led to the Queen in council; and the Queen in
council was advised that the proceedings of the Bishop of Cape Town were
null and void, for in law there was no established church in the colony,
nor any ecclesiastical court with lawful jurisdiction.(118) This triumph
of heresy was a heavy blow. In 1866 Bishop Colenso brought an action
against Mr. Gladstone and the other trustees of the colonial bishoprics
fund, calling upon them to set aside a sum of ten thousand pounds for the
purpose of securing the income of the Bishop of Natal, and to pay him his
salary, which they had withheld since his wrongful deprivation. "We," said
Mr. Gladstone to Miss Burdett Coutts, "founding ourselves on the judgment,
say there is no see of Natal in the sense of the founders of the fund, and
therefore, of course, no bishop of such a see." Romilly, master of the
rolls, gave judgment in favour of Colenso. These perplexities did not
dismay Mr. Gladstone. "Remembering what the churches in the colonies were
some forty years back, when I first began (from my father's having a
connection with the West Indies), to feel an interest in them, I must own
that they present a cheering, a remarkable, indeed a wonderful spectacle."
"I quite feel with you," he says to Miss Burdett Coutts, "a great
uneasiness at what may follow from the exercise of judicial powers by
synods merely ecclesiastical, especially if small, remote, and unchecked
by an active public opinion. But in the American episcopal church it has
been found practicable in a great degree to obviate any dangers from such
a source." Ten years after this, in one of the most remarkable articles he
ever wrote, speaking of the protestant evangelical section of the
adherents of the Christian system, he says that no portion of this entire
group seems to be endowed with greater vigour than this in the United
States and the British colonies, which has grown up in new soil, "_and far
from the possibly chilling shadow of national establishments of
religion_."(119)

Chapter XI. Popular Estimates. (1868)

Die Mitlebenden werden an vorzueglichen Menschen gar leicht irre;
das Besondere der Person stoert sie, das laufende bewegliche Leben
verrueckt ihre Standpunkte und hindert das Kennen und Anerkennen
eines solchen Mannes.--GOETHE.

The contemporaries of superior men easily go wrong about them.
Peculiarity discomposes them; the swift current of life disturbs
their points of vi