With boundless exaltation of spirit he expatiated on the
arduous and noble task which it was now laid upon the children of the
church of England amid trouble, suspense, and it might be even agony to
perform. 'Fully believing that the death of the church of England is
among the alternative issues of the Gorham case,' he wrote to a clerical
friend (April 9), 'I yet also believe that all Christendom and all its
history have rarely afforded a nobler opportunity of doing battle for
the faith in the church than that now offered to English churchmen. That
opportunity is a prize far beyond any with which the days of her
prosperity, in any period, can have been adorned.' He does not think
(June 1, 1850), that a loftier work was ever committed to men. Such vast
interests were at stake, such unbounded prospects open before them. What
they wanted was the divine art to draw from present terrible calamities
and appalling future prospects the conquering secret to rise through the
struggle into something better than historical anglicanism, which
essentially depended on conditions that have passed away. 'In my own
case,' he says to Manning a little later, 'there is work ready to my
hand and much more than enough for its weakness, a great mercy and
comfort. But I think I know what my course would be, were there not. It
would be to set to work upon the holy task or clearing, opening, and
establishing positive truth in the church of England, which is an office
doubly blessed, inasmuch as it is both the business of truth, and the
laying of firm foundations for future union in Christendom.' If this
vision of a dream had ever come to pass, perhaps Europe might have seen
the mightiest Christian doctor since Bossuet; and just as Bossuet's
struggle was called the grandest spectacle of the seventeenth century,
so to many eyes this might have appeared the greatest of the
nineteenth. Mr. Gladstone did not see, in truth he never saw, any more
than Bossuet saw in his age, that the Time-Spirit was shifting the
foundations of the controversy. However that may be, the interesting
thing for us in the history of his life is the characteristic blaze of
battle that this case now kindled in his breast.

VIEW OF THE CRISIS IN THE CHURCH

On the eve of his return from Germany in the autumn of 1845, one of his
letters to Mrs. Gladstone reveals the pressing intensity of his
conviction, deepened by his intercourse with the grave and pious circ