He sold his collection of china and his Wedgwood ware.[324] He despatched his books to Hawarden. He can hardly have resolved on retirement that should be effective and complete, or else he must have arranged to quit the House of Commons. In his diary he entered (March 30, 1875):—
Views about the future and remaining section of my life. In outline they are undefined but in substance definite. The main point is this: that setting aside exceptional circumstances which would have to provide for themselves, my prospective work is not parliamentary. My ties will be slight to an assembly with whose tendencies I am little in harmony at the present time; nor can I flatter myself that what is called the public out of doors is more sympathetic. But there is much to be done with the pen, all bearing much on high and sacred ends, for even Homeric study as I view it, is in this very sense of high importance; and what lies beyond this is concerned directly with the great subject of belief.
To Mrs. Gladstone he wrote (May 19, 1875): “I am feeling as it were my way towards the purposes of the rest of my life. It will I dare say clear by degrees. For the general business of the country, my ideas and temper are thoroughly out of harmony with the ideas and temper of the day, especially as they are represented in London.”
The movement of negation had been in full swing for a dozen years before the force and weight of it had, amid the stress and absorption of daily business, reached his inner mind. In May 1872, in a speech as member of the council of King's College—“averse from, and little used to platform speaking,” as he described himself to Manning—he used some strong language about those who promulgate as science what is not science and as religion what is not religion; but he took care to sever himself from the recent Roman decrees, which “seemed much to resemble the proclamation of a [pg 524] perpetual war against the progress and the movement of the human mind.”[325] In December 1872, he caused a marked sensation by an address at Liverpool, in which he spoke of Strauss's book on New and Old Belief.[326] He had become a member of the metaphysical society, where eminent representatives of every faith and of no faith discussed every aspect of the foundations of human creeds. He was of too masculine and energetic a cast of mind to feel mere shock as he listened to Huxley, Tyndall, Clifford, Harrison, firmly arguing materialism or positivism or agnosticism or other unhistoric forms. That his whole soul was energetically oppugnant, I need not say. His reverence for freedom never wavered. He wrote to an editor who had criticised his Liverpool address (Jan. 3, 1873):—
In the interest of my address, I wish to say that not a word to my knowledge fell from me limiting the range of free inquiry, nor have I ever supposed St. Paul to say anything so silly as “Prove all things: but some you must not prove.” Doubtless some obscurity of mine, I know not what, has led to an error into which the able writer of the article has fallen, not alone.
To the Duke of Argyll he wrote:—
Dec. 28, '72.—I have been touching upon deep and dangerous subjects at Liverpool. Whether I went beyond my province many may doubt. But of the extent of the mischief I do not doubt any more than of its virulence. All that I hear from day to day convinces me of the extension of this strange epidemic, for it is not, considering how it comes, worthy of being called a rational or scientific process. Be it however, what it may, we politicians are children playing with toys in comparison to that great work of and for manhood, which has to be done, and will yet be done, in restoring belief.
Sir Robert Morier sent him from Munich Frohschammer's reply to Strauss. “If I understand him aright,” said Mr. Gladstone, “he is a Unitarian, minus Miracle and Inspiration.” The whole book seemed to him able, honest, and diligent:—
But, he adds, I am one of those who think the Christianity of Frohschammer (as I have described it) is like a tall tree scientifically prepared for the saw by the preliminary process, well known to wood-cutters, of clearing away with the axe all projecting roots, which as long as they remained rendered the final operation impossible. This first process leaves the tree standing in a very trim condition, much more mathematical in form, as it is more near a cylinder, than in its native state. The business of the saw, when the horse and the man arrive, is soon accomplished.
To his article on ritualism he prefixed as motto two short lines of Pindar, about days that are to come being wisest witnesses.[327] In spite of retreat, it was impossible that he should forget the vast responsibility imposed upon him, both by his gifts and by the popular ascendency into which they had brought him. His was not the retreat of self-indulgence, and the days that were to come speedily brought him duties that were to bear him far into regions of storm and conflict now unforeseen. Meanwhile, with occasional visits to Westminster, he lived even and industrious days at Hawarden, felling trees, working at Greek mythology and ethnology, delighting in the woods and glades of the park, above all delighting in the tranquillity of his “temple of peace.” Besides being the bookroom of a student, this was still a far-shining beacon in the popular eye. If sages, scholars, heroes, saints, with time's serene and hallowed gravity looked upon him from their shelves, yet loud echoes sounded in his ear from roaring surges of an outer world—from turbid ebb and flow of all the struggle and clamorous hopes and half-blind mysterious instincts of the nations.