N the second chapter of this work we traced to a certain extent Mr. Gladstone's ancestry and family development. In the present connection we revert again to personal history, and in particular present a notice of his marriage, the establish­ment of his own family, and the status of that family in the last years of the statesman's life.

In 1839 Mr. Gladstone took in marriage Miss Catherine Glynne, daughter of Sir Stephen Richard Glynne. With her came the now cele­brated Hawarden Castle, in Flintshire. Here the statesman virtually spent his life with his growing family, but occupied during the greater part with his public duties at London. The home of the Gladstones became famous as the head of it rose to distinction and world-wide reputation.

The Hawarden estate has a history which, as events have determined, the English-speaking race is not likely to let die. The traditional accounts of Hawarden go back to the times of the Commonwealth, and then by another stage to the middle of the fifteenth century. It seems first to have belonged, in the reign of Henry VI, to Sir Thomas Stanley, one of the officers of the crown. Then it passed to the Derbys, with who it remained until James, Earl of Derby, was beheaded for royalism in 1651. With this event the estate went to Sergeant Glynne, to whom it was sold as a sequestered prop­erty. Nine years afterward, with the restoration of the House of Stuart, the heir of the Derbys was about to reclaim Hawarden; but Sergeant Glynne purchased whatever rights Charles, Earl of Derby, may have had, and the estate remained to the Glynnes, Sir William Glynne obtaining it in 1665. During the wars of the Commonwealth, the Royalists and the Republicans had the place by turns; but the Derbys never reoccupied Hawarden after the revolution.

As to the Glynne family, that came out of Wales. The name seems to be taken from Glyn Llyvon, in Carnarvonshire. The father of Sergeant Glynne, who obtained Hawarden in 1651, was a knight, who became a chief justice. One of his sons was a parliamentarian and a baronet. In 1727 Sir Stephen Glynne, second baronet of the name, built a house at Hawarden. Afterward Sir John Glynne, who married a daughter of the family of Ravenscroft, added to the estate the property called Broadlane. The Broad-lane House became the nucleus of Hawarden castle. The property was greatly improved by Sir John, who made the boundaries of the estate about what they are at the present time. More than seven thousand acres are included in the property, of which the park comprises about two hundred

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acres and the other improved grounds about five hundred acres additional. By a coincidence, the present Hawarden house was built in the year of the birth of Mr. Gladstone—as if to prepare a way for the future. Sir Stephen, father of Mrs. Gladstone, added many improvements in his time; and still greater changes and rectifications were made by Mr. Gladstone himself, in 1864.

The marriage of the statesman, when he had nearly completed his thirtieth year, was in every respect auspicious. The young wife was a lady of many accomplishments, noble character, fine native talents and a happy sympathy with the ambition of her husband. The union of the two proved to be prosperous and congenial in the highest measure. The Gladstone family as a whole came into public notice, and rose with the reputation of the statesman, until it became of world-wide note and most enviable reputation.

The marriage of Mr. Gladstone and the foundation of his own house was coincident in time with his first formal appearance in the world of letters. It was in 1837-38 that he wrote and in the latter year that he published his first book. It appeared in two volumes, under the title of The State in its Relations with the Church. Already in Parliament the powerful beginnings had been seen of the movement the logical end of which was the disestablishment of that great religious organization which since the Reformation had been so closely interwoven with the structure and spirit of civil society. The movement in question had spread alarm throughout conservative England. Every Tory must in the nature of the case declaim against it. Every upholder of the established order must lift up his voice in warning.

In Mr. Gladstone's case he was not at all satisfied with academic and parliamentary declamation. On the contrary, at the very time when he was mounting to distinction and falling in love, he sat down deliberately to consider and set forth the bottom principles in the existing ecclesiastical system. That system included the union of Church and State. It included the powerful patronage and support of the Church by the State. It virtually-made the State and the Church to be parts or organs of a common entity. Mr. Gladstone was not willing that this should simply be so, but he must dig down and discover the principles upon which the system was founded and the justification of it in right reason and good policy. He had studied all that former philosophers had written on the subject. He knew Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity and Warburton's Alliance of Church and State as if by heart. He was familiar with the writings of Locke, had carefully considered Filmer's Patriarchical Theory of Government, and Black-stone's dissertations on secular and sacred law. In like manner he had weighed whatever Paley and Bolingbroke and Dr. Chalmers had said on the

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great question of the relations of the State to the religious establishment in Great Britain. He had looked at the works of the authors referred to with a critical eye, and had discovered their insufficiency. None of the argu­ments seemed to satisfy his inquiring and honest mind. Therefore must he consider the whole question ab ovo, and find for himself the real foundation upon which the combined structure of English State and English Church rested. Therefore must he formulate new arguments, gathered more substantially out of the nature of things, out of right reason, and out of the particular conditions acknowledged in British society.

