The Real Gladstone: An Anecdotal Biography

CHAPTER XV

MR. GLADSTONE’S LETTERS

‘My dear Bright,

‘I am sorry to be compelled again to address you. In your speech you charge me with having successfully concealed my thoughts last November. You ought to have known that this was not the fact, for in reply to others, from whom this gross charge was more to be expected than from you, I pointed out last week that on the 9th November, in Edinburgh, I told my constituents that if the Irish elections went as was expected, the magnitude of the subject they would bring forward would throw all others into the shade, and that it “went down to the very roots and foundations of our whole civil and political constitution” (“Midlothian Speeches,” 1885, p. 44). 2. You say I have described a conspiracy now existing in Ireland as marching through rapine to the break-up of the United Kingdom. This also is contrary to the fact. In 1881 there was, in my opinion, such a conspiracy against the payment of rent and the union of the countries, and I so described it. In my opinion, there is no such conspiracy now, nor anything in the least degree resembling it. You put into my mouth words which, coming from me, would be absolute falsehood. 3. You charge me with a want of frankness, because I have not pledged the Government to some defined line of action with regard to the Land Purchase Bill. A charge of this kind is, between old colleagues and old friends, to say the least, unusual. Evidently you have not read the Bill or my speech on its introduction, and you have never been concerned in the practical work of legislation on difficult and complicated subjects. The foundation of your charge is that on one of the most difficult and most complicated of all subjects I do not, in the midst of overwhelming work, formulate at once a new course or method of action without consulting the colleagues to whom I am so much bound, and from whom I receive invaluable aid. It might, I think, have occurred to you, as you have been in the Cabinet, that such a course on my part would have been indecent and disloyal, and that I should greatly prefer to bear all the charges and suspicions which you are now unexpectedly the man to fasten upon me. 4. You state you are convinced it is my intention to thrust the Land Purchase Bill upon the House of Commons. If I am a man capable of such an intention, I wonder you ever took office with one so ignorant of the spirit of the Constitution and so arbitrary in his character. Though this appears to be your opinion of me, I do not think it is the opinion held by my countrymen in general. You quote not a word in support of your charge; it is absolutely untrue. Every candidate, friendly or unfriendly, will form his own view, and take his own course on the subject. We must consider to the best of our power all the facts before us, but I certainly will not forego my right to make some effort to amend the dangerous and mischievous Land Purchase Law passed last year for Ireland, if such effort should promise to meet approval. I have done what I could to keep out of controversy with you, and, while driven to remonstrate against your charges, I advisedly abstain from all notice of your statements, criticisms, and arguments.

To this Mr. Bright replied two days afterwards as follows:

‘My dear Gladstone,

‘I am sorry my speech has so greatly irritated you. It has been as great a grief to me to speak as I have spoken as it can have been to you to listen or to read. You say it is a gross charge to say that you concealed your thoughts last November. Surely, when you urged the constituencies to send you a Liberal majority large enough to make you independent of Mr. Parnell and his party, the Liberal party and the country understood you to ask for a majority to enable you to resist Mr. Parnell, not to make a complete surrender to him. You object to my quotations about a conspiracy “marching through rapine to the breakup of the United Kingdom,” and you say there is now no such conspiracy against the payment of rent and the union of the countries. I believe there is now such a conspiracy, and that it is expecting and seeking its further success through your measures. You complain that I charge you with a want of frankness in regard to the Land Purchase Bill. You must know that a large number of your supporters are utterly opposed to that Bill. If you tie the two Bills together, their difficulty in dealing with them will be much increased and their liberty greatly fettered. I think your friends and your opponents and the country have a right to know your intentions on so great a matter, when you are asking them to elect a Parliament in your favour. Your language seems to me rather a puzzle than an explanation, and that of your colleagues, though contradictory, is not much clearer. “I have done what I could to keep out of controversy with you.” I have not urged any man in Parliament, or out of it, to vote against you. I have abstained from speaking in public until I was in the face of my constituents, who have returned me unopposed to the new Parliament, and to them I was bound to explain my opinion of, and my judgment on, your Irish Bills. I stand by what I have said, and shall be surprised if the new Parliament be more favourable to your Irish measures than the one you have thought it necessary to dissolve. Though I thus differ from you at this time and on this question, do not imagine that I can ever cease to admire your great qualities or to value the great services you have rendered to your country.

