And the letter ends with a plea that the faith which animated T. H. Green might fitly be described by the words of the Psalm, “my soul is athirst for God, for the living God.”
To this Mr. Gladstone replied immediately:
St. James’s Street.
April 16, 1888.
MY DEAR MRS. WARD,—
I do not at all doubt that your conception of Robert Elsmere includes much of what is expressed in the opening verses of Psalm 42. I am more than doubtful whether he could impart it to Elgood St., and I wholly disbelieve that Elgood St. could hand it on from generation to generation. You have much courage, but I doubt whether even you are brave enough to think that, fourteen centuries after its foundation, Elgood St. could have written the Imitation of Christ.
And my meaning about Mr. Green was to hint at what seems to me the unutterable strangeness of his passionately beseeching philosophy to open to him the communion for which he thirsted, when he had a better source nearer hand.
It is like a farmer under the agricultural difficulty who has to migrate from England and plants himself in the middle of the Sahara.
But I must abstain from stimulating you. At Oxford I sought to avoid pricking you and rather laid myself open—because I thought it not fair to ask you for statements which might give me points for reply.
Mr. Gladstone evidently believed he had been as mild as milk—he knew not the terror of his own “drawn brows!”
Mrs. Ward to Mr. Gladstone.