhar, a friend from earliest days:—
III
No theological book, wrote Mr. Gladstone in 1866, that has appeared since the Vestiges of Creation twenty years before [pg 166] (1844), had attracted anything like the amount of notice bestowed upon “the remarkable volume entitled Ecce Homo,” published in 1865. It was an attempt, so Mr. Gladstone described it, to bring home to the reader the impression that there is something or other called the Gospel, “which whatever it may be,” as was said by an old pagan poet of the Deity,114 has formidable claims not merely on the intellectual condescension, but on the loyal allegiance and humble obedience of mankind. The book violently displeased both sides. It used language that could not be consistently employed in treating of Christianity from the orthodox point of view. On the other hand, it constituted “a grave offence in the eyes of those to whom the chequered but yet imposing fabric of actual Christianity, still casting its majestic light and shadow over the whole civilised world, is a rank eyesore and an intolerable offence.” Between these two sets of assailants Mr. Gladstone interposed with a friendlier and more hopeful construction.115 He told those who despised the book as resting on no evidence of the foundations on which it was built, and therefore as being shallow and uncritical, that we have a right to weigh the nature of the message, apart from the credentials of the messenger. Then he reassured the orthodox by the hope that “the present tendency to treat the old belief of man with a precipitate, shallow, and unexamining disparagement” is only a passing distemper, and that to the process of its removal the author of the book would have the consolation and the praise of having furnished an earnest, powerful, and original contribution.116 Dean Milman told him that he had brought to life again a book that after a sudden and brief yet brilliant existence seemed to be falling swiftly into oblivion. The mask of the anonymous had much to do, he thought, with its popularity, as had happened to the Vestiges of Creation. Undoubtedly when the mask fell off, interest dropped.
Dr. Pusey found the book intensely painful. “I have seldom,” he told Mr. Gladstone, “been able to read much at [pg 167] a time, but shut the book for pain, as I used to do with Renan's.” What revolted him was not the exhibition of the human nature of the central figure, but of a human nature apart from and inconsistent with its divinity; the writer's admiring or patronising tone was loathsome. “What you have yourself written,” Pusey said, “I like much. But its bearings on Ecce Homo I can hardly divine, except by way of contrast.” Dr. Newman thought that here was a case where materiam superabat opus, and that Mr. Gladstone's observations were more valuable for their own sake, than as a recommendation or defence of the book:—
As to the specific principles and particular opinions in Mr. Gladstone's criticism of what we now see to have been a not very effective or deeply influential book, we may think as we will. But the temper of his review, the breadth of its outlook on Christian thought, tradition, and society, show no mean elements in the composition of his greatness. So, too, does the bare fact that under the pressure of office and all the cares of a party leader in a crisis, his mind [pg 168] should have been free and disengaged enough to turn with large and eager interest to such themes as these. This was indeed the freedom of judgment with which, in the most moving lines of the poem that he loved above all others, Virgil bidding farewell to Dante makes him crowned and mitred master of himself—Perch' io te sopra te corono e mitrio.117
IV
Other strong gusts swept the high latitudes, when Dr. Colenso, Bishop of Natal, published certain destructive criticisms upon the canonical Scriptures. His metropolitan at Cape Town pronounced sentence of deprivation; Colenso appealed to the Queen in council; and the Queen in council was advised that the proceedings of the Bishop of Cape Town were null and void, for in law there was no established church in the colony, nor any ecclesiastical court with lawful jurisdiction.118 This triumph of heresy was a heavy blow. In 1866 Bishop Colenso brought an action against Mr. Gladstone and the other trustees of the colonial bishoprics fund, calling upon them to set aside a sum of ten thousand pounds for the purpose of securing the income of the Bishop of Natal, and to pay him his salary, which they had withheld since his wrongful deprivation. “We,” said Mr. Gladstone to Miss Burdett Coutts, “founding ourselves on the judgment, say there is no see of Natal in the sense of the founders of the fund, and therefore, of course, no bishop of such a see.” Romilly, master of the rolls, gave judgment in favour of Colenso. These perplexities did not dismay Mr. Gladstone. “Remembering what the churches in the colonies were some forty years back, when I first began (from my father's having a connection with the West Indies), to feel an interest in them, I must own that they present a cheering, a remarkable, indeed a wonderful spectacle.” “I quite feel with you,” he says to Miss Burdett Coutts, “a great uneasiness at what may follow from the exercise of judicial powers by synods [pg 169] merely ecclesiastical, especially if small, remote, and unchecked by an active public opinion. But in the American episcopal church it has been found practicable in a great degree to obviate any dangers from such a source.” Ten years after this, in one of the most remarkable articles he ever wrote, speaking of the protestant evangelical section of the adherents of the Christian system, he says that no portion of this entire group seems to be endowed with greater vigour than this in the United States and the British colonies, which has grown up in new soil, “and far from the possibly chilling shadow of national establishments of religion.”119
Chapter XI. Popular Estimates. (1868)
Die Mitlebenden werden an vorzüglichen Menschen gar leicht irre; das Besondere der Person stört sie, das laufende bewegliche Leben verrückt ihre Standpunkte und hindert das Kennen und Anerkennen eines solchen Mannes.—Goethe.
