n granted with some _non placets_ but with no
scrutiny. The scene remarkable to the eye and mind, so pictorial
and so national. There was great tumult about me, the hisses being
obstinate, and the _fautores_ also very generous. 'Gladstone and
the Jew bill' came sometimes from the gallery, sometimes more
favouring sounds.

II

After the whig government was formed in 1846, Mr. Gladstone expressed
himself as having little fear that they could do much harm, 'barring
church patronage.' He was soon justified in his own eyes in this
limitation of his confidence, for the next year Dr. Hampden was made a
bishop.[232] This was a rude blow both to the university which had
eleven years before pronounced him heretical, and to the bishops who now
bitterly and fervidly remonstrated. Grave points of law were raised, but
Mr. Gladstone, though warmly reprobating the prime minister's
recommendation of a divine so sure to raise the hurricane, took no
leading part in the strife that followed. 'Never in my opinion,' he said
to his father (Feb. 2, 1848), 'was a firebrand more wantonly and
gratuitously cast.' It was an indication the more of a determination to
substitute a sort of general religion for the doctrines of the church.
The next really marking incident after the secession of Newman was a
decision of a court of law, known as the Gorham judgment. This and the
preferment of Hampden to his bishopric produced the second great tide of
secession. 'Were we together,' Mr. Gladstone writes to Manning at the
end of 1849 (December 30), 'I should wish to converse with you from
sunrise to sunset on the Gorham case. It is a stupendous issue. Perhaps
they will evade it. On abstract grounds this would be still more
distasteful than a decision of the state against a catholic doctrine.
But what I feel is that as a body we are not ready yet for the last
alternatives. More years must elapse from the secession of Newman and
the group of secessions which, following or preceding, belonged to it. A
more composed and settled state of the public mind in regard to our
relations with the church of Rome must supervene. There must be more
years of faithful _work_ for the church to point to in argument, and to
grow into her habits. And besides all these very needful conditions of
preparation for a crisis, I want to see the question more fully
answered, What will the state of its own free and good will do