At the same time, I think it an evil in many ways. Girls and widows are Tories, and channels of clerical influence, and it is not for them so much as for married women that your argument tells. If we ever have manhood suffrage—dissociating power from property altogether, it will be difficult to keep out wives. The objections to voting wives are overwhelming.
*****
You open a delightful vista of Colleges and Chapels at Cambridge. It is not so easy to answer quite definitely. If the Reform Bill, read a second time before Easter, is sent up by Whitsuntide, the division in the Lords will be early in June. My difficulty would then be that, having to come in June, I could hardly come to England in May. Supposing my Reform vote to be wanted only after Midsummer, then my probable plan would be to come to London by the middle of May; and I should be at your orders for Cambridge any time between 20th and 30th May....
Subject to these conditions, I shall be only too happy to escort you down to the Sidgwicks', to whom, please present my best thanks. If Maine is there, I dare say we can count on a luncheon there.... I am talking of myself and own plans; but all the time I am thinking of your cares and troubles, of which you say so little. If you can send me a line of good news to Rome, I shall be so glad.
La Madeleine June 19, 1884
You will be careful, another time, I hope, as to the enclosures you forward, seeing how long a reply they involve, and how great a delay. The difficulty which prolongs and has delayed my letter will be very apparent to you before you reach the end.
First, as to the personal question:—
It was not my purpose to depreciate Canon Liddon. I came over with the highest opinion of him—an opinion higher perhaps than Dr. Döllinger's, or even than Mr. Gladstone's, whose ostensible preference for divines of less mark has sometimes set me thinking. Impressed by his greatness, not as a scholar to be pitted against Germans, but as a spiritual force, and also by a certain gracious nobleness of tone which ought to be congenial, I tried, at Oxford and in London, to ascertain whether there is some element of weakness that had escaped me.
Evidently, Liddon is in no peril from the movement of modern Science. He has faced those problems and accounted for them. If he is out of the perpendicular, it is because he leans the other way.
The question would rather be whether a man of his sentiments, rather inclined to rely on others, would be proof against the influence of Newman, or of foreign theologians like Newman.