In 1895 it was announced that Mr. Gladstone had written a book on ‘The Psalter, according to the Prayer-book Version.’ It was commenced by Mr. Gladstone many years before, but it was not till his retirement from office that he found time to finish it. He also compiled a Concordance, and added a series of notes on the Psalter. In the same year the address on the Armenian question, which was delivered by Mr. Gladstone at Chester, was republished in pamphlet form by Mr. Fisher Unwin.
I may not omit to refer to Mr. Gladstone’s utterance on the first chapter of Genesis—that sublime exordium to the Bible—that its truth is in all respects as fresh to-day as it was in the hour of its first enunciation, and that it links the Church of Adam, Abraham, and Moses in living fellowship and unity to the Church of to-day.
In 1894 Mr. Gladstone republished certain papers, which had already appeared in various periodicals, under the title of ‘Studies Subsidiary to the Works of Bishop Butler.’ He ridicules critics such as Matthew Arnold, who held that the ‘Analogy’ is dead, with the eighteenth-century Deism it opposed. He labours to show that it is as applicable to the religious problems of to-day as to those a hundred years old. The ‘Analogy,’ he holds, is one of the finest of intellectual disciplines. In the study of Butler’s works the student finds himself in an intellectual palæstra, where his best exertions are required thoroughly to grapple with his teacher. Mainly, education is a process of wrestling, and it is best to wrestle with the highest masters. The chapters on the Censors of Butler shows all the ex-Premier’s skill at fence. On the subject of the Theology of Butler, Mr. Gladstone attributes his habit of drawing it straight from the Scriptures, with little reference to authorities, as due to his Nonconformist education. In reply to the charges that the ‘Analogy’ tended to Romanism, he asks for a single known case where the study of Butler had led to Rome. The chapter on the influence of Butler is of great interest. In his second part Mr. Gladstone is occupied largely with an elaborate discussion, on the lines laid down by Butler, on the future life, and the condition of man therein. He is especially severe on the Universalists. He regards a period of future discipline for imperfect natures, ‘not without an admixture of salutary and accepted grace,’ as in accord with both faith and reason. The remaining chapters on Determinism, Teleology, Miracle, and Probability are the toughest in the whole book, and are as hard to understand as Butler himself. On miracles Mr. Gladstone follows the orthodox lines.
Mr. Gladstone’s latest utterances on the subject of Christianity appeared in 1895. He pleads for an eternity of punishment. His latest article on the subject appeared in the American Pictorial Bible. The following passage, in which he surveys the world, is worth reprinting: ‘The Christian religion,’ he says, ‘is for mankind the greatest of all phenomena. It is the dominant religion of the inhabitants of this planet in at least two important respects. It commands the largest number of professing adherents. If we estimate the population of the globe at 1,400,000,000—and some would state it at a higher figure—between 400 and 500 of these, or one-third of the whole, are professing Christians; and at every point of the circuit the question is not one of losing ground, but of gaining it. The fallacy which accepted the vast population of China as Buddhists in the mass has been exploded, and it is plain that no other religion approaches the numerical strength of Christianity—doubtful, indeed, if there be any other which reaches one-half of it. The second of the particulars now under view is perhaps more important. Christianity is the religion in the command of whose professors is lodged a proportion of power far exceeding its superiority of numbers, and this power is both moral and material. In the area of controversy it can be said to have hardly an antagonist. Force, secular or physical, is accumulated in the hands of Christians in a proportion almost overwhelming, and the accumulation of influence is not less remarkable than that of force. This is not surprising, for all the elements of influence have their home within the Christian precinct. The art, the literature, the systematic industry, invention, and commerce—in one word, the forces of the world are almost wholly Christian. In Christendom alone there seems to be an inexhaustible energy of world-wide expansion.’