Thus arose the book on Church and State—a work much debated about in its own time, and regarded with curiosity to the present day. The author defined himself in the title as “W. E. Gladstone, Esq., Student of Christchurch, and M. P. for Newark." The first edition of the book went to the public in 1838; but the standard edition (the second) appeared in the beginning of 1839. The publication produced a distinct impression on the public mind. It was made the subject of Macaulay's memorable essay in the April number of the Edinburgh Review of that year. This essay appears in all the standard editions of Macaulay, and has thus been disseminated wher­ever English speech is heard. The fact is that a good portion of the repu­tation of Gladstone's first book has depended, at least for perpetuity, on the splendid criticism which the master of that art gave to the work on the appearance of the second edition.

We shall for this reason, in what we have to say about the first formal work published by Mr. Gladstone, refer quite fully to Macaulay's critique. It should be borne in mind that the author of the book became himself a noted reviewer. His articles soon found their way into the Quarterly Review, which publication, by the way, was another of those remarkable facts which date their origin to the great year 1809. Macaulay quickly recognized the fact that a new personal force had appeared in British society. He himself and that new personal force were diametrically opposed in nearly every particular of theory and life. Macaulay was at this time the great light of the Edinburgh coterie. He was a Whig of the Whigs, though it could hardly be said that Gladstone, Conservative as he was, was a Tory of Tories. His book, however, was conceived wholly from the Tory point of view. It was written as if from Oxford. It was virtually an Oxford production. Not that Mr. Gladstone did not himself produce it and stamp his genius on it, chapter by chapter, and line by line; but he himself was still, par excellence, an Oxford man, and he would fain furnish Oxford with a better philosophical foundation than she had ever yet pos­sessed for one of her favorite tenets, namely, the union of Church and State This condition must be borne in mind in estimating the force of Macau­lay's criticism. It was Whig against Tory. If the reviewer had not had a

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profound respect for the young man Gladstone, he would have treated him as he treated the poet Montgomery or the political adventurer Barere; but there is nothing of this kind in the great critic's review of Gladstone's book. On the contrary, Macaulay does himself proudly, and the author of the book respectfully, from beginning to end. “The author of this vol­ume," says he, " is a young man of unblemished character, and of distin­guished parliamentary talents, the rising hope of those stern and unbending Tories, who follow, reluctantly and mutinously, a leader whose experience and eloquence are indispensable to them, but whose cautious temper and moderate opinions they abhor. It would not be at all strange if Mr. Glad­stone were one of the most unpopular men in England. But we believe that we do him no more than justice when we say, that his abilities and his demeanor have obtained for him the respect and good will of all parties. His first appearance in the character of an author is therefore an interest­ing event; and it is natural that the gentle wishes of the public should go with him to his trial."

This paragraph has often been cited by the curious in political history as a striking example of the unforeseen that comes to pass in the affairs of men. Here we have him who was to become the greatest Liberal leader in the annals of England described—and truly described—as "the rising hope of those stern and unbending Tories, who follow, reluctantly and mutinously, a leader whose experience and eloquence are indispensable to them, but whose cautious temper and moderate opinions they abhor.'' The critic adds that Gladstone at that time might be regarded as one of the most unpopular men in England. This implies that he had no popularity or place with the Liberals of the day; certainly he had none with the Radi­cals. It also implies that while he was necessary to the young Tories in and out of Parliament, they really abhorred his moderate opinions. How great the change that was to ensue in the next three decades—a change by which all the existing relations in 1839 were to be utterly reversed!

Macaulay has stated the theory of Mr. Gladstone in his work on Church and State as resting on a single "great fundamental proposition— that the propagation of religious truth is one of the principal ends of gov­ernment, as government." The reviewer adds that if Mr. Gladstone does not prove this proposition, his whole argument vanishes away. This is correctly stated. Gladstone's book does attempt to support the proposition that the propagation of religious truth is one of the great ends, if not the greatest end, of human government, and that therefore the established reli­gious order in England is, so to speak, one of the functions of the British government, to be administered with as much care as if it were the army, or the polls, or the system of coast defenses, or the police, or the post, or the colonial administration of the empire.

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We will append two or three critical quotations from the book in which Mr. Gladstone expresses in his own lofty and at times somewhat vague manner the bottom doctrines which he would defend and make permanent in the polity of Great Britain. One of his arguments is to show that only communicants of the Church of England ought to be selected for office, and

that all others may be rightfully excluded. On this hypothesis he builds up the following argument:

“We may state the same proposition in a more general form, in which it surely must command universal assent. Wherever there is power in the universe, that power is the property of God, the King of that universe--his property of right, however for a time withholding or abused. Now this property is, as it were, realized, is used according to the will of the owner,

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when it is used for the purposes he has ordained, and in the temper of mercy, justice, truth, and faith, which he has taught us. But those principles never can be truly, never can be permanently entertained in the human breast, except by a continual reference to their source, and the supply of the divine grace. The powers, therefore, that dwells in individuals acting as a government, as well as those that dwell in individuals acting for themselves, can only be secured for right uses by applying to them a religion.

