The House of Commons is hardly attractive to an irregular and perfunctory attendant; and Mr. Gladstone's thoughts [pg 500] all turned to other fields. To Mrs. Gladstone he wrote early in April:—
The anti-parliamentary reaction has been stronger with me even than I anticipated. I am as far as possible from feeling the want of the House of Commons. I could cheerfully go there to do a work; but I hope and pray to be as little there as possible, except for such an aim. In London I think we were too much hustled to speak leisurely or effectually of the future. It will open for us by degrees. I shall be glad when the matter of money, after all a secondary one, is disentangled, but chiefly because it seems to put pressure upon you. I spoke to Stephen about these matters on Saturday; he was kind, reasonable, and in all ways as satisfactory as possible. There is one thing I should like you to understand clearly as to my view of things, for it is an essential part of that view. I am convinced that the welfare of mankind does not now depend on the state or the world of politics; the real battle is being fought in the world of thought, where a deadly attack is made with great tenacity of purpose and over a wide field, upon the greatest treasure of mankind, the belief in God and the gospel of Christ.
In June Sir Stephen Glynne died,—“a dark, dark day.” “My brother-in-law,” wrote Mr. Gladstone at a later date, “was a man of singular refinement and as remarkable modesty. His culture was high and his character one of deep interest. His memory was on the whole decidedly the most remarkable known to me of the generation and country. His life, however, was retired and unobtrusive; but he sat in parliament, I think, for about fifteen years, and was lord-lieutenant of his county.”
I thank you much—Mr. Gladstone said to the Duke of Argyll—for your kind note. Your sympathy and that of the duchess are ever ready. But even you can hardly tell how it is on this occasion needed and warranted. My wife has lost the last member of a family united by bonds of the rarest tenderness, the last representative of his line, the best of brothers, who had ever drawn closer to her as the little rank was thinned. As for me, no one can know what our personal relations were, without knowing [pg 501] the interior details of a long family history, and efforts and struggles in common carried on through a long series of years, which riveted into the closest union our original affection. He was a very rare man, but we grieve not for him; he sleeps the sleep of the just. The event is a great one also to the outward frame of our life here.[310]
Ecclesiastical Debate
In the same letter he says it is most painful to him to be dragged into ecclesiastical turmoil, as for example by the Scotch patronage bill, which he considers precipitate, unwise, and daring, or the bill directed against the endowed schools commissioners, of whom his brother-in-law, Lord Lyttelton, was one. In the last case he acted as a leader of an organised party, but in the more important instance of a bill devised, as Mr. Disraeli said, to put down ritualism, his dissent from most of those around him fulfilled all the anticipations that had pointed to retirement. The House was heartily in favour of the bill, and what is called the country earnestly supported it, though in the cabinet itself at least four ministers were strenuously hostile. Mr. Gladstone writes to his wife a trenchant account of his vigorous dealing with a prominent colleague who had rashly ventured to mark him for assault. He sent word to the two archbishops that if they carried a certain amendment he should hold himself “altogether discharged from maintaining any longer the establishment of the church.” He wrote to Lord Harrowby when the recess came:—
I think, or rather I am convinced, that the effect either of one or two more ecclesiastical sessions of parliament such as the last, or of any prolonged series of contentious proceedings under the recent Act, upon subjects of widespread interest, will be to disestablish the church. I do not feel the dread of disestablishment which you may probably entertain: but I desire and seek so long as standing ground remains, to avert, not to precipitate it.
To another correspondent—
Individually I have serious doubts whether the whole of the penal proceedings taken in this country with respect to church [pg 502] matters from the day of Dr. Hampden downwards, have not done considerably more harm than good. There is no doubt at all that all the evils, of whatever kind, at which they were aimed, exist at this moment among us in a far more aggravated shape than when they began.... My object and desire has ever been and still is, to keep the church of England together, both as a church and as an establishment. As a church, I believe she is strong enough, by virtue of the prayer-book, to hold together under all circumstances; but as an establishment, in my opinion, she is not strong enough to bear either serious secession or prolonged parliamentary agitation.
Finally, in a letter dated from Whittinghame (Nov. 17)—