The contemporaries of superior men easily go wrong about them. Peculiarity discomposes them; the swift current of life disturbs their points of view, and prevents them from understanding and appreciating such men.
I
It must obviously be interesting, as we approach a signal crisis in his advance, to know the kind of impression, right or wrong, made by a great man upon those who came nearest to him. Friends like Aberdeen and Graham had many years earlier foreseen the high destinies of their colleague. Aberdeen told Bishop Wilberforce in 1855 that Gladstone had some great qualifications but some serious defects. “The chief, that when he has convinced himself, perhaps by abstract reasoning of some view, he thinks that every one else ought at once to see it as he does, and can make no allowance for difference of opinion.”120 About the same time Graham said of him that he was “in the highest sense of the word Liberal; of the greatest power; very much the first man in the House of Commons; detested by the aristocracy for his succession duty, the most truly conservative measure passed in my recollection.... He must rise to the head in such a government as ours, even in spite of all the hatred of him.” Three years later Aberdeen still thought him too obstinate and, if such a thing be possible, too honest. He does not enough think of what other men think. Does not enough look out of the window. “Whom [pg 171] will he lead?” asked the bishop.121 “Oh! it is impossible to say! Time must show, and new combinations.” By 1863 Cardwell confidently anticipated that Mr. Gladstone must become prime minister, and Bishop Wilberforce finds all coming to the conclusion that he must be the next real chief.122
On the other side Lord Shaftesbury, to whom things ecclesiastical were as cardinal as they were to Mr. Gladstone, ruefully reflected in 1864 that people must make ready for great and irrevocable changes. Palmerston was simply the peg driven through the island of Delos: unloose the peg, and all would soon be adrift. “His successor, Gladstone, will bring with him the Manchester school for colleagues and supporters, a hot tractarian for chancellor, and the Bishop of Oxford for ecclesiastical adviser. He will succumb to every pressure, except the pressure of a constitutional and conservative policy.” “He is a dangerous man,” was one of Lord Palmerston's latest utterances, “keep him in Oxford and he is partially muzzled; but send him elsewhere and he will run wild.”123 “The long and short of our present position is,” said Shaftesbury, “that the time has arrived (novus sœclorum nascitur ordo) for the triumph of the Manchester school, of which Gladstone is the disciple and the organ. And for the nonce they have a great advantage; for, though the majority of the country is against them, the country has no leaders in or out of parliament; whereas they are all well provided and are equally compact in purpose and action.”124 Somewhat earlier cool observers “out of hearing of the modulation of his voice or the torrent of his declamation” regarded him “in spite of his eloquence unsurpassed in our day, perhaps in our century, in spite of his abilities and experience, as one most dangerous to that side to which he belongs. Like the elephant given by some eastern prince to the man he intends to ruin, he is an inmate too costly for any party to afford to keep long.”125
“One great weight that Gladstone has to carry in the political race,” wrote his friend Frederick Rogers (Dec. 13, [pg 172] 1868), “is a character for want of judgment, and every addition to that is an impediment.” And indeed it is true in politics that it often takes more time to get rid of a spurious character, than to acquire the real one. According to a letter from Lord Granville to Mr. Gladstone (Feb. 11, 1867):—
Still people went on saying that he had yet to gain the same hold over his party in parliament that he had over the party in the nation; he had studied every branch of government except the House of Commons; he confounded the functions of leader with those of dictator; he took counsel with one or two individuals instead of conferring with the party; he proclaimed as edicts what he ought to have submitted as proposals; he lacked “the little civilities and hypocrisies” of political society. Such was the common cant of the moment. He had at least one friend who dealt faithfully with him:—
T. D. Acland to Mr. Gladstone.
Jan. 24, 1868.—Now I am going to take a great liberty with you. I can hardly help myself. I have heard a lot of grumbling lately about you, and have several times asked myself whether it would be tanti to tease you by repeating it. Well, what is pressed on me is, that at the present time when every one is full of anxiety as to the future, and when your warmest supporters are longing for cohesion, there is an impression that you are absorbed in questions about Homer and Greek words, about Ecce Homo, that you are not reading the newspapers, or feeling the pulse of followers. One man personally complained that when you sought his opinion, you spent the whole interview in impressing your own view on him, and hardly heard anything he might have to say. It is with a painful feeling and (were it not for your [pg 173] generous and truly modest nature it would be) with some anxiety as to how you would take it that I consented to be the funnel of all this grumbling. As far as I can make out, the feeling resolves itself into two main points: 1. Whatever your own tastes may be for literature, and however strengthening and refreshing to your own mind and heart it may be to dig into the old springs, still the people don't understand it; they consider you their own, as a husband claims a wife's devotion; and it gives a bad impression if you are supposed to be interested, except for an occasional slight recreation, about aught but the nation's welfare at this critical time, and that it riles them to see the walls placarded with your name and Ecce Homo.... 2. (a) The other point is (pray forgive me if I go too far, I am simply a funnel) a feeling that your entourage is too confined, and too much of second-rate men; that the strong men and the rising men are not gathered round you and known to be so; (b) and besides that there is so little easy contact with the small fry, as when Palmerston sat in the tea-room, and men were gratified by getting private speech with their leader. But this is a small matter compared with (a).
