mark
my respect and affection for your lordship by making to you such a
proposal. What is more important is, that I am directly authorised
by her Majesty to state that this has been the single impediment
to her conferring the honour, and imposing the burden, upon you of
such an offer.(61)

The world made free with the honoured name of Church, the Dean of Saint
Paul's, and it has constantly been said that he declined the august
preferment to Canterbury on this occasion. In that story there is no
truth. "Formal offer," the Dean himself wrote to a friend, "there was
none, and could not be, for I had already on another occasion told my mind
to Gladstone, and said that reasons of health, apart from other reasons,
made it impossible for me to think of anything, except a retirement
altogether from office."(62)

When it was rumoured that Mr. Gladstone intended to recommend Dr. Benson,
then Bishop of Truro, to the archbishopric, a political supporter came to
remonstrate with him. "The Bishop of Truro is a strong tory," he said,
"but that is not all. He has joined Mr. Raikes's election committee at
Cambridge; and it was only last week that Raikes made a violent personal
attack on yourself." "Do you know," replied Mr. Gladstone, "you have just
supplied me with a strong argument in Dr. Benson's favour? For if he had
been a worldly man or self-seeker, he would not have done anything so
imprudent." Perhaps we cannot wonder that whips and wirepullers deemed
this to be somewhat over-ingenious, a Christianity out of season. Even
liberals who took another point of view, still asked themselves how it was
(M38) that when church preferment came his way, the prime minister so
often found the best clergymen in the worst politicians. They should have
remembered that he was of those who believed "no more glorious church in
Christendom to exist than the church of England"; and its official
ordering was in his eyes not any less, even if it was not infinitely more,
important in the highest interests of the nation than the construction of
a cabinet or the appointment of permanent heads of departments. The church
was at this moment, moreover, in one of those angry and perilous crises
that came of the Elizabethan settlement and the Act of Uniformity, and the
anglican revival forty years ago, and all the other things that mark the
arrested progress of the Reformation in England. The anti-ritualist hunt
was up. Civil courts were