exclusive religion of the State, the religion of the minority. The religious instruction which the ruler ought, in his public capacity, to patronise, is the instruction from which he, in his conscience, believes that the people will learn the most good with the smallest mixture of evil. It is not necessarily his own religion that he will select. He may prefer the doctrines of the Church of England to those of the Church of Scotland, but he would not force the former upon the inhabitants of Scotland. These were the objections raised by Macaulay, though he goes on to state the conditions under which an established Church might be retained with advantage. There are many institutions which, being set up, ought not to be rudely pulled down.

In addition to the adverse comments it elicited from eminent Dissenters, the dissertation was dealt with by the Quarterly Review from yet another standpoint. Here, the writer remarked that as a necessary consequence of a profounder philosophy than that of Coleridge and similar thinkers, Mr. Gladstone had taken far higher grounds in his argument than had been occupied by the defenders of the Church for many years. He has 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 apprehended; 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 reviewer, nevertheless, manifested considerable divergence from some of Mr. Gladstone's theories, and he observed that a popular Government cannot long maintain a religion which is opposed to the feelings of the nation. If the people of this country combined to attack the Church, the King, Lords, and Commons would be compelled to abandon it. Mr. Gladstone supported this view when, thirty years later, he disestablished the Irish Church. The Quarterly reviewer proceeded to argue that morality in a State cannot be established without religion, that religion should be the object of Government, and that to preserve the Church with the State the great body of the nation must be brought back to it.

Commenting upon the style in which Mr. Gladstone's first work was written, the same writer eulogised its singular vigour, depth of thought, and eloquence. Mr. Gladstone is evidently not an ordinary character; though it is to be hoped that many others are now forming themselves in the same school with him to act hereafter upon the same principles. And the highest compliment which we can pay him is to show that we believe him to be what a statesman and philosopher should be-indifferent to his own reputation for talents, and only anxious for truth and right.' Lord Macaulay observed upon the same question of style, Mr. Gladstone seems to us to be, in many respects, exceedingly well qualified for philosophical investigation. His mind

is of large grasp; nor is he deficient in dialectical skill. But he does not give his intellect fair play. There is no want of light, but a great want of what Bacon would have called dry light. Whatever Mr. Gladstone sees is refracted and distorted by a false medium of passions and prejudices. His style bears a remarkable analogy to his mode of thinking, and, indeed, exercises great influence on his mode of thinking. His rhetoric, though often good of its kind, darkens and perplexes the logic which it should illustrate. Half his acuteness and diligence, with a barren imagination and a scanty vocabulary, would have saved him from almost all his mistakes. He has one gift most dangerous to a speculator: a vast command of a kind of language, grave and majestic, but of vague and uncertain import-of a kind of language which affects us much in the same way in which the lofty diction of the Chorus of Clouds affected the simple-hearted Athenian.' It is a dangerous and transparent haze, the critic complains, like that through which the sailor sees capes and mountains of false sizes, and in false bearings-more perilous than utter darkness. Mr. Gladstone had of course the faults of rhetoric and of argument almost inseparable from youth, but this vigorous denunciation of his style by Lord Macaulay, accurate as it is in many respects, probably owed some of its point to the critic's antipathy to his theories. As regards the theories themselves, it is not within our province, nor is it our purpose, to defend them. Their propounder, as we shall presently

see, has himself in large measure abandoned them.

