al effort into whatever
channel lay at the moment nearest.

With these Scottish qualities, Mr. Gladstone was brought up at school
and college (Eton and Christ Church) among Englishmen, and received at
Oxford, then lately awakened from a long torpor, a bias and tendency
which never thereafter ceased to affect him. The so-called "Oxford
Movement," which afterwards obtained the name of Tractarianism and
carried Newman and Manning, together with other less famous leaders,
on to Rome, had not yet, in 1831, when Mr. Gladstone obtained his
degree with double first-class honours, taken visible shape, or
become, so to speak, conscious of its own purposes. But its doctrinal
views, its peculiar vein of religious sentiment, its respect for
antiquity and tradition, its proneness to casuistry, its taste for
symbolism, were already in the air as influences working on the more
susceptible of the younger minds. On Mr. Gladstone they told with full
force. He became, and never ceased to be, not merely a High-churchman,
but what may be called an Anglo-Catholic, in his theology, deferential
not only to ecclesiastical tradition, but to the living voice of the
Visible Church, revering the priesthood as the recipients (if duly
ordained) of a special grace and peculiar powers, attaching great
importance to the sacraments, feeling himself nearer to the Church of
Rome, despite what he deemed her corruptions, than to any of the
non-Episcopal Protestant churches. Henceforth his interests in life
were as much ecclesiastical as political. For a time he desired to be
ordained a clergyman. Had this wish, abandoned in deference to his
father's advice, been carried out, he must eventually have become a
leading figure in the Church of England and have sensibly affected her
recent history. The later stages in his career drew him away from the
main current of political opinion within that church. He who had been
the strongest advocate of the principle of the State establishment of
religion came to be the chief actor in the disestablishment of the
Protestant Episcopal Church in Ireland, and a supporter of the policy
of disestablishment in Scotland and in Wales. But the colour which
these Oxford years gave to his mind and thoughts was never effaced.
While they widened the range of his interests and deepened his moral
earnestness, they at the same time confirmed his natural bent toward
over-subtle distinctions and fine-drawn reasonings, and put him out of
sym