In conclusion, we give a couple of extracts from Mr. Gladstone’s more recent articles of universal interest. In one he makes a noble contribution to the praise of books. ‘Books are,’ he says, ‘the voices of the dead. They are a main instrument of communion with the vast human procession of the other world. They are the allies of the thought of men. They are in a certain sense at enmity with the world. Their work is, at least, in the two higher compartments of our threefold life. In a room well filled with them no one has felt or can feel solitary. Second to none, as friends to the individual, they are first and foremost among the compages, the bonds and rivets of the race.’ But books want housing and arranging, and they are multiplying so rapidly that they threaten to get beyond all control. In an article in the Nineteenth Century, from which we quote the above, Mr. Gladstone, with a light-hearted relish of the subject it is pleasant to see, gives some of his ideas on the subject of arrangement.
Another extract will give us his ideas of the Jews. He thinks that the purport of the Old Testament can be best summed up in the words that it is a history of sin and redemption. After explaining that the narrative of the Fall is in accordance with the laws of a grand and comprehensive philosophy, and that the objections taken to it are the product of narrower and shallower modes of thought, he proceeds, passing by the story of the Deluge and the dispersion, to consider the selection of Abraham. ‘Why,’ he asks, ‘were the Jews selected as the chosen people of God?’ Not, he thinks, because of their moral superiority. He contrasts the Jewish ethics and those of the Greeks, considerably to the detriment of the former, and then sums up the matter as follows: ‘Enough has perhaps been said to show that we cannot claim as a thing demonstrable a great moral superiority for the Hebrew line generally over the whole of the historically known contemporary races. I, nevertheless, cannot but believe that there was an interior circle, known to us by its fruits in the Psalter and the prophetic books, of morality and sanctity altogether superior to what was to be found elsewhere, and due rather to the pre-Mosaic than to the Mosaic religion of the race. But it remains to answer with reverence the question, Why, if not for a distinctly superior morality, nor as a full religious provision for the whole wants of man, why was the race chosen as a race to receive the promises, to guard the oracles, and to fulfil the hopes of the great Redemption?
‘The answer may, I believe, be conveyed in moderate compass. The design of the Almighty, as we everywhere find, was to prepare the human race, by a varied and a prolonged education, for the arrival of the great Redemption. The immediate purposes of the Abrahamic selection may have been to appoint, for the task of preserving in the world the fundamental bases of religion, a race which possessed qualifications for that end decisively surpassing those of all other races. We may easily indicate two of these fundamental bases. The first was the belief in one God. The second was the knowledge that the race had departed from His laws—without which knowledge how should they welcome a Deliverer whose object it was to bring them back? It may be stated with confidence that among the dominant races of the world the belief in one God was speedily destroyed by polytheism, and the idea of sin faded gradually but utterly away. Is it audacious to say that what was wanted was a race so endowed with the qualities of masculine tenacity and persistency, as to hold over these all-important truths until that fulness of time when, by and with them, the complete design of the Almighty would be revealed to the world? A long experience of trials beyond all example has proved since the Advent how the Jews, in this one essential quality, have surpassed every other people upon earth. A marvellous and glorious experience has shown how among their ancestors before the Advent were kept alive and in full vigour the doctrine of belief in one God and the true idea of sin. These our Lord found ready to His hand, essential preconditions of His teaching. And in the exhibition of this great and unparalleled result of a most elaborate and peculiar discipline we may perhaps recognise, sufficiently for the present purpose, the office and work of the Old Testament.’
In another article Mr. Gladstone objects to Universalism as a contradiction of Divine utterance. He writes: ‘To presume on overriding the express declarations of the Lord Himself delivered upon His own authority, is surely to break up revealed religion in its very ground-work, and to substitute for it a flimsy speculation spun like a spider’s web by the private spirit, and as little capable as that web of bearing the strain by which the false is to be severed from the true.’ Speaking of the theory which denies future punishment, he says: ‘What is this but to emasculate all the sanctions of religion, and to give wickedness, already under a too feeble restraint, a new range of license?’
It is vain to seek to chronicle Mr. Gladstone’s publications. Even at the time of his last illness he was said to have been engaged in a work on the Fathers. His writings fill six columns in the library catalogue of the British Museum.