ombstone of our tribe--900 A.D.
The oldest scholar's grave is 600 A.D., and Heaven knows how many
great old Rabbis lie there, memorable and forgotten. The wind and
the rain were sobbing all round the place, and all the melancholy
of my race seemed to rise up and answer them." Though she was a
Churchwoman by practice, her own religion was a kind of undefined
Unitarianism. "The Immanence of God and the life of Christ are my
treasures." "I am a heretic, you know, and it seems to me that
all who call Christ Master with adoration of that life are of the
same band." Her favourite theologians were James Martineau, Alfred
Ainger (whose Life she wrote admirably), and Samuel Barnett, whom
she elevated into a mystic and a prophet. The ways of the Church
of England did not please her. She had nothing but scorn for "a
joyless curate prating of Easter joy with limpest lips," or for "the
Athanasian Creed sung in the highest of spirits in a prosperous church"
filled with "sealskin-jacketed mammas and blowsy old gentlemen." But
the conclusion of the whole matter was more comfortable--"All the
clergymen in the world cannot make one disbelieve in God."

X

_"WILL" GLADSTONE_

"He bequeathed to his children the perilous inheritance of a name
which the Christian world venerates." The words were originally
used by Bishop Samuel Wilberforce with reference to his father,
the emancipator of the negro. I venture to apply them to the great
man who, in days gone by, was my political leader, and I do so the
more confidently because I hold that Gladstone will be remembered
quite apart from politics, and, as Bishop Westcott said, "rather
for what he was than for what he did." He was, in Lord Salisbury's
words, "an example, to which history hardly furnishes a parallel,
of a great Christian, Statesman." It was no light matter for a
boy of thirteen to inherit a name which had been so nobly borne
for close on ninety years, and to acquire, as soon as he came of
age, the possession of a large and difficult property, and all
the local influence which such ownership implies. Yet this was
the burden which was imposed on "Will" Gladstone by his father's
untimely death. After an honourable career at Eton and Oxford, and
some instructive journeyings in the East and in America (where he
was an attache at the British Embassy), he entered Parliament as
Member for the Kilmarnock Boroughs. His Parliamentary career was
not destined to be long, but it was in