Mr. Gladstone to T. D. Acland.
Hawarden, Jan. 30, '68.—Be assured I cannot feel otherwise than grateful to you for undertaking what in the main must always be a thankless office. It is new to me to have critics such as those whom you represent under the first head, and who complain that I do not attend to my business, while the complaint is illustrated by an instance in which, professing to seek a man's opinion, I poured forth instead the matter with which I was overflowing. Nor do I well know how to deal with those who take out of my hands the direction of my own conduct on such a question as the question whether I ought to have undertaken a mission to Sheffield to meet Roebuck on his own ground. I am afraid I can offer them little satisfaction. I have been for near thirty-six years at public business, and I must myself be the judge how best to husband what little energy of brain, and time for using it, may remain to me. If I am told I should go to Sheffield instead of writing on Ecce Homo, I answer that it was my Sunday's work, and change of [pg 174] work is the chief refreshment to my mind. It is true that literature is very attractive and indeed seductive to me, but I do not knowingly allow it to cause neglect of public business. Undoubtedly it may be said that the vacation should be given to reading up and preparing materials for the session. And of my nine last vacations this one only has in part been given to any literary work, if I except the preparation of an address for Edinburgh in 1865. But I am sincerely, though it may be erroneously, impressed with the belief that the quantity of my public work cannot be increased without its quality being yet further deteriorated. Perhaps my critics have not been troubled as I have with this plague of quantity, and are not as deeply impressed as I am with the belief that grinding down the mental powers by an infinity of detail, is what now principally dwarfs our public men, to the immense detriment of the country. This conviction I cannot yield; nor can I say more than that, with regard to the personal matters which you name, I will do the best I can. But what I have always supposed and understood is that my business in endeavouring to follow other and better men, is to be thoroughly open to all members of parliament who seek me, while my seeking them must of necessity be limited.... We have before us so much business that I fear a jumble. Reform, Education, and Ireland each in many branches will compete; any of these alone would be enough. The last is in my mind the imperious and overpowering subject.... The aspect of this letter is, I think, rather combative. It would have been much less so but that I trust entirely to your indulgence.
In a second letter, after mentioning again some of these complaints, Acland says: “On the other hand I know you are held by some of the best men (that dear, noble George Grey I am thinking of) to have the great quality of leadership: such clear apprehension of the points in council, and such faithful exactness in conveying the result agreed on, truly a great power for one who has such a copia verborum, with its temptations.” He still insists that a leader should drop into the tea-room and have afternoon chats with his adherents; and earnestly wishes him to belong to the Athenæum club, “a great centre of intellect and criticism,” where he would be [pg 175] sure to meet colleagues and the principal men in the public service.
All this was good advice enough, and most loyally intended. But it was work of supererogation. The House of Commons, like all assemblies, is even less affected by immediate displays than by the standing impression of power. Mr. Gladstone might be playful, courteous, reserved, gracious, silent, but the House always knew that he had a sledge-hammer behind his back, ready for work on every anvil in that resounding forge. His sheer intellectual strength, his experience and power in affairs, the tremendous hold that he had now gained upon the general public out of doors, made the artful genialities of the tea-room pure superfluity. Of the secret of the rapidity with which his star was rising, and of the popular expectations thereby signified, an admirable contemporary account was traced by an excellent observer,126 and it would be idle to transcribe the pith of it in words other than his own:—
A letter from Francis Newman to Mr. Gladstone is a good illustration of the almost passionate going out of men's hearts to him in those days:—
Church, afterwards the dean of St. Paul's, a man who united in so wonderful a degree the best gifts that come of culture, sound and just sense, and unstained purity of spirit, said of Mr. Gladstone at the moment of accession to power, “There never was a man so genuinely admired for the qualities which deserve admiration—his earnestness, his deep popular sympathies, his unflinching courage; and there never was a man more deeply hated both for his good points and for undeniable defects and failings. But they love him much less in the House than they do out of doors. A strong vein of sentiment is the spring of what is noblest about his impulses; but it is a perilous quality too.”128 An accomplished woman with many public interests met Mr. Bright in Scotland sometime after this. “He would not hear a word said against Mr. Gladstone. He said it was just because people were not good enough themselves to understand him that he met such abuse, and then he quoted the stanza in the third canto of Childe Harold:—
I asked if he did not think sometimes his temper carried Mr. Gladstone away. He said, ‘Think of the difference between a great cart horse, and the highest bred most sensitive horse you can imagine, and then, under lashing of a whip, think of the difference between them.’ ” After a stay with Mr. Gladstone in a country house, Jowett, the master of Balliol, said of him, “It is the first time that any one of such great simplicity has been in so exalted a station.”129
In one of his Lancashire speeches, Mr. Gladstone described in interesting language how he stood:—
Five-and-twenty years later, when his course was almost run, and the achievements of the long laborious day were over, he said:—