ake that community powerful and healthful, to give a firm seat to
its rulers, and to engender a warm and intelligent devotion in
those beneath their sway.[238]

FOUNDATIONS OF LIBERALISM

These were the golden trumpet-notes of a new time. When they readied the
ears of old Dr. Routh, as he sat in wig and cassock among his books and
manuscripts at Magdalen, revolving nearly a hundred years of mortal
life, he exclaimed that he had heard enough to be quite sure that no man
holding such opinions as these could ever be a proper member for the
university of Oxford. A few months later, it was seen how the learned
man found several hundreds of unlearned to agree with him.

IV

This chapter naturally closes with what was to Mr. Gladstone one of the
dire catastrophies of his life. With growing dismay he had seen Manning
drawing steadily towards the edge of the cataract. When he took the
ominous step of quitting his charge at Lavington, Mr. Gladstone wrote to
him from Naples (January 26, 1851): 'Without description from you, I can
too well comprehend what you have suffered.... Such griefs ought to be
sacred to all men, they must be sacred to me, even did they not touch me
sharply with a reflected sorrow. You can do nothing that does not reach
me, considering how long you have been a large part both of my actual
life and of my hopes and reckonings. Should you do the act which I pray
God with my whole soul you may not do, it will not break, however it may
impair or strain, the bonds between us.' 'If you go over,' he says, in
another letter of the same month, 'I should earnestly pray that you
might not be as others who have gone before you, but might carry with
you a larger heart and mind, able to raise and keep you above that
slavery to a system, that exaggeration of its forms, that disposition to
rivet every shackle tighter and to stretch every breach wider, which
makes me mournfully feel that the men who have gone from the church of
England after being reared in her and by her, are far more keen, and I
must add, far more cruel adversaries to her, than were the mass of those
whom they joined.'

In the case of Hope there had been for some considerable time a
lingering sense of change. 'My affection for him, during these later
years before his change, was I may almost say intense: there was hardly
anything I think which he could have asked me to do, and which I