eakable benefit to Mr. Gladstone that his love of
letters and learning enabled him to find in the pursuit of knowledge a
relief from anxieties and a solace under disappointments. Without some
such relief his fiery and restless spirit would have worn itself out.
He lived two lives--the life of the statesman and the life of the
student, and passed swiftly from the one to the other, dismissing when
he sat down to his books all the cares of politics. But he led a
third life also, the secret life of the soul. Religion was of all
things that which had the strongest hold upon his thoughts and
feelings. Nothing but his father's opposition prevented him from
becoming a clergyman when he quitted the University. Never thereafter
did he cease to take the warmest interest in everything that affected
the Christian Church. He lost his seat for Oxford University by the
votes of the country clergy, who formed the bulk of the constituency.
He incurred the displeasure of four-fifths of the Anglican communion
by disestablishing the Protestant Episcopal Church in Ireland, and
from 1868 to the end of his life found nearly all the clerical force
of the English establishment arrayed against him, while his warmest
support came from the Nonconformists of England and the Presbyterians
of Scotland. Yet nothing affected his devotion to the Church in which
he had been brought up, nor to the body of Anglo-Catholic doctrine he
had imbibed as an undergraduate. After an attack of influenza which
had left him very weak in the spring of 1891, he endangered his life
by attending a meeting on behalf of the Colonial Bishoprics Fund, for
which he had spoken fifty years before. His theological opinions
tinged his views upon political subjects. They filled him with dislike
of the legalisation of marriage with a deceased wife's sister; they
made him a vehement opponent of the bill which established the
English Divorce Court in 1857, and a watchfully hostile critic of all
divorce legislation in America afterwards. Some of his friends traced
to the same cause his less than adequate appreciation of German
literature (though he admired Goethe and Schiller) and even his
political coldness towards Prussia and afterwards towards the German
Empire. He could not forget that Germany had been the fountain of
rationalism, while German Evangelical Protestantism was more
schismatic and farther removed from the mediaeval Catholic Church than
it pleased him to deem the Church of