Further on, and in pursuance of the same line of argument which the author perceived he must make secure against all attack, he continues:

“Why, then, we come now to ask, should the governing body in a State profess a religion? First, because it is composed of individual men; and they, being appointed to act in a definite moral capacity, must sanctify their acts done in that capacity by the offices of religion, inasmuch as the acts cannot otherwise be acceptable to God, or anything but sinful and punish­able in themselves. And whenever we turn our face away from God in our conduct, we are living atheistically. ... In fulfillment, then, of his obli­gations as an individual, the statesman must be a worshiping man. But his acts are public—the powers and instruments with which he works are public—acting under and by the authority of the law, he moves at his word ten thousand subject arms. And because such energies are thus essentially public, and wholly out of the range of mere individual agency, they must be sanctified not only by the private personal prayers and piety of those who fill public situations, but also by public acts of the men composing the public body. They must offer prayer and praise in their public and collec­tive character—in that character wherein they constitute the organ of the nation, and wield its collected force. Wherever there is a reasoning agency, there is a moral duty and responsibility involved in it. The governors are reasoning agents for the nation, in their conjoint acts as such. And there­fore there must be attached to this agency, as that without which none of our responsibilities can be met, a religion. And this religion must be that of the conscience of the governor, or none."

Still again, the author, holding persistently to the fundamental doc­trines of his thesis, says :

"National will and agency are indisputably one, binding either a dis­sentient minority, or the subject body, in a manner that nothing but the recognition of the doctrine of national personality can justify. National honor and good faith are words in everyone's mouth. How do they less imply a personality in nations than the duty toward God, for which we now contend? They are strictly and essentially distinct from the honor and good faith of the individuals composing the nation. France is a person to us, and we to her. A willful injury done to her is a moral act, and a moral

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act quite distinct from the acts of all the individuals composing the nation, Upon broad facts like these we may rest, without resorting to the more technical proof which the laws afford in their manner of dealing with cor­porations. If, then, a nation have unity of will, have pervading sympathies, have the capability of reward and suffering contingent upon its acts, shall we deny its responsibility ; its need of a religion to meet that responsibility? . . . A nation, then, having a personality, lies under the obligation, like the individuals composing its governing body, of sanctifying the acts of that personality by the offices of religion, and thus we have a new and impera­tive ground for the existence of a State religion."

These extracts sufficiently elucidate the bottom grounds on which Mr, Gladstone built up with so much pains and cogency his system of Church and State. The argument was new. It was invented out of the philosophy of conditions existing in England, and existing still more widely in the abstract consideration of the nature and functions of human government, Macaulay must attack this argument, if at all, in its fundamental assump­tions; and that he does in the review which we have before us—a review as famous as the book to which it is directed.

The critic, like the author, went down to the bottom principle of the controversy. That principle involved, on the one hand, the assumption that government has for one of its leading functions the propagation of religious truth, and, on the other hand, the assumption that government is strictly a secular affair limited to the office of protecting the persons and estates of citizens from injury.

This question, we may remark, has now been virtually solved by the logic and process of events. History within this century has demonstrated that human government is a secular, and not a religious affair. True, there is a large class of well-meaning people, diffused in varying numbers and varying zeal through all the civilized nations, who still claim that religion is a subject about which government should be constantly concerning itself Such persons go through life in a ferment of excitement, the end and aim of which is to get the government to interfere more and more with the reli- gious and moral questions of men. But the class referred to are no longer potent as they once were. It has become a disorganized class, whose office is annoying, but hardly any longer disturbing to the course and manner of secular administration.

. A half a century ago, however, the case was different. Then it was still necessary to insist stoutly that government should be restricted to its normal and necessary functions, and that these functions had respect only to the secular conditions of society. This ground was boldly assumed by Mr. Macaulay in his review of Gladstone's book. Speaking of the two theories, the two possible objects of government, the one being the propagation of

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religious truth, and the other the protection of the persons and estates of citizens from injury, the critic says:

“No two objects more entirely distinct can well be imagined. The one object belongs wholly to the visible and tangible world in which we live; the other belongs to that higher world beyond the reach of our senses. The one belongs to this life; the other, to that which is to come."

