ecclesiastical and Christian questions over the whole empire, to
manifest the importance which it attaches to protestant truth, by the
selection of a _Protestant Representative_.' The teaching residents
were, as always, decisively for Gladstone, and nearly all the fellows of
Merton voted against their own warden. In one respect this was
remarkable, for Mr. Gladstone had in 1850 (July 18) resisted the
proposal for that commission of inquiry into the universities which the
Oxford liberals had much at heart, and it would not have been
surprising if they had held aloof from a candidate who had told the
House of Commons that 'after all, science was but a small part of the
business of education,'--a proposition that in one sense may be true,
but applied to unreformed Oxford was the reverse of true. The
non-residents were diligently and rather unscrupulously worked upon, and
they made a formidable set of discordant elements. The evangelicals
disliked Mr. Gladstone. The plain high-and-dry men distrusted him as
what they called a sophist. Even some of the anglo-catholic men began to
regard as a bad friend 'to the holy apostolic church of these realms,
the author of the new theory of religious liberty' in the Scotch letter.
They reproachfully insisted that had he headed a party in the House of
Commons defending the church, not upon latitudinarian theories of
religious liberty, not upon vague hints of a disaffected movement of the
non-juring sort, still less upon romanising principles, but on the
principles of the constitution, royal supremacy included, then the
church would have escaped the worst that had befallen her since 1846.
The minister would never have dared to force Hampden into the seat of a
bishop. The privy council would never have reversed the court of arches
in the Gorham case. The claim of the clergy to meet in convocation would
never have been refused. The committee of council would have treated
education very differently.[270] All came right in the end, however, and
Mr. Gladstone was re-elected (July 14), receiving 260 votes fewer than
Sir Robert Inglis, but 350 more than the warden of Merton.[271] We have
to remember that he was not returned as a liberal.

II

The leaders of the sections out of office, when the general election was
over, at once fetched forth line and plummet to take their soundings.
'The next few months,' Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Aberdeen (Aug. 20),
'are