words of
Clough's fine line from _Easter Day_, 'through the great sinful streets
of Naples as he passed,' that a great mutation overtook him.

One Sunday (May 13) something, I know not what, set me on examining
the occasional offices of the church in the prayer book. They made
a strong impression upon me on that very day, and the impression
has never been effaced. I had previously taken a great deal of
teaching direct from the Bible, as best I could, but now the figure
of the Church arose before me as a teacher too, and I gradually
found in how incomplete and fragmentary a manner I had drawn divine
truth from the sacred volume, as indeed I had also missed in the
thirty-nine articles some things which ought to have taught me
better. Such, for I believe that I have given the fact as it
occurred, in its silence and its solitude, was my first
introduction to the august conception of the Church of Christ. It
presented to me Christianity under an aspect in which I had not yet
known it: its ministry of symbols, its channels of grace, its
unending line of teachers joining from the Head: a sublime
construction, based throughout upon historic fact, uplifting the
idea of the community in which we live, and of the access which it
enjoys through the new and living way to the presence of the Most
High. From this time I began to feel my way by decrees into or
towards a true notion of the Church. It became a definite and
organised idea when, at the suggestion of James Hope, I read the
just published and remarkable work of Palmer. But the charm of
freshness lay upon that first disclosure of 1832.

This mighty question:--what is the nature of a church and what the
duties, titles, and symbols of faithful membership, which in divers
forms had shaken the world for so many ages and now first dawned upon
his ardent mind, was the germ of a deep and lasting pre-occupation of
which we shall speedily and without cessation find abundant traces.

II

OFFER OF A SEAT

A few weeks later, the great rival interest in Mr. Gladstone's life, if
rival we may call it, was forced into startling prominence before him.
At Milan he received a letter from Lord Lincoln, saying that he was
commissioned by his father, the Duke of Newcastle, to inform him that
his influence in the borou