Macaulay goes on, by parity of reasoning, to show what the Gladstonian principle would lead to if applied to society and its organized forces in gen­eral. He reaches the reduction ad absurdum as follows :

“Take any combination at random—the London and Birmingham Rail­way Company, for example—and observe to what consequences Mr. Glad­stone's arguments inevitably lead. Thus: ' Why should the directors of the railway company in their collective capacity profess a religion? First, because the collection is composed of individual men appointed to act in a definite moral capacity—bound to look carefully to the property, the limbs, and the lives of their fellow-creatures—bound to act diligently for their con­stituents—bound to govern their servants with humanity and justice—bound to fulfill with fidelity many important contracts. They must therefore sanc­tify their acts by the offices of religion, or these acts will be sinful and punishable in themselves. In fulfillment, then, of his obligations as an indi­vidual, the Director of the London and Birmingham Railway Company must be a worshiping man. But his acts are public. He acts for a body. He moves at his word ten thousand subject arms. And because these energies are out of the range of his mere individual agency they must be sanctified by public acts of devotion. The railway directors must offer prayer and praise in their public and collective character—in that character wherewith they constitute the organ of the company and wield its collected power. Wherever there is reasoning agency, there is moral responsibility. The directors are reasoning agents for the company. And therefore there must be attached to this agency, as that without which none of our responsibili­ties can be met, a religion. And this religion must be that of the con­science of the director himself, or none. There must be public worship and a test. No Jew, no Socinian, no Presbyterian, no Catholic, no Quaker, must be permitted to be the organ of the company and to wield its collected force.' Would Mr. Gladstone really defend this proposition? We are sure that he would not; but we are sure that to this proposition and to innumer­able similar propositions his reasoning inevitably leads." The brilliant and profound reviewer next proceeds as follows :

“Is it not perfectly clear that Mr. Gladstone's argument applies with exactly as much force to every combination of human beings for a common purpose, as to governments? Is there any such combination in the world, whether technically a corporation or not, which has not this collective

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personality from which Mr. Gladstone deduces such extraordinary consequences ? Look at banks, insurance offices, dock companies, canal com­panies, gas companies, hospitals, dispensaries, associations for the relief of the poor, associations for apprehending malefactors, associations of medical pupils for procuring subjects, associations of country gentlemen for keeping foxhounds, book societies, benefit societies, clubs of all ranks, from those which have lined Pall Mall and St. James' Street with their palaces, down to the ' free and easy ' which meets in the shabby parlor of a village inn. Is there a single one of these combinations to which Mr. Gladstone's argu­ment will not apply as well as to the State? In all these combinations-in the Bank of England, for example, or in the Athenaeum Club—the will and agency of the society are one, and bind the dissentient minority. The bank and the Athenaeum have a good faith and a justice different from the good faith and the justice of the individual members. The bank is a person to those who deposit bullion with it. The Athenaeum is a person to the butcher and the wine merchant. If the Athenaeum keeps money at the bank, the two societies are as much persons to each other as England and France. Either society may increase in prosperity; either may fall into difficulties. If, then, they have this unity of will ; if they are capable of doing and suffering good and evil, can we, to use Mr. Gladstone's words, 'deny their responsibility, or their need of a religion to meet that responsibility?' Joint-stock banks, therefore, and clubs 'having a personality lie under the necessity of sanctifying that personality by the offices of religion;' and thus we have ' a new and imperative ground ' for requiring all the directors and clerks of joint-stock banks, and all the officers of clubs to qualify by taking the sacrament."

From these paragraphs the reader may discover Macaulay's astuteness and logical fence in answering and undoing the bottom assumptions of Mr. Gladstone's book. Further on the critic says :

“It is perfectly true that it would be a very good thing if all the mem­bers of all the associations in the world were men of sound religious views. We have no doubt that a good Christian will be under the guidance of Christian principles in his conduct as director of a canal company or steward of a charity dinner. If he were, to refer to a case which we before put, a member of a stage coach company he would, in that capacity, remember that ' a righteous man regarded the life of his beast.' But it does not follow that every association of men must therefore, as such association professes a religion. It is evident that many great and useful objects can be attained in this world only by cooperation. It is equally evident that there cannot be efficient cooperation if men proceed on the principle that they must not cooperate for one object unless they agree about other objects Nothing seems to us more beautiful or admirable in our social system than

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the facility with which thousands of people, who perhaps agree only on a single point, combine their energies for the purpose of carrying that single point. We see daily instances of this. Two men, one of them obstinately prejudiced against missions, the other president of a missionary society, sit together at the board of an hospital and heartily concur in measures for the health and comfort of the patients. Two men, one of whom is a zealous supporter and the other a zealous opponent of the system pursued in Lan­caster's schools, meet at the Mendicity Society, and act together with the utmost cordiality. The general rule we take to be undoubtedly this, that it is lawful and expedient for men to unite in an association for the promo­tion of a good object, though they may differ with respect to other objects of still higher importance."

Further on in his argument against the principles of Gladstone Macau-lay continues:

“It is impossible to name any collection of human beings to which Mr. Gladstone's reasonings would apply more strongly than to an army. Where shall we find more complete unity of action than in an army? Where else do so many human beings implicitly obey one ruling mind? What other mass is there which moves so much like one man? Where is such tremen­dous power entrusted to those who command? Where is so awful a respon­sibility laid upon them? If Mr. Gladstone has made out, as he conceives, an imperative necessity for a State religion, much more has he made it out to be imperatively necessary that every army should, in its collective capacity, profess a religion. Is he prepared to adopt this consequence?

