And yet, how nobly and unflinchingly did he bear that burden all through his life!
Mr. Gladstone has been discussed and appraised and honoured all the world over as a great statesman. To me, however, his supreme claim to greatness lay even beyond his genius, in his rare and irreproachable moral qualities. Cardinal Manning once remarked that Mr. Gladstone was a more fitting person to receive Holy Orders than himself. "In fact," added the Cardinal frankly, "he is as perfectly suited for the Church as I am unsuited for it!"
Already in his childhood, Gladstone seems to have exercised a beneficial influence over his companions. Bishop Hamilton, famed for his many virtues, and treated by his contemporaries almost as a saint, has admitted that little Willie Gladstone saved him from many an escapade at Eton!
Much later, in 1838, Gladstone wrote his famous work, The State in its Relations to the Church; in 1845 he gave up his position as chief of the Ministry in order to remain true to his religious convictions, and still later, in 1857, he opposed, with all his energy, the "Divorce Bill," on the ground of his belief that a union consecrated by the Church cannot be broken by human law.
I will not dwell upon a fact so well known as the sensation produced by the great English statesman's pamphlet on The Vatican. I will only say that it was the general public, and not Mr. Gladstone's personal friends, who were so astonished at the views expounded in that pamphlet. In his own intimate circle, I constantly heard him repeat his opinion that "Roman Catholicism is the systematic tyranny of the priest over the layman, the Bishop over the priest, and the Pope over the Bishop."
Feeling in his soul, on the one hand, almost a horror of Rome, and on the other a deep religious inspiration, Mr. Gladstone's sympathy with and admiration for the great cause of the Old Catholics were almost a foregone conclusion. He first came in contact with this movement through his friend Döllinger, and he never ceased to express his confidence in its ultimate success. Whenever he spoke of the Old Catholics, and he did so very frequently, it was always to express himself about them in terms of deep sympathy and approval, as of true Christians who strive, with such inspired faith and steadfast purpose, to propagate the doctrines of the original Christian Church, robbed of all the human errors that have crept into it and are represented by the ambitious and tyrannical Papacy of the Vatican. Mr. Gladstone was one of the first subscribers to the Revue internationale de Théologie, which always occupied a place of honour in his library, and which, in January, 1895, published his long letter to me on the subject of Old Catholicism and Döllinger. This letter is reproduced in my pamphlet: "Christ or Moses? Which?" For Döllinger, Mr. Gladstone had the warmest admiration and friendship, looking upon him as one of the most remarkable men in the contemporary Christian Church.
The following letter from Mr. Gladstone will, I think, have some interest for my readers:—
HAWARDEN CASTLE, CHESTER,
Oct. 6, 1894.
MY DEAR MADAME NOVIKOFF,
I can hardly ever write anything upon suggestion, what is more, is that I have before me continuous operations, long ago planned, and must refrain from those that are fragmentary. So I can undertake nothing new.