or, failed to see that they were making manifest in this a wholesale
scepticism as to truths that they professed to prize, far deeper and
more destructive than the doubts and disbeliefs of the gentiles in the
outer courts.

The epoch, as the reader knows, was what Mr. Gladstone called 'an
agitated and expectant age.' Some stages of his career mark stages of
the first importance in the history of English party, on which so much
in the working of our constitution hangs. His name is associated with a
record of arduous and fruitful legislative work and administrative
improvement, equalled by none of the great men who have grasped the helm
of the British state. The intensity of his mind, and the length of years
through which he held presiding office, enabled him to impress for good
in all the departments of government his own severe standard of public
duty and personal exactitude. He was the chief force, propelling,
restraining, guiding his country at many decisive moments. Then how many
surprises and what seeming paradox. Devotedly attached to the church, he
was the agent in the overthrow of establishment in one of the three
kingdoms, and in an attempt to overthrow it in the Principality.
Entering public life with vehement aversion to the recent dislodgment of
the landed aristocracy as the mainspring of parliamentary power, he lent
himself to two further enormously extensive changes in the
constitutional centre of gravity. With a lifelong belief in
parliamentary deliberation as the grand security for judicious laws and
national control over executive act, he yet at a certain stage betook
himself with magical result to direct and individual appeal to the great
masses of his countrymen, and the world beheld the astonishing spectacle
of a politician with the microscopic subtlety of a thirteenth century
schoolman wielding at will the new democracy in what has been called
'the country of plain men.' A firm and trained economist, and no friend
to socialism, yet by his legislation upon land in 1870 and 1881 he
wrote the opening chapter in a volume on which many an unexpected page
in the history of Property is destined to be inscribed. Statesmen do far
less than they suppose, far less than is implied in their resounding
fame, to augment the material prosperity of nations, but in this
province Mr. Gladstone's name stands at the topmost height. Yet no ruler
that ever lived felt more deeply the truth--for which I know no better
words