II

HIS RELIGIOUS GROWTH

The reader has already been told how at Rome and in Naples in 1832, Mr.
Gladstone was suddenly arrested by the new idea of a church,
interweaving with the whole of human life a pervading and equalised
spirit of religion. Long years after, in an unfinished fragment, he
began to trace the golden thread of his religious growth:--

My environment in my childhood was strictly evangelical. My dear
and noble mother was a woman of warm piety but broken health, and I
was not directly instructed by her. But I was brought up to believe
that Doyly and Mant's Bible (then a standard book of the colour
ruling in the church) was heretical, and that every unitarian (I
suppose also every heathen) must, as matter of course, be lost
forever. This deplorable servitude of mind oppressed me in a
greater or less degree for a number of years. As late as in the
year (I think) 1836, one of my brothers married a beautiful and in
every way charming person, who had been brought up in a family of
the unitarian profession, yet under a mother very sincerely
religious. I went through much mental difficulty and distress at
the time, as there had been no express renunciation [by her] of the
ancestral creed, and I absurdly busied myself with devising this or
that religious test as what if accepted might suffice.[85]

So, as will be seen, the first access of churchlike ideas to my
mind by no means sufficed to expel my inherited and bigoted
misconception, though in the event they did it as I hope
effectively. But I long retained in my recollection an observation
made to me in (I think) the year 1829, by Mrs. Benjamin Gaskell of
Thornes, near Wakefield, a seed which was destined long to remain
in my mind without germinating. I fell into religious conversation
with this excellent woman, the mother of my Eton friend Milnes
Gaskell, himself the husband of an unitarian. She said to me,
Surely we cannot entertain a doubt as to the future condition of
any person truly united to Christ by faith and love, whatever may
be the faults of his opinions. Here she supplied me with the key to
the whole question. At this hour I feel grateful to her
accordingly, for the scope of her remark is very wide; and it is
now my rule to remember her in prayer before the al