editations long, strenuous, and systematic, was indeed
remarkable. Dr. Allon expressed it, with admirable point, in a letter to
him some fourteen years after our present date (April 15, 1878):--

The kind of intercourse that you have kindly permitted with
nonconformists, has helped more consciously to identify them with
movements of national life, and to diminish the stern feeling of
almost defiant witness-bearing that was strong a generation or two
ago. It is something gained if ecclesiastical and political
differences can he debated within a common circle of social
confidence and identity.... Their confidence in you has made them
amenable to your lead in respect of methods and movements needing
the guidance of political insight and experience.

V

A man's mind seldom moves forward towards light and freedom on a single
line, and in Mr. Gladstone's case the same impulses that made him tolerant
of formal differences as to church government led slowly to a still wider
liberality in respect of far deeper differences. Readers may remember the
shock with which in his youth he found that one person or another was a
Unitarian. To Mr. Darbishire, a member of the Unitarian body who was for
many years his friend, he wrote about some address of James Martineau's
(Dec. 21, 1862):--

From, time to time I have read works of Mr. Martineau's, or works
that I have taken for his, with great admiration, with warm
respect for the writer, and moreover, with a great deal of
sympathy. I should greatly like to make his acquaintance. But
attached as I am to the old Christian dogma, and believing it as I
do, or rather believing the Person whom it sets forth, to be the
real fountain of all the gifts and graces that are largely strewn
over society, and in which Mr. Martineau himself seems so amply to
share, I fear I am separated from him in the order of ideas by an
interval that must be called a gulf. My conviction is that the old
creeds have been, and are to be, the channel by which the
Christian religion is made a reality even for many who do not hold
it, and I think that when we leave them we shall leave them not
for something better, but something worse. Hence you will not be
surprised that I regard some of Mr. Martineau's propositions as
unhistorical and untrue.

And to the same gentleman a year or two later (Jan. 2, 1865):--