ve all I wish
you to be free. What I have now been dwelling upon is a matter
higher and deeper than the region of mere opinion. It has fallen
to my lot to take a share larger than that of many around me,
though in itself slight, in bringing the principle I have
described into use as a ground of action. I am convinced that if I
have laboured to any purpose at all it has been in great part for
this. It is part of that business of reconciling the past with the
new time and order, which seems to belong particularly to our
country and its rulers.

He then goes on to cite as cases where something had been done towards
securing the action of the church as a religious body, Canada, where
clergy and people now appointed their own bishop; a recent judgment of the
privy council leading to widespread emancipation of the colonial church;
the revival of convocation; the licence to convocation to alter the
thirty-sixth canon; the bestowal of self-government on Oxford. "In these
measures," he says, "I have been permitted to take my part; but had I
adopted the rigid rule of others in regard to the temporal prerogatives,
real or supposed, of the church, I should at once have lost all power to
promote them."

"As to disruption," he wrote in these days, "that is the old cry by means
of which in all times the temporal interests of the English church have
been upheld in preference to the spiritual. The church of England is much
more likely of the two, to part with her faith than with her funds. It is
the old question, which is the greater, the _gold_ or the altar that
sanctifies the gold. Had this question been more boldly asked and more
truly answered in other times, we should not have been where we now are.
And by continually looking to the gold and not the altar, the dangers of
the future will be not diminished but increased."(111)

(M46) In 1866 Mr. Gladstone for the first time voted for the abolition of
church rates. Later in the session he introduced his own plan, not in his
capacity as minister, but with the approval of the Russell cabinet. After
this cabinet had gone out, Mr. Gladstone in 1868 introduced a bill,
abolishing all legal proceedings for the recovery of church rates, except
in cases of rates already made, or where money had been borrowed on the
security of the rates. But it permitted voluntary assessments to be made,
and all agreements to make such payments on the faith of which any