ut very far from a truism in the sense in
which we have been led to construe them." This, indeed, was a new and very
real "papal aggression." For himself, Mr. Gladstone said, it should not
shake his allegiance to "the rule of maintaining equal civil rights
irrespectively of religious differences." Had he not given conclusive
indications of that view, by supporting in parliament as a minister since
the council, the repeal in 1871 of the law against ecclesiastical titles,
whose enactment he had opposed twenty years before?

That the pamphlet should create intense excitement, was inevitable from
the place of the writer in the public eye, from the extraordinary
vehemence of the attack, and above all from the unquenchable fascination
of the topic. Whether the excitement in the country was more than
superficial; whether most readers fathomed the deep issues as they stood,
not between catholic and protestant, but between catholic and catholic
within the fold; whether in fastening upon the civil allegiance of English
Romanists Mr. Gladstone took the true point against Vaticanism--these are
questions that we need not here discuss. The central proposition made a
cruel dilemma for a large class of the subjects of the Queen; for the
choice assigned to them by assuming stringent logic was between being bad
citizens if they submitted to the decree of papal infallibility, and bad
catholics if they did not. Protestant logicians wrote to Mr. Gladstone
that if his contention were good, we ought now to repeal catholic
emancipation and again clap on the fetters. Syllogisms in action are but
stupid things after all, unless they are checked by a tincture of what
seems paradox.(321) Apart from the particular issue in his Vatican
pamphlet, Mr. Gladstone believed himself to be but following his own main
track in life and thought in his assault upon "a policy which declines to
acknowledge the high place assigned to liberty in the counsels of
Providence, and which upon the pretext of the abuse that like every other
good she suffers, expels her from its system."

Among the names that he was never willing to discuss with me--Machiavelli,
for instance--was Joseph de Maistre, the hardiest, most adventurous, most
ingenious, and incisive of all the speculative champions of European
reaction.(322) In the pages of de Maistre he might have found the reasoned
base on which the ultramontane creed may be supposed to rest. He would
have found liberty depicted