" On the morning of the 13th of August, in the year 1704, two great captains, equal in authority, united by close private and public ties, but of different creeds, prepared for a battle, on the event of which were staked the liberties of Europe. Marlborough had passed a part of the night in prayer, and before daybreak received the sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England. He then hastened to join Eugene, who had probably just confessed himself to a popish priest. The generals consulted together, formed their plan in concert, and repaired each to his own post. Marl­borough gave orders for public prayers. The English chaplains read the service at the head of the English regiments. The Calvinistic chaplains of the Dutch army, with heads on which hand of bishop had never been laid, poured forth their supplication in front of their countrymen. In the mean­time the Danes might listen to their Lutheran ministers, and Capuchins might encourage the Austrian squadrons, and pray to the Virgin for a blessing on the arms of the Holy Roman Empire. The battle commences, and these men of various religions all act like members of one body. The Catholic and the Protestant generals exert themselves to assist and to surpass each other. Before sunset the empire is saved. France has lost in

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a day the fruits of eighty years of intrigue and of victory. And the allies, after conquering together, return thanks to God separately, each after his own form of worship. Now, is this practical atheism? Would any man in his senses say that, because the allied army had unity of action and a common interest, and because a heavy responsibility lay on its chiefs, it was, therefore, imperatively necessary that the army should, as an army, have one established religion, that Eugene should be deprived of his com­mand for being a Catholic, that all the Dutch and Austrian colonels should be broken for not subscribing to the Thirty-nine Articles ? Certainly not. The most ignorant grenadier on the field of battle would have seen the absurdity of such a proposition. ' I know,' he would have said,' that the Prince of Savoy goes to mass and that our Corporal John cannot abide it, but what has the mass to do with the taking of the village of Blenheim ? The prince wants to beat the French, and so does Corporal John. If we stand by each other we shall most likely beat them. If we send all the papists and Dutch away Tallard will have every man of us.' Mr. Glad-stone himself, we imagine, would admit that our honest grenadier had the best of the argument; and if so, what follows? Even this: that all Mr. Gladstone's general principles about power and responsibility and person­ality and conjoint action must be given up, and that, if his theory is to stand at all, it must stand on some other foundation.

“We have now, we conceive, shown that it may be proper to form men into combinations for important purposes, which combinations shall have unity and common interests, and shall be under the direction of rulers entrusted with great power and lying under solemn responsibility, and yet that it may be highly improper that these combinations should, as such, profess any one system of religious belief, or perform any joint act of reli­gious worship. How, then, is it proved that this may not be the case with some of those great combinations which we call States? We firmly believe that it is the case with some States. We firmly believe that there are communities in which it would be as absurd to mix up theology with government as it would have been in the right wing of the allied army at Blenheim to commence a controversy with the left wing, in the middle of the battle, about purgatory and the worship of images."

In the further course of this remarkable criticism Macaulay takes up Gladstone's particular argument for the exclusion of Dissenters from public office. On this subject the debate waxes hot. The critic charges home upon the author the justification of doctrines which would lead to the repetition of all the religious barbarities of the Middle Ages. He succeeds in making appear in their true absurdity the humane exceptions and restraints which Mr. Gladstone would fain put on the naked barbarity of the legitimate results and deductions of his thesis.

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We may not here pursue with any considerable fullness the lengthy review which Macaulay presents of the vicious elements in Gladstone's book. He does not hesitate to say that on the whole it is one of the worst books ever written; that it is false, and that the doctrines are so pernicious that they would lead, if carried into practical operation, to the dissolution of society. At the same time he loses no opportunity to comment favor­ably on the high talents and character of the author, and of his possible and probable usefulness in the intellectual and public life of Great Britain. The severity of the strictures is everywhere tempered with respect to the source from which the book proceeded.

It is evident in the present reconsideration of the subject, after the lapse of more than a half a century—after allowing for the current prejudices of both the author and the critic, and for the disparity in the then literary experience and fame of the two men—that Macaulay succeeded in demol­ishing and making of no effect the elaborate structure which Gladstone had built up with so great pains, and, indeed, with so much learning. The author was in the wrong, and the critic mainly in the right. The present age would be much less patient with a book advocating the propagation of religious truth as one of the legitimate and necessary functions of government than was the age of which we are speaking—of the age when it was still doubtful whether Alfred Tennyson could write a good poem, and when the bones of Napoleon were still resting under the slab in Slane's valley.

