uth, which
is at once the supreme duty and the supreme joy of life. I have
only to add the expression of my hope that in what I have said
there is nothing to hurt or to offend you; and, if there be, very
heartily to wish it unsaid.

Yet there was never the shadow of mistake about his own fervent faith. As
he said to another correspondent:--

_Feb. 5, 1876._--I am in principle a strong denominationalist. "One
fold and one shepherd" was the note of early Christendom. The
shepherd is still one and knows his sheep; but the folds are many;
and, without condemning any others, I am of opinion that it is
best for us all that we should all of us be jealous for the honour
of whatever we have and hold as positive truth, appertaining to
the Divine Word and the foundation and history of the Christian
community. I admit that this question becomes one of circumstance
and degree, but I take it as I find it defined for myself by and
in my own position.

IV

Of Mr. Gladstone as orator and improvisatore, enough has been said and
seen. Besides being orator and statesman he was scholar and critic.
Perhaps scholar in his interests, not in abiding contribution. The most
copious of his productions in this delightful but arduous field was the
three large volumes on _Homer and the Homeric Age_, given to the world in
1858. Into what has been well called the whirlpool of Homeric
controversies, the reader shall not here be dragged. Mr. Gladstone himself
gave them the go-by, with an indifference and disdain such as might have
been well enough in the economic field if exhibited towards a
protectionist farmer, or a partisan of retaliatory duties on manufactured
goods, but that were hardly to the point in dealing with profound and
original critics. What he too contemptuously dismissed as Homeric
"bubble-schemes," were in truth centres of scientific illumination. At the
end of the eighteenth century Wolf's famous _Prolegomena_ appeared, in
which he advanced the theory that Homer was no single poet, nor a name for
two poets, nor an individual at all; the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ were
collections of independent lays, folk-lore and folk-songs connected by a
common set of themes, and edited, redacted, or compacted about the middle
of the sixth century before Christ. A learned man of our own day has said
that F. A. Wolf ought to be counted one of the half dozen writers that
within the last t