e Articles
renounced no single Roman doctrine. This, and not the six hundred pages
of argumentation, was the ringing challenge that provoked a plain issue,
precipitated a decisive struggle, and brought the first stage of
tractarianism to a close.

ARTICLE ON WARD

It was impossible that Mr. Gladstone even in the thick of his tariffs,
his committees and deputations, his cabinet duties, and all the other
absorbing occupations of an important minister in strong harness, should
let a publication, in his view so injurious, pass in silence.[191] With
indignation he flew to his intrepid pen, and dealt as trenchantly with
Ward as Ward himself had dealt trenchantly with the reformers and all
others whom he found planted in his dialectic way. Mr. Gladstone held
the book up to stringent reproof for its capricious injustice; for the
triviality of its investigations of fact; for the savageness of its
censures; for the wild and wanton opinions broached in its pages; for
the infatuation of mind manifested in some of its arguments; and for the
lamentable circumstance that it exhibited a far greater debt in mental
culture to Mr. John Stuart Mill than to the whole range of Christian
divines. In a sentence, Ward 'had launched on the great deep of human
controversy as frail a bark as ever carried sail,' and his reviewer
undoubtedly let loose upon it as shrewd a blast as ever blew from the
AEolian wallet. The article was meant for the _Quarterly Review_, and it
is easy to imagine the dire perplexities of Lockhart's editorial mind in
times so fervid and so distracted. The practical issue after all was not
the merits or the demerits of Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer, nor the real
meaning of Hooker, Jewel, Bull, but simply what was to be done to Ward.
Lockhart wrote to Murray that he had very seriously studied the article
and studied Ward's book, and not only these, but also the Articles and
the canons of the church, and he could not approve of the _Review_
committing itself to a judgment on the line proper to be taken by the
authorities of church and university, and the expression of such a
judgment he suspected to be Mr. Gladstone's main object in writing. Mr.
Gladstone, describing himself most truly as 'one of those soldiers who
do not know when they are beat,' saw his editor; declared that what he
sought was three things, first, that the process of mobbing out by
invective and private interpretations is bad and shou