We shall not pass, however, from the interesting topic of Gladstone's first appearance and defeat in the field of literature without noting with admiration the correspondence to which the episode gave rise between the author of The State in its Relations with the Church and the brilliant scholar before whose trenchant blade he went to the wall. Much later in life, namely, in 1868, Mr. Gladstone published his Chapter of Autobiography, in which he reviewed at some length the circumstances of the issuance of his first book, gave what justification he could in the retrospect, and renounced the rest, but in particular gave publicity to the two letters which were exchanged between himself and Macaulay on the occasion of the pub­lication by the latter of his celebrated article on " Church and State." These letters are here incorporated, not only for their own intrinsic interest, but for the lesson which they teach, and ought to teach, relative to the narrow-minded rancor and puny enmities which sometimes prevail among public and literary men in the United States. After fifty-six years it is still a matter of inspiration and good cheer to read these two letters of rising Tory and famous Whig, of young author and veteran critic, of political aspirant trying to bolster up the past, and experienced publicist advancing into the future and setting up the gonfalon of liberal­ism far out beyond the outposts. The first letter is from Mr. Gladstone,

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written coincidently with the appearance of Macaulay's criticism, and is as follows:

"6 Carlton Gardens, April 10, 1839. "Dear Sir: I have been favored with a forthcoming number of the Edinburgh Review, and I perhaps too much presume upon the bare acquaintance with you, of which alone I can boast, in thus unceremoniously assuming you to be the author of the article entitled ' Church and State,' and in offering you my very warm and cordial thanks for the manner in which you have treated both the work and the author on whom you deigned to bestow your attention. In whatever you write you can hardly hope for the privilege of most anonymous productions, a real concealment; but if it had been possible not to recognize you I should have ques­tioned your authorship in this particular case, because the candor and single-mindedness which it exhibits are, in one who has long been connected in the most distinguished manner with political party, so rare as to be almost incredible.

“I hope to derive material benefit, at some more tranquil season, from a consideration of your argument throughout. I am painfully sensible, whenever I have occasion to reopen the book, of its shortcomings, not only of the subject, but even of my own conceptions; and I am led to suspect that, under the influence of most kindly feelings, you have omitted to criticize many things besides the argument, which might fairly have come within your animadversion.

"In the meantime I. hope you will allow me to apprise you that on one material point, especially, I am not so far removed from you as you sup-pose. I am not conscious that I have said either that the Test Act should be repealed or that it should not have been passed; and though on such subjects language has many bearings which escape the view of the writer at the moment when the pen is in his hand, yet I think that I can hardly have put forth either of these propositions, because I have never entertained the corresponding sentiments. Undoubtedly I should speak of the pure abstract idea of Church and State as implying that they are coextensive; and I should regard the present composition of the United Kingdom as a deviation from that pure idea, but only in the same sense as all differences of religious opinion in the Church are a deviation from its pure idea, while I not only allow that they are permitted, but believe that (within limits) they were intended to be permitted. There are some of these deflections from abstract theory which appear to me allowable; and that of the admission of persons not holding the national creed into civil office is one which, in my view, must be determined by times and circumstances. At the same time I do not recede from any protest which I have made against the principle that religious differences are irrelevant to the question of competency

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for civil office; but I would take my stand between the opposite extremes— the one, that no such differences are to be taken into view ; the other, that all such differences are to constitute disqualifications.

“I need hardly say the question I raise is not whether you have mis­represented me; for, were I disposed to anything so weak, the whole internal evidence and clear intention of your article would confute me; indeed, I feel I ought to apologize for even supposing that you may have been mistaken in the apprehension of my meaning, and I freely admit, on the other hand, the possibility that, totally without my own knowledge, my language may have led to such an interpretation.

“In these lacerating times one clings to anything of personal kindness in the past, to husband it for the future, and if you will allow me I shall earnestly desire to carry with me such a recollection of your mode of deal­ing with the subject; inasmuch as the attainment of truth, we shall agree, so materially depends upon the temper in which the search for it is insti­tuted and conducted.

“I did not mean to have troubled you at so much length, and I have only to add that I am, with much respect, dear sir,

" Very truly yours, " T. B. Macaulay, Esq. W. E. Gladstone."

The reply of Macaulay to this letter of the man whose book he had brought, not only to the bar, but to the rack also, is equally interesting and honorable. He says on the very next day :

"3 Clarges Street, April 11, 1839.

"My Dear Sir: I have very seldom been more gratified than by the very kind note which I have just received from you. Your book itself, and everything that I heard about you, though almost all my informa­tion came—to the honor, I must say, of our troubled times—from people very strongly opposed to you in politics, led me to regard you with respect and good will, and I am truly glad that I have succeeded in marking those feelings. I was half afraid, when I read myself over again in print, that the button, as is too common in controversial fencing, even between friends, had once or twice come off the foil.

