Mrs.
Craven, the wife of the secretary of the Stuttgart mission, and
authoress of the _Recit d'une Soeur_. Some of the personages of that
alluring book were of the company. 'I have drunk tea several times
at her house, and have had two or three long conversations with
them on matters of religion. They are excessively acute and also
full of Christian sentiment. But they are much more difficult to
make real way with than a professor of theology, because they are
determined (what is vulgarly called) to go the whole hog, just as
in England usually when you find a woman anti-popish in spirit,
she will push the argument against them to all extremes.'

FURTHER ADVANCE

It was at the same time that he read Bunsen's book on the church.
'It is dismal,' he wrote home to Mrs. Gladstone, 'and I must write
to him to say so as kindly as I can.' Bunsen would seem all the
more dismal from the contrast with the spiritual graces of these
catholic ladies, and the ripe thinking and massive learning of one
who was still the great catholic doctor. At no time in Mr.
Gladstone's letters to Manning or to Hope is there a single
faltering accent in respect of Rome. The question is not for an
instant, or in any of his moods, open. He never doubts nor wavers.
None the less, these impressions of his German journey would rather
confirm than weaken his theological faith within the boundaries of
anglican form and institution. 'With my whole soul I am convinced,'
he says to Manning (June 23, 1850), 'that if the Roman system is
incapable of being powerfully modified in spirit, it never can be
the instrument of the work of God among us; the faults and the
virtues of England are alike against it.'

THE LADY HEWLEY CASE

I need spend no time in pointing out how inevitably these new currents
drew Mr. Gladstone away from the old moorings of his first book. Even in
1844 he had parted company with the high ecclesiastical principles of
good tories like Sir Robert Inglis. Peel, to his great honour, in that
year brought in what Macaulay truly called 'an honest, an excellent
bill, introduced from none but the best and purest motives.' It arose
from a judicial decision in what was known as the Lady Hewley case, and
its object was nothing more revolutionary or latitudinarian than