the
days of adolescence, may seem unpleasantly strained and excessive. The
fashion of such words undergoes transfiguration as the epochs pass. Yet
in all their fashions, even the crudest, they deserve much tenderness.
He consults a clergyman (1829) on the practice of prayer meetings in
his rooms. His correspondent answers, that as the wicked have their
orgies and meet to gamble and to drink, so they that fear the Lord
should speak often to one another concerning Him; that prayer meetings
are not for the cultivation or exhibition of gifts, nor to enable noisy
and forward young men to pose as leaders of a school of prophets; but if
a few young men of like tastes feel the withering influence of mere
scholastic learning, and the necessity of mutual stimulation and
refreshment, then such prayer meetings would be a safe and natural
remedy. The student's attention to all religious observances was close
and unbroken, the most living part of his existence.

The movement that was to convulse the church had not yet begun. 'You may
smile,' Mr. Gladstone said long after, 'when told that when I was at
Oxford, Dr. Hampden was regarded as a model of orthodoxy; that Dr.
Newman was eyed with suspicion as a low churchman, and Dr. Pusey as
leaning to rationalism.' What Mr. Gladstone afterwards described as a
steady, clear, but dry anglican orthodoxy bore sway, 'and frowned this
way or that, on the first indication of any tendency to diverge from the
beaten path.'[41] He hears Whately preach a controversial sermon (1831)
just after he had been made Archbishop of Dublin. 'Doubtless he is a man
of much power and many excellences, but his anti-sabbatical doctrine is,
I fear, as mischievous as it is unsound.' A sermon of Keble's at St.
Mary's prompts the uneasy question, 'Are all Mr. Keble's opinions those
of scripture and the church? Of his life and heart and practice, none
could doubt, all would admire.' A good sermon is mentioned from Blanco
White, that strange and forlorn figure of whom in later life Mr.
Gladstone wrote an interesting account, not conclusive in argument, but
assuredly not wanting in either delicacy or generosity.[42] 'Dr. Pusey
was very kind to me when I was an undergraduate at Oxford,' he says, but
what their relations were I know not. 'I knew and respected both Bishop
Lloyd and Dr. Pusey,' he says, 'but neither of them attempted to
exercise the smallest influence over my religious opinions.' With Newman
he seems to have