rry it fairly; let them win and wear
her (God forbid, however); but if she has a heart true to the faith her
hand will be stronger ten times over than it has been heretofore, in
doing battle.... Nor am I saddened by the pamphlet of a certain Mr. ----
which I have been reading to-day. It has more violence than venom, and
also much more violence than strength. I often feel how hard it is on
divines to be accused of treachery and baseness, because they do not,
like _us_, get it every day and so become case-hardened against it.'

In parliament the craft laboured heavily in cross-seas. 'I have never
known,' says its pilot, 'a measure so foolishly discussed in committee.'
Nor was oil cast upon the waters by its friends. By the end of May Mr.
Gladstone and Lord John saw that they must take in canvas. At this point
a new storm broke. It was impossible that a measure on such a subject
could fail to awaken the ever ready quarrel between the two camps into
which the English establishment, for so many generations, has so
unhappily divided the life of the nation. From the first, the protestant
dissenters had been extremely sore at the absence from the bill of any
provision for their admission to the remodelled university. Bright, the
most illustrious of them, told the House of Commons that he did not care
whether so pusillanimous and tinkering an affair as this was passed or
not. Dissenters, he said with scorn, are expected always to manifest too
much of those inestimable qualities which are spoken of in the Epistle
to the Corinthians: 'To hope all things, to believe all things, and to
endure all things.'

More discredit than he deserved fell upon Mr. Gladstone for this
obnoxious defect. In announcing the commission of inquiry four years
before, Lord John as prime minister had expressly said that the
improvement of the universities should be treated as a subject by
itself, and that the admission of dissenters ought to be reserved for
future and separate consideration. Writing to Mr. Gladstone (Jan. 1854)
he said, 'I do not want to stir the question in this bill,' but he
would support a proposal in a separate bill by which the halls might be
the means of admitting dissenters. Mr. Gladstone himself professed to
take no strong line either way; but in a parliamentary case of this kind
to take no line is not materially different from a line in effect
unfriendly. Arthur Stanley pressed him as hard as he could. 'Justice to
the university,