William Ewart Gladstone | Page 6

fine- drawn reasonings, and they put him somewhat
out of sympathy not only with the attitude of the average Englishman,
who is essentially a Protestant,--that is to say, averse to sacerdotalism,
and suspicious of any other religious authority than that of the Bible
and the individual conscience,--but also with two of the strongest
influences of our time, the influence of the sciences of nature, and the
influence of historical criticism. Mr. Gladstone, though too wise to rail
at science, as many religious men did till within the last few years,
could never quite reconcile himself either to the conclusions of geology
and zoology regarding the history of the physical world and the animals
which inhabit it, or to the modern methods of critical inquiry as applied
to Scripture and to ancient literature generally. The training which
Oxford then gave, stimulating as it was, and free from the modern error
of over specialization, was defective in omitting the experimental
sciences, and in laying undue stress upon the study of language. A
proneness to dwell on verbal distinctions and to trust overmuch to the
analysis of terms as a means of reaching the truth of things is
noticeable in many eminent Oxford writers of that and the next
succeeding generation--some of them, like the illustrious F. D. Maurice,
far removed from Dr. Newman and Mr. Gladstone in theological

opinion.
When the brilliant young Oxonian entered the House of Commons at
the age of twenty-three, Sir Robert Peel was leading the Tory party
with an authority and ability rarely surpassed in parliamentary annals.
Within two years the young man was admitted into the short-lived Tory
ministry of 1834, and soon proved himself an active and promising
lieutenant of the experienced chief. Peel was an eminently wary and
cautious man, alive to the necessity of watching the signs of the times,
of studying and interpreting the changeful phases of public opinion. His
habit was to keep his own counsel, and even when he perceived that the
policy he had hitherto followed would need to be modified, to continue
to use guarded language and refuse to commit himself to change till he
perceived that the fitting moment had arrived. He was, moreover, a
master of detail, slow to propound a plan until he had seen how its
outlines were to be filled up by appropriate devices for carrying it out
in practice. These qualities and habits of the minister profoundly
affected his gifted disciple. They became part of the texture of his own
political character, and in his case, as in that of Peel, they sometimes
brought censure upon him, as having withheld too long from the public
views or purposes which he thought it unwise to disclose till effect
could promptly be given to them. Such reserve, such a guarded attitude
and conservative attachment to existing institutions, were not altogether
natural to Mr. Gladstone's mind, and the contrast between them and
some of his other qualities, like the contrast which ultimately appeared
between his sacerdotal tendencies and his political liberalism,
contributed to make his character perplexing and to expose his conduct
to the charge of inconsistency. Inconsistent, in the ordinary sense of the
word, he was not, much less changeable. He was really, in the main
features of his political convictions and the main habits of his mind,
one of the most tenacious and persistent of men. But there were always
at work in him two tendencies. One was the speculative desire to probe
everything to the bottom, to try it by the light of general principles and
logic, and where it failed to stand this test, to reject it. The other was
the sense of the complexity of existing social and political
arrangements, and of the risk of disturbing any one part of them unless
the time had arrived for resettling other parts also. Every statesman

feels both these sides to every concrete question of reform. No one has
set them forth more cogently, and in particular no one has more
earnestly dwelt on the necessity for the latter, than the most profound
thinker among English statesmen, Edmund Burke. Mr. Gladstone,
however, felt and stated them with quite unusual force, and when he
stated the one side, people forgot that there was another which would
be no less vividly present to him at some other moment. He was not
only, like all successful parliamentarians, necessarily something of an
opportunist, though perhaps less so than his master Peel, but was
moved by emotion more than most statesmen, and certainly more than
Peel. The relative strength with which the need for comprehensive
reform or the need for watchful conservatism presented itself to his
mind depended largely upon the weight which his emotions cast into
one or the other scale, and this element made it difficult to forecast