At the St. Asaph Diocesan Conference the following letter, addressed by the Premier to Dr. Hughes, Bishop of St. Asaph, was read by Canon Wynne Edwards:

‘My dear Lord Bishop,

‘When I undertook to contribute a letter (in default of personal attendance) towards the work of the Diocesan Conference, I did not anticipate the autumnal controversy in which the political world is now engulfed, and I fear that any attempt I now make to redeem a pledge given under other circumstances will be poor and inadequate, even in comparison with what it might otherwise have been, from the cares and distractions which the controversy daily brings upon me. At the same time, I had not even at the outset any ambitious plan before me. I did not prepare to enter on the wide field of argument respecting the disestablishment of the Church – too vast for my available time; too polemical for one who has already more than enough of polemical matter on his hands (a laugh). Will it come? Ought it to come? Must it come? Is it near, or is it somewhat distant or indefinitely remote? All these are questions of interest which I could not touch with advantage unless it be a single point. Whether Disestablishment would be disastrous or not, I think it clear that there is only one way in which it might come to be disgraceful. That one way parts into two. Disestablishment would be disgraceful if it were due to the neglect, indifference, or deadness of the Church (applause). But this is a contingency happily so improbable that for present purposes it may be dismissed without discussion. It might also be disgraceful were it to arrive as a consequence of dissensions among the members of the Church (hear, hear). This, as it appears to me, would be an unworthy termination of a controversy which ought to be settled upon far higher grounds (applause). The particular “duty of Churchmen with regard to Disestablishment,” which I shall try in few words to set forth, is the duty of taking care that dissensions from within shall not bring the Establishment to its end (applause). The last half-century has been a period of the most active religious life known to the Reformed Church of England. It has also been the period of the sharpest internal discord. That discord has of late been materially allayed, not, I believe, through the use of mere narcotics, not because the pulse beats less vigorously in her veins, but through the prevalence in various quarters of wise counsels, or, in other words, the application to our ecclesiastical affairs of that common-sense by which we desire that our secular affairs should always be governed (applause). What I wish now to urge is this. In the fact that such discord has prevailed there is not – nay, even were it to rise again into exasperation there ought not to be – ground for religious despondency or dismay. Divergence is to be expected, not only in all things human, but in all things divine which wear things human for their habiliment; and there were particular reasons why it was to be anticipated and to be patiently borne within the Church of England. We have still to look it in the face as an incident of our history, though it may lie less heavily upon us than in some former years as a present embarrassment. It is, under all circumstances, a cause of pain and a source of danger, but not always a demonstrative proof of weakness. On the contrary, when profoundly felt and yet borne, so to speak, without breach of continuity, it may be a test and a proof of strength (applause). In every living organism, in every institution or system, its health will depend upon the equilibrium of the elements out of which it is composed; but the maintenance of this equilibrium is more easy when the system is uniformly simple and its tendencies determinate and clear; more difficult when it is many-sided and when it aims at binding together and at directing towards a common end tendencies which are naturally divergent, and which more commonly find for themselves homes altogether severed. Let me borrow an illustration from the world of politics. Discord is comparatively rare and slight in a political club, because a political club is an institution formed to maintain some scheme of opinion current at the time and familiarly apprehended, though its tests be but rough, by those who join it. But the Houses of Parliament, in which these rival systems have to dwell together and to work themselves out into common results, are and must be the homes of frequent and serious contention. In the sixteenth century the Continental Churches of the West north of the Alps and Pyrenees were for the most part broken into rival bodies, fiercely contending with one another, but within themselves representing respectively one of the two great tendencies of the period. To these tendencies I will not give a theological name, but will call them those of the Reformation and the counter-Reformation respectively. From the time of the Council of Trent and of Loyola the Church of Rome represented more strictly than it had done before the tendencies of counter-Reformation. The Reformed Church had partly in the letter, and yet more in the spirit, broken with the previous constitution of the Church as well as with her dogma. Their confessions were indeed complex, but were framed upon a basis which their members felt, or at least thought they understood. They had all become in different degrees less like legislatures and more like clubs; that is to say, in the points to which I refer. A considerable time elapsed accordingly before the Latin Church was again seriously troubled with theological quarrels within its own domain; so also the Protestant Churches on the Continent underwent far less of trouble from internal dissensions than did the Church of England.

‘In the Scandinavian countries we may almost say such trouble has been unknown; the reason is, I apprehend, that in each case the hostile elements had been in the main suppressed or expelled by the struggle of the sixteenth century. Within this island it was not so. Both in England and in Scotland the effort was not only made, but tenaciously persisted in, to maintain the external unity of the nation in a common religious profession. I may here drop the case of Scotland, which has found a solution of its own. It is enough to speak of the case of England. It presents a result at first sight paradoxical in this respect – that the Church, which among reformed communions had least broken with tradition and most maintained the framework of the ancient authority, was the most perplexed, and indeed convulsed, with controversies and with schisms. When the matter is examined the cause is not far to seek. Weingarten, a German writer, lays down the proposition that the Reformation, as a religious movement, took its shape in England not in the sixteenth century, but in the seventeenth. The sixteenth century made the Church and the nation independent, and established the external framework of an ecclesiastical policy; but it seems difficult to show that the religion now professed as national in England took its rise at that epoch otherwise than as a legal and national profession. It seems plain that the great bulk of those burned under Mary were Puritans. Under Elizabeth we have to look, I believe (with very rare and remarkable exceptions), among Puritans or among recusants for the exhibition of an active and definite religious life. A strong pressure from without bound together a heterogeneous mass. In the region of theology I apprehend that what is termed Anglicanism began with Hooker – an authority still so high amongst us that none disown him, and a writer whose work is said by Walton to have attracted the laudatory admiration of the reigning Pope. But the body to which Hooker belonged also contained Cartwright, and contained, too, men of the same opinion. These internal differences ripened after a time into convulsion, tyranny, and revolution. I cannot severely blame those who overset Episcopacy for their oversetting, nor those who brought it back for their bringing it back. The contending elements could not live together in the same dwelling upon tolerable terms. Every effort was made to devise schemes of comprehension, and every effort failed. It was better, I suppose, that the rival partisans should part than that they should carry the country onward from one revolution to another. They parted in Scotland by casting out Episcopacy at the Revolution. They parted in England legally at the Restoration, and morally when a series of subsequent experiences had shown that the system then established by law was the only one in which the bulk of the nation could be content to abide (applause).

