letters will one
day see the light, and the reader may then know how candidly Mr. Gladstone
was admonished as to the excess of his description of the moral action of
Christianity; as to the risk of sending modern questions to ancient
answers, for the apologists of an age can only meet the difficulties of
their age; that there are leaps and bounds in the history of thought; how
well did Newman once say that in theology you have to meet questions that
the Fathers could hardly have been made to understand; how if you go to
St. Thomas or Leibnitz or Paley for rescue from Hegel or Haeckel your
apologetics will be a record of disaster. You insist broadly, says Acton,
on belief in the divine nature of Christ as the soul, substance, and
creative force of Christian religion; you assign to it very much of the
good the church has done; all this with little or no qualification or
drawback from the other side:--

Enter Martineau or Stephen or ---- (unattached), and loq.:--Is this
the final judgment of the chief of liberals? the pontiff of a
church whose fathers are the later Milton and the later Penn,
Locke, Bayle, Toland, Franklin, Turgot, Adam Smith, Washington,
Jefferson, Bentham, Dugald Stewart, Romilly, Tocqueville,
Channing, Macaulay, Mill? These men and others like them
disbelieved that doctrine established freedom, and they undid the
work of orthodox Christianity, they swept away that appalling
edifice of intolerance, tyranny, cruelty, which believers in
Christ built up to perpetuate their belief.

The philosophy of liberal history, Acton proceeds, which has to
acknowledge the invaluable services of early Christianity, feels the
anti-liberal and anti-social action of later Christianity, before the rise
of the sects that rejected, some of them the divinity of Christ; others,
the institutions of the church erected upon it. Liberalism if it admits
these things as indifferent, surrenders its own _raison d'etre_, and
ceases to strive for an ethical cause. If the doctrine of Torquemada make
us condone his morality, there can be no public right and no wrong, no
political sin, no secular cause to die for. So it might be said that--

You do not work really from the principle of liberalism, but from
the cognate, though distinct principles of democracy, nationality,
progress, etc. To some extent, I fear, you will estrange valued
friends, not assuredly by any expression of