ivilege of social
ascendency. The parent and the child, in whose name the struggle raged,
stood indifferent. From the point of party strategy, the policy of this
great statute was fatal. The church of England was quickened into active
antagonism by Irish disestablishment, by the extinction of sectarian tests
at Oxford and Cambridge, and by the treatment of endowed schools. This
might have been balanced by the zeal of nonconformists. Instead of zeal,
the Education Act produced refrigeration and estrangement.

We may be sure that on such a subject Mr. Gladstone looked further than
strategies of party. "I own to you," said he to a correspondent before the
battle was quite over, "that the history of these last few months leaves
upon my mind some melancholy impressions, which I hope at some fancied
period of future leisure and retirement to study and interpret." He soon
saw how deep the questions went, and on what difficult ground the state
and the nation would be inevitably drawn. His notions of a distinctive
formula were curious. Forster seems to have put some question to him on
the point whether the three creeds were formularies within the Act. It
appears to me, Mr. Gladstone answered (October 17, 1870):--

It is quite open to you at once to dispose of the Nicene and
Athanasian Creeds and to decline inquiring whether they are
distinctive, upon the ground that they are not documents employed
in the instruction of young children.... Obviously no one has a
right to call on you to define the distinctive character of a
formulary such as the Thirty-nine Articles, or of any but such as
are employed in schools. With respect to the Apostles' Creed, it
appears to me not to be a distinctive formulary in the sense of
the Act. Besides the fact that it is acknowledged by the great
bulk of all Christendom, it is denied or rejected by no portion of
the Christian community; and, further, it is not controversial in
its form, but sets forth, in the simplest shape a series of the
leading facts on which Christianity, the least abstract of all
religions, is based.

Manning plied him hard (September, October, November, 1871). The state of
Paris (Commune blazing that year, Tuileries and Hotel de Ville in ashes,
and the Prussian spiked helmets at the gates) was traceable to a godless
education--so the archbishop argued. In England the Christian tradition was
unbroken. It was only a cli