f the time,
writing:--

I felt ready to weep when you were treated with so much contumely
by your opponent in your former struggle; and yet I rejoiced that
you were educating this nation to believe in conscience and
truth.... I wish I could brush away the gadflies, but I suppose by
this time you have been stung so often that the system has become
invulnerable.... You are loved by hosts of us as intensely as you
are hated by certain of the savage party.

And when Mr. Gladstone was to visit Spurgeon's tabernacle (Jan. 1882):--

I feel like a boy who is to preach with his father to listen to
him. I shall try not to know that you are there at all, but just
preach to my poor people the simple word which has held them by
their thousands these twenty-eight years. You do not know how
those of us regard you, who feel it a joy to live when a premier
believes in righteousness. We believe in no man's infallibility,
but _it is restful to be sure of one man's integrity_.

That admirable sentence marks the secret.

All the religious agitations of the time come before us. Eminent foreign
converts from the Roman church still find comfort in warning this most
unshaken of believers against "a superficial and sceptical liberalism."
Others, again, condemned for heresy hail him as "dear and illustrious
master"--with no cordial response, we may surmise. Relying on Mr.
Gladstone's character for human-heartedness and love of justice, people
submit to him some of the hard domestic problems then and so often forced
upon the world by the quarrels of the churches. One lady lays before him
(1879) with superabundant detail a case where guardians insisted on the
child of a mixed marriage being brought up as a protestant, against the
fervid wishes of the surviving parent, a catholic. Mr. Gladstone masters
the circumstances, forms his judgment, elaborates it in a closely argued
memorandum, and does not evade the responsibility of advising. In another
of these instances the tragedy is reversed; the horrid oppression is
perpetrated on the protestant mother by the catholic father, and here too
it is Mr. Gladstone to whom the sufferer appeals for intercession.

His correspondents have not always so much substance in them. One lady of
evangelical strain, well known in her time, writes to him about turbulence
in Ireland on the last day of 1880. The private secretary dockets: "Wishes
you a b