man attain to self-knowledge? By Contemplation?
certainly not: but by Action. Try to do your Duty and you will
find what you are fit for. But what is your Duty? The Demand of
the Hour.

As if of all men then living on our planet, Mr. Gladstone were not he to
whom such counsel was most superfluous. He replies (Oct. 9, 1880), "I feel
the immense, the overmastering power of Goethe, but with such limited
knowledge as I have of his works, I am unable to answer the question
whether he has or has not been an evil genius of humanity."

(M171) In 1839 Spedding, the Baconian, to whom years later the prime
minister proposed that he should fill the chair of history at Cambridge,
wrote to him that John Sterling, of whom Mr. Gladstone already knew
something, was prevented by health from living in London, and so by way of
meeting his friends on his occasional visits, had proposed that certain of
them should agree to dine together cheaply once a month at some stated
place. As yet Sterling had only spoken to Carlyle, John Mill, Maurice, and
Bingham Baring. "I hope," says Spedding, "that your devotion to the more
general interests of mankind will not prevent your assisting in this
little job." Mr. Gladstone seems not to have assisted, though his friend
Bishop Wilberforce did, and fell into some hot water in consequence. A
veteran and proclaimed freethinker sets out to Mr. Gladstone his own
recognition of what ought to be a truism, that he is for every man being
faithful to his faith; that his aggressive denial of the inspiration of
the Bible did not prevent him from sending a copy in large type to his old
mother to read when her eyes were dim; that he respected consolations
congenial to the conscience. "I hope," he says to Mr. Gladstone, "there is
a future life, and if so, my not being sure of it will not prevent it, and
I know of no better way of deserving it than by conscious service of
humanity. The Universe never filled me with such wonder and awe as when I
knew I could not account for it. _I admit ignorance is a privation. But to
submit not to know where knowledge is withheld, seems but one of the
sacrifices that reverence for truth imposes on us._" The same
correspondent speaks (1881) of "the noble toleration which you have
personally shown me, notwithstanding what you must think seriously
erroneous views of mine, and upon which I do not keep silence." Mr.
Gladstone had written to him six years before (1875): "Differ