d those on which legislation in their case ought
to proceed, he said that the only use he could make of these principles
was to apply them to the decisive performance of a great and important
act, founded on the everlasting principles of truth and justice. Sheil,
who followed Mr. Gladstone, made a decidedly striking observation. He
declared how delighted he was to hear from such high authority that the
bill was perfectly reconcilable with the strictest and the sternest
principles of state conscience. 'I cannot doubt,' he continued, 'that
the right hon. gentleman, the champion of free trade, will ere long
become the advocate of the most unrestricted liberty of thought.' Time
was to justify Sheil's acute prediction. Unquestionably the line of
argument that suggested it was a great advance from the arguments of
1838, of which Macaulay had said that they would warrant the roasting of
dissenters at slow fires.

IV

In this vast field of human interest what engaged and inflamed him was
not in the main place that solicitude for personal salvation and
sanctification, which under sharp stress of argument, of pious
sensibility, of spiritual panic, now sent so many flocking into the
Roman fold. It was at bottom more like the passion of the great popes
and ecclesiastical master-builders, for strengthening and extending the
institutions by which faith is spread, its lamps trimmed afresh, its
purity secured. What wrung him with affliction was the laying waste of
the heritage of the Lord. 'The promise,' he cried, 'indeed stands sure
to the church and the elect. In the farthest distance there is peace,
truth, glory; but what a leap to it, over what a gulf.' For himself, the
old dilemma of his early years still tormented him. 'I wish,' he writes
to Manning (March 8, 1846) good humouredly, 'I could get a synodical
decision in favour of my retirement from public life. For, I profess to
remain there (to myself) for the service of the church, and my views of
the mode of serving her are getting so fearfully wide of those generally
current, that even if they be sound, they may become wholly
unavailable.' The question whether the service of the church can be most
effectually performed in parliament was incessantly present to his mind.
Manning pressed him in one direction, the inward voice drew him in the
other. 'I could write down in a few lines,' he says to Manning, 'the
measures, after the adoption of whi