collection of congregations commended in the Bible for the
diffusion of the knowledge and right interpretation of the Scriptures,
the commemoration of gospel events, and the linking of gospel truths to
a well-ordered life. To the high anglican as to the Roman catholic, the
church was something very different from this; not a fabric reared by
man, nor in truth any mechanical fabric at all, but a mystically
appointed channel of salvation, an indispensable element in the relation
between the soul of man and its creator. To be a member of it was not to
join an external association, but to become an inward partaker in
ineffable and mysterious graces to which no other access lay open. Such
was the Church Catholic and Apostolic as set up from the beginning, and
of this immense mystery, of this saving agency, of this incommensurable
spiritual force, the established church of England was the local
presence and the organ.

HARD QUESTIONS REVIVED

The noble restlessness of the profounder and more penetrating minds was
not satisfied, any more than Bossuet had been, to think of the church as
only an element in a scheme of individual salvation. They sought in it
the comprehensive solution of all the riddles of life and time. Newman
drew in powerful outline the sublime and sombre anarchy of human
history.

This is the enigma, this the solution in faith and spirit, in which Mr.
Gladstone lived and moved. In him it gave to the energies of life their
meaning, and to duty its foundation. While poetic voices and the oracles
of sages--Goethe, Scott, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge--were
drawing men one way or another, or else were leaving the void turbid and
formless, he, in the midst of doubts, distractions, and fears, saw a
steadfast light where the Oxford men saw it; in that concrete
representation of the unseen Power that, as he believed, had made and
guides and rules the world, in that Church Catholic and Apostolic which
alone would have the force and the stoutness necessary to serve for a
breakwater against the deluge. Yet to understand Mr. Gladstone's case,
we have ever to remember that what is called the catholic revival was
not in England that which the catholic counter-revolution had been on
the continent of Europe, primarily a political movement. Its workings
were inward, in the sphere of the mind, in thought and faith, in
idealised associations of historic grandeur.[84]