nd religious. Nevertheless his mission in all its forms was action. He
had none of that detachment, often found among superior minds, which we
honour for its disinterestedness, even while we lament its impotence in
result. The track in which he moved, the instruments that he employed,
were the track and the instruments, the sword and the trowel, of
political action; and what is called the Gladstonian era was
distinctively a political era.

On this I will permit myself a few words more. The detailed history of
Mr. Gladstone as theologian and churchman will not be found in these
pages, and nobody is more sensible than their writer of the gap. Mr.
Gladstone cared as much for the church as he cared for the state; he
thought of the church as the soul of the state; he believed the
attainment by the magistrate of the ends of government to depend upon
religion; and he was sure that the strength of a state corresponds to
the religious strength and soundness of the community of which the state
is the civil organ. I should have been wholly wanting in biographical
fidelity, not to make this clear and superabundantly clear. Still a
writer inside Mr. Gladstone's church and in full and active sympathy
with him on this side of mundane and supramundane things, would
undoubtedly have treated the subject differently from any writer
outside. No amount of candour or good faith--and in these essentials I
believe that I have not fallen short--can be a substitute for the
confidence and ardour of an adherent, in the heart of those to whom the
church stands first. Here is one of the difficulties of this complex
case. Yet here, too, there may be some trace of compensation. If the
reader has been drawn into the whirlpools of the political Charybdis, he
might not even in far worthier hands than mine have escaped the rocky
headlands of the ecclesiastic Scylla. For churches also have their
parties.

Lord Salisbury, the distinguished man who followed Mr. Gladstone in a
longer tenure of power than his, called him 'a great Christian'; and
nothing could be more true or better worth saying. He not only accepted
the doctrines of that faith as he believed them to be held by his own
communion; he sedulously strove to apply the noblest moralities of it
to the affairs both of his own nation and of the commonwealth of
nations. It was a supreme experiment. People will perhaps some day
wonder that many of those who derided the experiment and reproached its
auth