ing from you,
I do not believe that secular motives are adequate either to propel or to
restrain the children of our race, but I earnestly desire to hear the
other side, and I appreciate the advantage of having it stated by sincere
and high-minded men." There is a letter too from the son of another
conspicuous preacher of negation, replying to some words of Mr. Gladstone
which he took to be disparaging of his parent, and begging him, "a
lifelong idealist yourself," to think more worthily and sympathetically of
one whom if he had known he would have appreciated and admired.

A considerable correspondence is here from the learned Bishop Stubbs
(1888) on the character of Bishop Fisher of Rochester, the fellow-sufferer
of More; on the Convocation Act of 1531 and the other Convocation Acts of
Elizabeth; on Father Walsh's letters, and other matters of the sixteenth
century. In fact, it is safe to assume that Mr. Gladstone has always some
ecclesiastical, historical, theological controversy running alongside of
the political and party business of the day. Nobody that ever lived tried
to ride so many horses abreast. Another prelate puts a point that is worth
remembering by every English school of foreign policy. "In 1879," writes
Bishop Creighton (Feb. 15, 1887), "when foreign affairs were much before
the public, I suggested to a publisher a series of books dealing quite
shortly and clearly with the political history and constitution of the
chief states of Europe from 1815. I designed them for popular instruction,
thinking it of great importance that people in general should know what
they were talking about, when they spoke of France or Russia.... The
result of my attempt was to convince me that our ignorance of the last
sixty years is colossal."

Lord Stanhope has been reading (1858) the "Tusculan Questions," and
confides to Mr. Gladstone's sympathetic ear Cicero's shockingly faulty
recollection of Homer,--mistaking Euryclea for Anticlea, the nurse for the
mother, and giving to Polyphemus a speech that Polyphemus never spoke. A
bishop says Macaulay told him that one of the most eloquent passages in
the English language is in Barrow's Seventy-Fifth Sermon, on the
Nativity--"Let us consider that the Nativity doth import the completion of
many ancient promises...."(329) Letters abound and over-abound on that
most movable of topics--"the present state of the Homeric controversy."
Scott, the lexicographer, sends him Greek epigrams