“I am very glad to find that we do not differ as widely as I had appre­hended about the Test Act. I can easily explain the way in which I was misled. Your general principle is that religious nonconformity ought to be a disqualification for civil office. In page 238 you say that the true and authentic mode of ascertaining conformity is the Act of Communion. I thought, therefore, that your theory pointed directly to a renewal of the Test Act. And I do not recollect that you have ever used any expression

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importing that your theory ought in practice to be modified by any consid­erations of civil prudence. All the exceptions that you mention are, as far as I remember, founded on positive contract—not one on expediency, even in cases where the expediency is so strong and so obvious that most states­men would call it necessity. If I had understood that you meant your rules to be followed out in practice only so far as might be consistent with the peace and good government of society I should certainly have expressed myself very differently in several parts of my article.

“Accept my warm thanks for your kindness, and believe me, with every good wish, my dear sir,

“Very truly yours, " W. E. Gladstone, Esq., M. P. T. B. Macaulay."

Mr. Gladstone's work, The State in its Relations with the Church, in so far as it had any ulterior motive, was intended to please and inspire the conservative scholars and thinkers of Great Britain. The author had Oxford particularly in mind. To that institution the book was dedicated in these words: "Inscribed to the University of Oxford; tried and not found wanting through the vicissitudes of a thousand years; in the belief that she is providentially designed to be a fountain of blessings spiritual, social, and intellectual, to this and to other countries, to the present an future times; and in the hope that the temper of these pages may be found not alien to her own."

Certainly the temper of the book and its fundamental assumptions were not alien to those of Oxford. The men of that university received the work almost as finality on the great theme which the author discussed. The better thinkers, however, of Toryism, as well as of the Liberal ranks, hesitated or drew back from the defense of principles the results of which must be as Macaulay had shown. The Quarterly Review took up the book as the Edinburgh had done, but from the conservative point of view. But the Quarterly, though praising much the work of the young author, did not ratify his arguments as such. The reviewer asserted that a popular government could not maintain a State religion against the wishes of the people. If the English nation as such should choose to renounce the Established Church, then the king, the lords and the Commons, singly or in union of effort, would be impotent to uphold the Church, and must indeed abandon it to its fate. The writer did not fail to observe that Gladstone had gone beyond his predecessors in seeking the bottom principles and sources of his argument. “He has," said the reviewer," seen through the weakness and fallacy of the line of reasoning pursued by Warburton and Paley. And he has most wisely abandoned the argument from expediency, which offers little more than an easy weapon to fence with, while no real danger is appre-

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hended; and has insisted chiefly on the claims of duty and truth—the only consideration which can animate and support men in a real struggle against false principles." The writer then proceeded, in the manner of Gladstone himself, to show that morality in government cannot be maintained without religion. This was a supposedly unassailable proposition with the conserva­- tive writers of the last quarter of the eighteenth, and the first half of the nine-­ teenth century. If the truth of this proposition be granted, then it should follow that the maintenance of religion is a proper function of government, and the support of the Church, in union with the State, the necessary method of enforcing the State's morality.

, Mr. Gladstone's first book still furnishes not a few remarkable studies for the student of political history. Among these no part is more interesting than those paragraphs in which the author sets forth his views respecting the duties of the State of Great Britain to uphold the Irish Church. Little did the writer foresee the great change which his own mind would undergo before he could become the champion of disestablishment. In the opening chapter of the second volume of The State in its Relations with the Church the author, speaking of the Irish Establishment, makes the following argu­ment for the maintenance of the existing order :

“The Protestant Legislature of the British Empire maintains in the

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possession of the Church property of Ireland the ministers of a creed professed, according to the parliamentary enumeration of 1835, by one ninth of its population, regarded with partial favor by scarcely another ninth, and disowned by the remaining seven. And not only does this anomaly meet us in full view, but we have also to consider and digest the fact that the maintenance of this Church for near three centuries in Ireland has been contemporaneous with a system of partial and abusive government varying in degree of culpability, but rarely, until of later years when we have been forced to look at the subject and to feel it, to be exempted in common fairness from the reproach of gross inattention (to say the very least) to the interests of a noble but neglected people.

“But however formidable at first sight these admissions, which I have no desire to narrow or to qualify, may appear, they in no way shake the foregoing arguments. They do not change the nature of truth and her capability and destiny to benefit mankind. They do not relieve government of its responsibility, if they show that that responsibility was once unfelt and unsatisfied. They place the Legislature of this country in the condition, as it were, of one called to do penance for past offenses ; but duty remains unaltered and imperative, and abates nothing of her demand on our services. It is undoubtedly competent, in a constitutional view, to the government of this country to continue the present disposition of Church property in Ireland. It appears not too much to assume that our imperial Legislature has been qualified to take, and has taken in point of fact, a sounder view of religious truth than the majority of the people of Ireland in their desti­tute and uninstructed state. We believe, accordingly, that that which we place before them is, whether they know it or not, calculated to be beneficial to them, and that, if they know it not now, they will know it when it is presented to them fairly. Shall we, then, purchase their applause at the expense of their substantial, nay, their spiritual interests?

