y point, nor were
they converted, but they felt a man with the orator's quality of taking
fire and kindling fire at a moral idea. They felt his command of the
whole stock of fact and of principle belonging to his topics, as with
the air and the power of a heroic master he cleared the way before him
towards his purpose. Along with complete grasp of details, went grasp of
some of the most important truths in the policy of a modern state. He
clearly perceived the very relevant fact, so often overlooked by
advocates of the free church in a free state, that 'there is no
religious body in the world where religious offices do not in a certain
degree conjoin with temporal incidents.' But this did not affect the
power of his stroke, as he insisted on respect for the frontier--no
scientific frontier--between temporal and spiritual. 'You speak of the
progress of the Roman catholic religion, and you pretend to meet that
progress by a measure false in principle as it is ludicrous in extent.
You must meet the progress of that spiritual system by the progress of
another; you can never do it by penal enactments. Here, once for all, I
enter my most solemn, earnest, and deliberate protest against all
attempts to meet the spiritual dangers of our church by temporal
legislation of a penal character.' The whole speech is in all its
elements and aspects one of the great orator's three or four most
conspicuous masterpieces, and the reader would not forgive me if I
failed to transcribe its resplendent close. He went back to a passage of
Lord John Russell's on the Maynooth bill of 1845. 'I never heard,' said
Mr. Gladstone, 'a more impressive passage delivered by any statesman at
any time in this House.'

The noble lord referred to some beautiful and touching lines of
Virgil, which the house will not regret to hear:--

'Scilicet et tempus veniet, cum finibus illis
Agricola, incurvo terram molitus aratro,
Exesa inveniet scabra rubigine pila;
Aut gravibus rastris galeas pulsabit inanes,
Grandiaque effossis mirabitur ossa sepulcris.'[262]

And he said, upon those scenes where battles have been fought, the
hand of nature effaces the traces of the wrath of man, and the
cultivator of the soil in following times finds the rusted arms,
and looks upon them with calm and joy, as the memorials of
forgotten strife, and as quickening his sense of the blessings of
his peaceful