, the professor of history, to Blakesley; renewed his acquaintance
with the elder Hallam; listened to glorious anthems at Trinity and
King's; tried to hear a sermon from Simeon, the head of the English
evangelicals; met Stanhope, an old Eton man, and the two sons of Lord
Grey; and 'copied a letter of Mr. Pitt's.' From Cambridge he made his
way home, having thus triumphantly achieved the first stage of his long
life journey. Amid the manifold mutations of his career, to Oxford his
affection was passionate as it was constant. 'There is not a man that
has passed through that great and famous university that can say with
more truth than I can say, I love her from the bottom of my heart.'[52]

VI

THOUGHTS ON FUTURE PROFESSION

Another episode must have a place before I close this chapter. At the
end of 1828, the youthful Gladstone had composed a long letter, of which
the manuscript survives, to a Liverpool newspaper, earnestly contesting
its appalling proposition that 'man has no more control over his belief,
than he has over his stature or his colour,' and beseeching the editor
to try Leslie's _Short Method with the Deists_, if he be unfortunate
enough to doubt the authority of the Bible. At Oxford his fervour
carried him beyond the fluent tract to a personal decision. On August
4th, 1830, the entry is this:--'Began Thucydides. Also working up
Herodotus. [Greek: exertumenos]. Construing Thucydides at night. Uncomfortable
again and much distracted with doubts as to my future line of conduct.
God direct me. I am utterly blind. Wrote a very long letter to my dear
father on the subject of my future profession, wishing if possible to
bring the question to an immediate and final settlement.' The letter is
exorbitant in length, it is vague, it is obscure; but the appeal
contained in it is as earnest as any appeal from son to parent on such a
subject ever was, and it is of special interest as the first definite
indication alike of the extraordinary intensity of his religious
disposition, and of that double-mindedness, that division of sensibility
between the demands of spiritual and of secular life, which remained
throughout one of the marking traits of his career. He declares his
conviction that his duty, alike to man as a social being, and as a
rational and reasonable being to God, summons him with a voice too
imperative to be resisted, to forsake the ordinary callings of