“It does, indeed, so happen that there are also powerful motives on the other side concurring with that which has here been presented as paramount. In the first instance we are not called upon to establish a creed, but only to maintain an existing legal settlement, where our constitutional right is undoubted. In the second, political considerations tend strongly to recom­mend that maintenance. A common form of faith binds the Irish Protes­tants to us, while they, upon the other hand, are fast linked to Ireland; and thus they supply the most natural bond of connection between the countries. But if England, by overthrowing their Church, should weaken their moral position they would be no longer able, perhaps no longer willing, to counteract the desires of the majority tending, under the direc­tion of their leaders (however, by a wise policy, revocable from that fatal course), to what is termed national independence. Pride and fear, on the

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one hand, are, therefore, bearing up against more immediate apprehension and difficulty, on the other. And with some men these may be the funda­mental considerations; but it may be doubted whether such men will not flinch in some stage of the contest should its aspect at any moment become unfavorable."

His book on Church and State put Mr. Gladstone on the defensive during his life. He was constrained ever afterward to appear at intervals in the role of apologist for the doctrines set forth in his first work. He was obliged to ware right and ware left in defending as much as was at all defensible in his book. In course of time he openly disavowed much of it. Sometimes, when hard pressed, he would put forth an argument aptly conceived and well calculated to conciliate hostile criticism. His enemies urged that his doctrine of a conscience in the State led directly to the exclusion from all participation in public affairs those who had consciences of different scope and timber from that of the governing power. It led even, said they, to persecution for opinion's sake and the revival of the horrid vices of the Middle Ages.

To this Mr. Gladstone replied with not a little skill: “What political or relative doctrine is there which does not become an absurdity when pushed to its extreme? The taxing powers of the State, the prerogatives of the crown to dissolve Parliaments and to create peers, the right of the House of Commons to withhold supplies, the right of the subject, not to civil franchises only, but even to security of person and property—all these, the plain, uncontested rules of our Constitution, become severally monstrous and intolerable when they are regarded in a partial and exclusive aspect."

This argument was, indeed, adroit and powerful, but the antagonist was not satisfied. He returned to the onset, and showed that Mr. Gladstone's case of logical parity and reduction to the absurd would not hold; for in the case of taxation, that, under the British Constitution, rests not on some men, but on all alike; whereas Mr. Gladstone's doctrine, if pressed to its extreme, would exclude the Jew and the Quaker from office, and, therefore, would be a hardship to some only—not to all. This view of the case was certainly correct, and again the statesman's argument was undone.

We have already quoted from a Chapter of Autobiography, published by Mr. Gladstone in 1868. By that time he had become the successful leader in the movement for disestablishing the Irish Church. His position at the time was so utterly contrarious to the grounds which he had occupied aforetime that he felt constrained to publish what may be regarded as an amende honorable to the British public and all mankind. He had passed over to a position wholly opposed to that which he had formerly held, and must defend the change as well as he might. This he does in his Chapter

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of Autobiography. The work is essentially an explanation of the processes by which British society and British polity had been transformed, and how he had been transformed also. The introduction to his treatise is suffi­ciently explanatory :

"At a time," says he" when the Established Church of Ireland is on her trial it is not unfair that her assailants should be placed upon their trial too ; most of all if they have at one time been her sanguine defenders. But if not the matter of the indictment against them, at any rate that of their defense should be kept apart, as far as they are concerned, from the public controversy, that it may not darken or perplex the greater issue. It is in the character of the author of a book called The State in its Relations with the Church that I offer these pages to those who may feel a disposi­tion to examine them. They were written at the date attached to them, but their publication has been delayed until after the stress of the general election."

The writer then goes on to admit the great and glaring change which had taken place in himself with respect to the Established Church in Ireland. He urged that this change must be accounted for, explained, and understood as not attributable to eccentricity or perversity on his own part, but to the slow-moving and irresistible changes by which British society, and, indeed, all modern history, had been translated into another mood and temper. Moreover, Mr. Gladstone was not willing that the public question then on in England for the disestablishment of the Irish Church should suffer in its progress and solution by any of his own inconsistencies. The reader will bear in mind that we are here speaking of what Mr. Gladstone wrote thirty years after the date of his first book.

We have thus sufficiently pursued the story of the statesman's first appearance in literature, of the nature of the book which he published, of the reception which it met, of the pains which the author must afterward be at to apologize for it or explain it away. The publication of the book raised Mr. Gladstone in the estimation of all parties. His abilities were recognized in the intellectual world, and if his arguments were condemned by the best thinkers, they were condemned as much because they were the product of the past, of Toryism, and of Oxford University, as because they were the utterance of a rising statesman. With him as a person, as an author, as an aspiring politician, nearly all the intellectual folk of Great Britain sympathized, notwithstanding the abhorrence in which many held his doctrines. We may thus, at the beginning of the year 1840, contemplate William E. Gladstone as well advanced on that public career which he was destined to follow so long and so well, and see him establishing himself more and more in the good opinion of his countrymen.