, and he voted and spoke accordingly. "It will most rudely shake his
Oxford seat," says Phillimore. The peril there was becoming daily more
apparent. Then in 1864 and on later occasions he met leading nonconformist
clergy at the house of Mr. Newman Hall--such men as Binney, Allon, Edward
White, Baldwin Brown, Henry Reynolds, and that most admirable friend,
citizen, and man, R.W. Dale, so well known as Dale of Birmingham. Their
general attitude was described by Mr. Newman Hall as this: they hoped for
the ultimate recognition of the free church theory, and meditated no
political action to bring it about; they looked for it to come as the
result of influence within the church of England, not of efforts from
without. "Many dissenters," one of them told him (Nov. 20, 1864), "would
enter the church whatever their theory about establishment, if such slight
modifications were made as would allow them to do so
conscientiously--holding the essentials of the faith far more soundly than
many within the established church." Another regretted, after one of these
gatherings, that they never got to the core of the subject, "namely that
there run through the prayer-book from beginning to end ideas that are not
accepted by numbers who subscribe, and which cannot _all_ be admitted by
any one."

All this once more brought Mr. Gladstone into a curious position. Just as
at Oxford he had in 1847 been the common hope of ultra-clericals on one
hand and ultra-liberals on the other, so now he was the common hope of the
two antagonistic schools of religious comprehension--the right, who looked
towards the formularies, system, discipline, and tradition either of the
Orthodox church or the Latin, and the left, who sought reunion on the
basis of puritanism with a leaven of modern criticism. Always the devoted
friend of Dr. Pusey and his school, he was gradually welcomed as ally and
political leader by men like Dale and Allon, the independents, and
Spurgeon, the baptist, on the broad ground that it was possible for all
good men to hold, amid their differences about church government, the more
vital sympathies and charities of their common profession. They even
sounded him on one occasion about laying the foundation stone of one of
their chapels. The broad result of such intercourse of the nonconformist
leaders with this powerful and generous mind, enriched by historic
knowledge and tradition, strengthened by high political responsibility,
deepened by m