ol. It is a school of
temper. It is also a school of patience. It is a school of honour,
and it is a school of justice.--GLADSTONE (1878).

FOREIGN TRAVEL

Leaving home in the latter part of January (1832), with a Wordsworth for
a pocket companion, Mr. Gladstone made his way to Oxford, where he
laboured through his packing, settled accounts, 'heard a very able
sermon indeed from Newman at St. Mary's,' took his bachelor's degree
(Jan. 26), and after a day or two with relatives and friends in London,
left England along with his brother John at the beginning of February.
He did not return until the end of July. He visited Brussels, Paris,
Florence, Naples, Rome, Venice, and Milan. Of this long journey he kept
a full record, and it contains one entry of no small moment in his
mental history. A conception now began to possess him, that according to
one religious school kindled a saving illumination, and according to
another threw something of a shade upon his future path. In either view
it marked a change of spiritual course, a transformation not of religion
as the centre of his being, for that it always was, but of the frame and
mould within which religion was to expand.

In entering St. Peter's at Rome (March 31, 1832) he experienced his
'first conception of unity in the Church,' and first longed for its
visible attainment. Here he felt 'the pain and shame of the schism which
separates us from Rome--whose guilt surely rests not upon the venerable
fathers of the English Reformed Church but upon Rome itself, yet whose
melancholy effects the mind is doomed to feel when you enter this
magnificent temple and behold in its walls the images of Christian
saints and the words of everlasting truth; yet such is the mass of
intervening encumbrances that you scarcely own, and can yet more
scantily realise, any bond of sympathy or union.' This was no fleeting
impression of a traveller. It had been preceded by a disenchantment, for
he had made his way from Turin to Pinerol, and seen one of the Vaudois
valleys. He had framed a lofty conception of the people as ideal
Christians, and he underwent a chill of disappointment on finding them
apparently much like other men. Even the pastor, though a quiet,
inoffensive man, gave no sign of energy or of what would have been
called in England vital religion. With this chill at his heart he came
upon the atmosphere of gorgeous Rome. It was, however, in the