‘But what was the operation thus effected? It was a drastic process, but a process far less drastic than those of the sixteenth century. On the one side or the other it so far enabled the Church of England to fulfil the conditions of a corporate life and unity that it has now been maintained during two centuries and a quarter without either the unmitigated dualism or the agonies of convulsion which had marked the previous experience, and with this general result: that at the present hour the hopes of the Church of England are higher and more buoyant than perhaps they have ever been (applause). It has been very far indeed from an heroic history. Not only defect but scandal has abounded. These things, however, are beside the present purpose, which aims at pointing out that when uniformity was finally brought by law into the Church of England, still much room for diversity was left – room enough to invite polemical criticism, but perhaps not more than, on the one hand, the inestimable value of the principle of liberty required, or than, on the other hand, the teaching office of the Church could without vital injury allow. She is still working out her system by experience, but still not without this note, that the strife of parties, although softened of late, is still somewhat sharp within her. When it is said that the Church is comprehensive, the true meaning seems to be that her history, which has, of course, determined her character, has tended to comprise within her limits a greater diversity of views than have usually been so brought together. What may be called the Puritanical element, rejected at the Restoration, began slowly to reassert itself in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and is now admitted to have brought about a great revival of religious life in the English Church (applause). A form of thought to which the name of Broad may be applied seems to have been more than tolerated in some conspicuous instances by Laud, and acquired solidity in the universities at last after the Restoration. On the other hand, as regards the Romeward tendency (so to term it) of the Church of England, there is some evidence (though not free from suspicion) in the curious life of Lady Williams, to show that the chief English bishops of that era took a very mitigated view of their doctrinal differences from the Roman Church; and Barillon, the Ambassador of Louis XIV., writes to his Court in the reign of James II. that the Anglican prelates were preferable to the Jansenist Bishops of the Roman Communion. I will not attempt to bring these illustrations (in which I am relying upon memory only) down to the present day. Enough, I think, has been said to show that the Church of England has been all along peculiarly liable on the one side and on the other both to attack and to defection, and that the probable cause is to be found in the degree in which, whether for worldly or for religious reasons, it was attempted in her case to combine divergent elements within her borders. If there be any truth in this rough and very incomplete historical sketch, the conclusions to be drawn from it as regards my present purpose are clear and simple, for it at once appears that the great maxim In omnibus caritas, which is so necessary to temper all religious controversy, ought to apply with a tenfold force to the conduct of the members of the Church of England in respect to differences among themselves. They ought, of course, in the first place to remember that their right to differ is limited by the laws of the system to which they belong; but within that limit should they not also, each of them, recollect that his antagonist has something to say? – that the Reformation and the counter-Reformation tendencies were, in the order of Providence, placed here in a closer juxtaposition than anywhere else in the Christian world; that a course of destiny so peculiar appears to indicate on the part of the Supreme Orderer a peculiar purpose; that not only no religious, but no considerate or prudent, man, should run the risk of interfering with such a purpose; that the great charity which is a bounden duty everywhere in these matters should here be accompanied and upheld by two ever-striving handmaidens of a great reverence and a great patience; that instead of the bitterness, I might almost say the savagery, which has too often characterized our inward contentions, they ought on every ground of history and reason to be peculiarly marked by moderation, mildness and reserve (applause), by thinking no evil, by hoping all things, by kindly and favourable interpretations (applause), and if the demand thus made upon the evangelical resources of human nature seem to be over-large, is it not warranted? Is it not eminently rational at a time when, on the one hand, the deepest and widest questions of belief in a Saviour, in a Deity, and in a moral law, are everywhere coming to issue on a scale hitherto without example; and when, on the other hand, this great organization within which our lot has been cast is from day to day exhibiting here and beyond the seas not only a remarkable material extension, but a growing vigour of inward life, and an increasing abundance in every work of mercy, of benevolence, and of true civilization? (applause). In concluding these remarks, I will only say that I have, in writing them, endeavoured to place myself at a point of view which is impersonal, impartial and historical, and that I have not knowingly wounded the susceptibilities or assailed the opinions of anyone who may read them (loud applause).