st the condemnation of the
book, and against the proposal to strip its writer of his university
degree. He held that the censure combined condemnation of opinions with
a declaration of personal dishonesty, and the latter question he held to
be one 'not fit for the adjudication of a human tribunal.'

All this has a marked place in Mr. Gladstone's mental progress. Though
primarily and ostensibly the concern of the established church, yet the
series of proceedings that had begun with the attack on Hampden in 1836,
and then were followed down to our own day by academical, ecclesiastical
and legal censures and penalties, or attempts at censure and penalty, on
Newman, Pusey, Maurice, Gorham, _Essays and Reviews_, Colenso, and
ended, if they have yet ended, in a host of judgments affecting minor
personages almost as good as nameless--all constitute a chapter of
extraordinary importance in the general history of English toleration,
extending in its consequences far beyond the pale of the communion
immediately concerned. It was a long and painful journey, often
unedifying, not seldom squalid, with crooked turns not a few, and before
it was over, casting men into strange companionship upon bleak and
hazardous shores. Mr. Gladstone, though he probably was not one of those
who are as if born by nature tolerant, was soon drawn by circumstance to
look with favour upon that particular sort of toleration which arose
out of the need for comprehension. When the six doctors condemned Pusey
(June 1843) for preaching heresy and punished him by suspension, Mr.
Gladstone was one of those who signed a vigorous protest against a
verdict and a sentence passed upon an offender without hearing him and
without stating reasons. This was at least the good beginning of an
education in liberal rudiments.

III

NEWMAN'S SECESSION

In October 1845 the earthquake came. Newman was received into the Roman
communion. Of this step Mr. Gladstone said that it has never yet been
estimated at anything like the full amount of its calamitous importance.
The leader who had wielded a magician's power in Oxford was followed by
a host of other converts. More than once I have heard Mr. Gladstone tell
the story how about this time he sought from Manning an answer to the
question that sorely perplexed him: what was the common bond of union
that led men of intellect so different, of character so opposite,