well as the general power attending it, would not I think be acting
for him in a wise and loving spirit--assuming, which may be a vain
assumption, that the alternative could ever be before us.

The fact that in Scotland, a country in which Mr. Gladstone passed so
much time and had such lively interests, the members of his own
episcopal church were dissenters, was well fitted to hasten the progress
of his mind in the liberal direction. Certain it is that in a
strongly-written letter to a Scotch bishop at the end of 1851, Mr.
Gladstone boldly enlarged upon the doctrine of religious freedom, with a
directness that kindled both alarm and indignation among some of his
warmest friends.[237] Away, he cried, with the servile doctrine that
religion cannot live but by the aid of parliaments. When the state has
ceased to bear a definite and full religious character, it is our
interest and our duty alike to maintain a full religious freedom. It is
this plenary religious freedom that brings out in full vigour the
internal energies of each communion. Of all civil calamities the
greatest is the mutilation, under the seal of civil authority, of the
Christian religion itself. One fine passage in this letter denotes an
advance in his political temper, as remarkable as the power of the
language in which it finds expression:--

It is a great and noble secret, that of constitutional freedom,
which has given to us the largest liberties, with the steadiest
throne and the most vigorous executive in Christendom. I confess to
my strong faith in the virtue of this principle. I have lived now
for many years in the midst of the hottest and noisiest of its
workshops, and have seen that amidst the clatter and the din a
ceaseless labour is going on; stubborn matter is reduced to
obedience, and the brute powers of society like the fire, air,
water, and mineral of nature are, with clamour indeed but also with
might, educated and shaped into the most refined and regular forms
of usefulness for man. I am deeply convinced that among us all
systems, whether religious or political, which rest on a principle
of absolutism, must of necessity be, not indeed tyrannical, but
feeble and ineffective systems; and that methodically to enlist the
members of a community, with due regard to their several
capacities, in the performance of its public duties, is the way to
m