er by this time well knows, living deepest in Mr.
Gladstone's heart and mind from his first book in 1838 onwards, was the
relation of the churches to modern society. English statesmen are wont to
be either blind to the existence of such a question, or else they seek an
easy refuge from it in a perfunctory erastianism, sometimes intellectually
refined, sometimes a little brutish, but always shallow. In all the three
great branches of Christianity, the Latin, the Greek or orthodox, the
protestant, Mr. Gladstone's interest was incessant, sincere, and profound.
It covered their theology, their organisation, their history and
principles of growth, the bearings of their system upon individual
character and social well-being all over Europe. He was one of the very
few public men capable of discerning that the fall of the temporal power
of the pope marked a more startling change and a profounder crisis in
human history, than the unification of Italy, the unification of Germany,
the reconstructed republic in France, perhaps even than the preservation
of the American union. He knew the force of ideas in the world; he
realised the vast transformations that had in their succession swept over
the minds of men since cardinal dogmas had been established; he
comprehended the motion in articles of faith, as men made their "voyagings
through strange seas of thought"; he was alive to the fact that moral
crises brought on by change in intellectual outlook and temperature, are
of deeper concern than questions of territory, or dynasty, or form of
government. The moral crisis is what reaches furthest and matters most. A
movement of the first magnitude was accentuated by Pius IX., when by the
Syllabus of 1864 he challenged modern society in all its foundations, its
aims, its principles, in the whole range of its ideals. Some called this
daring ultimatum the gravest event since the French uprising in 1789. The
Syllabus prepared the way for a more elaborately organised operation on
behalf of papal authority. The train was secretly laid for a grand
reaction, a grand re-installation of the Christian faith.(314)

(M161) The pope had been despoiled of territory, his sway within the walls
of Rome itself was in constant danger, his most powerful protector north
of the Alps had been weakened and humiliated by protestant Prussia. He was
now to be compensated for his calamities by a majestic demonstration of
his hold upon the spiritual allegiance of millio