The criticisms of Lord Macaulay upon Mr. Gladstone's work led to an interesting correspondence between these two distinguished men, which we extract from Mr. Trevelyan's Life of his relative. Writing to Napier early in 1839, Macaulay said:- By the bye, I met Gladstone at Rome. We walked and talked together in St. Peter's during the best part of an afternoon. He is both a clever and an amiable man.' These extracts from his lordship's diary also we find :-' I bought Gladstone's book; a capital Shrove-tide cock to throw at. Almost too good a mark.' 'Feb. 13. I read, while walking, a good deal of Gladstone's book. The Lord hath delivered him. into our hand. I think I see my way into a popular, and, at the same time, gentlemanlike, critique.' 'Home, and thought about Gladstone. In two or three days I shall have the whole in my head, and then my pen will go like fire.' It says much for Mr. Gladstone's ability that, at the age of thirty, he should thus have been able to fix the attention of the first of critics upon his work. On the 10th of April, 1839, Lord Macaulay received a letter from Mr. Gladstone, who in generous terms acknowledged the courtesy, and, with some reservations, the fairness of his article. 'I have been favoured,' wrote Mr. Gladstone, with a copy of the 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 recognise you, I should have questioned your authorship in this particular case, because the candour 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. In these lacerating times one clings to everything 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 a subject upon which the attainment of truth, we shall agree, so materially depends upon the temper in which the search for it is instituted and conducted.' How much this letter pleased Macaulay, Mr. Trevelyan remarks, is indicated by the fact of his having kept it unburned-a compliment which, except in this single instance, he never paid to any of his correspondents. 'I have very seldom,' he writes, in reply to Mr. Gladstone, '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 honour, 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.' The emphatic allusions which both these letters contain to the prevailing bitterness and injustice of party feeling have an unfamiliar sound to men of later times, when the House of Commons was pervaded by a more genial atmosphere than that which prevailed in 1839. The truth, no doubt, is that Lord Macaulay, even at this early date, had dived deeper into Mr. Gladstone's character than most men of his time (including even his political sympathisers), and foresaw the great space he was certain sooner or later to fill in the public eye. It is gratifying to know that before his death, in 1859, Lord Macaulay saw something of the great strides which the future Liberal leader was destined to make in his religious and political ideas.

In 1840 Mr. Gladstone followed up his defence of the union of Church and State by the publication of another work on a subject nearly related thereto, entitled Church Principles considered in their Results. This was written beneath the shades of Hagley,' and dedicated 'in token of sincere affection' to the author's life-long friend and relative Lord Lyttelton. In a preli

minary chapter Mr. Gladstone points out that periods of reaction and variation may be expected in religion, compatibly with the permanence of the Faith. The Church was at that moment going through a period of transition, the old forms battling with the new. Indicating the course of procedure in his new treatise, he says that he shall attempt, in the first instance, to present a familiar or partial representation of the moral characteristics and effects of those doctrines which are now perhaps more than ever felt in the English Church to be full of intrinsic value, and which likewise appear to have much special adaptation to the circumstances of the time. These characteristics he defines more particularly to be (leaving out points for the most part minor) the doctrine of the visibility of the Church, of the apostolical succession in the ministry, of the authority of the Church in matters of faith, of the things signified in the sacraments. Having dealt with the right of private judgment in his previous work, he should forbear from re-opening that topic. Before coming to his real subjectmatter, however, Mr. Gladstone devotes a chapter to Rationalism, endeavouring to define the proper work of the understanding, and also indicating the limits of its province. This the writer understands to be the true view of Rationalism: That Rationalism is generally taken to be a reference of Christian doctrine to the human understanding as its measure and criterion. That, in truth, it means a reference of the Gospel to the depraved standard of the actual

human nature, and by no means to its understanding, properly so called, which is an instrumental faculty, and reasons and concludes upon the Gospel according to the mode in which our affections are disposed towards it. That the understanding is incompetent to determine the state of the affections, but is, on the contrary, governed by them in respect to the elementary ideas of religion. That, therefore, to rely upon the understanding, misinformed as it is by depraved affections, as our adequate instructor in matters of religion, is most highly irrational. That, without any prejudice to these conclusions, the understanding has a great function in religion, and is a medium of access to the affections, and may even correct their particular impulses.'

He then proceeds to treat of the Church, the sacraments, the apostolical succession, the specific claim of the Church of England, and Church principles in relation to existing circumstances. With regard to the re-conversion of England to Rome-earnestly desired by some-Mr. Gladstone asks,

England, which with ill grace, and ceaseless efforts at remonstrance, endured the yoke when Rome was in her zenith, and when the powers of thought were but here and there evoked-will the same England, afraid of the truth which she has vindicated, or even with the licence which has mingled like a weed with its growth, recur to that system in its decrepitude which she repudiated in its vigour?' If the Church of England should be worsted, she will be worsted not by an undistinguishing