l chairman of
his Oxford committee now and to the end, eighteen years off. He had
reached the dignity of a bachelor of divinity, but nearly all the rest
were no more than junior masters.

Routh, the old president of Magdalen, declined to vote for him on the
well-established ground that Christ Church had no business to hold both
seats. Mr. Gladstone at once met this by the dexterous proposition that
though Christ Church was not entitled to elect him against the wish of
the other colleges, yet the other colleges were entitled to elect him if
they liked, by giving him a majority not made up of Christ Church votes.
His eldest brother had written to tell him in terms of affectionate
regret, that he could take no part in the election; mere political
differences would be secondary, but in the case of a university,
religion came first, and there it was impossible to separate a candidate
from his religious opinions. When the time came, however, partly under
strong pressure from Sir John, Thomas Gladstone took a more lenient view
and gave his brother a vote.

The Round men pointed triumphantly to their hero's votes on Maynooth and
on the Dissenters' Chapels bill, and insisted on the urgency of
upholding the principles of the united church of England and Ireland in
their full integrity. The backers of Mr. Gladstone retorted by recalling
their champion's career; how in 1834 he first made himself known by his
resistance to the admission of dissenters to the universities; how in
1841 he threw himself into the first general move for the increase of
the colonial episcopate, which had resulted in the erection of eleven
new sees in six years; how zealously with energy and money he had
laboured for a college training for the episcopalian clergy in Scotland;
how instrumental he was in 1846, during the few months for which he held
the seals of secretary of state, in erecting four colonial bishoprics;
how the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, through the mouth of
the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, had thanked him for his services;
how long he had been an active supporter of the great societies for the
spread of church principles, the propagation of church doctrines, and
the erection of church fabrics. As for the Dissenters' Chapels bill, it
was an act of simple justice and involved no principles at issue between
the church and dissent, and Mr. Gladstone's masterly exposition of the
tendency of dissent to drop one by one all the