Art. 10.-GLADSTONE ON THE RELATIONS OF CHURCH AND STATE.

1. The Correspondence of William Ewart Gladstone on Church and Religion. Selected and arranged by D. C. Lathbury. Two vols. London: Murray, 1910. 2. The State in its relations with the Church. By W. E. Gladstone. London: Murray, 1838.

3. Gleanings of Past Years. By W. E. Gladstone. Seven vols. (Vols. 5, 6: Ecclesiastical). London: Murray, 1879. 4. The Life of William Ewart Gladstone. By John Morley. Three vols. London: Macmillan, 1903.

5. Mr Gladstone. By D. C. Lathbury. London: Mowbray, 1907.

6. Report of the Commissioners appointed to enquire into the constitution and working of the Ecclesiastical Courts. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1883.

7. Report of the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline. London: Wyman, 1906.

And other works.

It has been pointed out by Lord Morley that the fundamental fact of Mr Gladstone's history was that all its various activities centred in religion. Political life was only part of his religious life. It was religion that prompted his literary life. It was religious motive that, through a thousand avenues and channels, stirred him and guided him in his whole conception of active social duty.' During a life prolonged almost to the ninetieth year and vigorous to the last, Mr Gladstone expressed himself upon most of the religious and ecclesiastical problems which came up for discussion between 1833, when he first entered Parliament, and 1898, when he died; and what he found to say, whether in the field of biblical criticism, or in defence of orthodoxy, or in such special studies as those upon Bishop Butler, begun as early as 1845 and resumed when he finally retired from public life, was always interesting as the product of a mind as penetrating as it was devout. In some cases, it must be admitted, the learning, though considerable for a layman, was not adequate; in others, the position so jealously defended has proved indefensible.

But there is one province of ecclesiastical theory, that of the relations of Church and State, to which Mr Gladstone made large and lasting contributions. To a consideration of the problem as he viewed it at the opening of his career he contributed his first and most elaborate essay; and he returned to the subject, in one or other of its historical or legal associations, by pamphlets and speeches, almost to the end of his life. Still more important is the fact that it fell to him as a statesman to take a leading part in modifying those relations, in response to the pressure, on the one side, of the new democratic spirit, and, on the other, of an awakened self-consciousness in the Church. Hence a study of the changes through which his conceptions passed as his mind developed or circumstances urged, cannot fail to be of interest; and it is that which is attempted in this article. The task has become possible through the labours of Lord Morley, who, throughout his masterly biography, has paid sympathetic attention to the theological side of the statesman's activities; and it has been facilitated by the zeal of Mr D. C. Lathbury, who has both written a sketch of Mr Gladstone's career as a leader of the Church,' and has edited his religious and ecclesiastical correspondence with a running commentary. It is no disparagement to the skill of either man of letters to say that the point of view in each case is so much his own that the reader needs to be on his guard against the inevitable prepossessions of an interpreter.

As set forth in the treatise of 1838, The State in its relations with the Church,' the case for Establishment is based upon two fundamental principles; the first of which is that the State has a conscience, 'representing the result of the general belief of the people.' Inasmuch as all government implies moral responsibility, which is not only that of the individual governors but belongs to the nation as a whole, the establishment of religion, upon which moral responsibility rests as its only sure ground, becomes a natural and legitimate consequence of the fact of government. When this principle is accepted, the author has no difficulty in showing the advantages that a religious establishment confers upon a nation. In the first place it brings the sanction of a ruling institution to the principles of Christianity. As he remarks (p. 51)—

'In order to raise a set of prepossessions favourable to religion, we require to bring to bear upon men every secondary instrument which is legitimate in its mode of operation; and the uppermost of all these, that which combines, embodies, and (so to speak) perpetuates the rest, is the influence of fixed law.'

Again, the establishment of religion makes it possible to give a universal application to religious influences by a territorial division of the country into manageable districts. Further, there are all the considerations, general and special, connected with the fact that the permanent administration of the ordinances of the Church requires permanent pecuniary supplies.' In his discussion of the 'sustaining, correcting and befriending' offices of the Church, the author is in the main indebted to Coleridge, whose argument he characterises as 'alike beautiful and profound.'

The second principle of the essay was Mr Gladstone's own contribution to the subject, and he formally withdrew it thirty years later. It was that, by virtue of its conscience, the State can take cognisance of religious truth and error, is indeed bound to do so, and accordingly must propagate religious truth and discourage religious error to the best of its power. It is hard to resist the suspicion that this very unconvincing idea, although it reflected Mr Gladstone's new ardour for the Tractarian scheme of doctrine which he had recently adopted and, throughout his life, jealously defended, was introduced into the scheme as one of its fundamental principles with the object of defending the establishment in Ireland; it was certainly retracted in the course of the campaign for Irish disestablishment. In A Chapter of Autobiography,' written in 1868, Mr Gladstone says of his treatise of thirty years before:

'My doctrine was, that the Church, as established by the law, was to be maintained for its truth; that this was the only principle on which it could be properly and permanently upheld; that this principle, if good in England, was good also for Ireland; that truth is of all possessions the most precious to the soul of man; and that to remove, as I then erroneously thought we should remove, this priceless treasure from the view and the reach of the Irish people, would be meanly to purchase their momentary favour at the expense of their

permanent interests, and would be a high offence against our own sacred obligations.' ('Gleanings,' vii, 108.)

It will be noticed that Mr Gladstone, in this palinode, overstates the bearing of his second principle upon the question of establishments in general. It is indisputable that a State which entertained the notion of establishing a church would not do so, unless it were convinced that the church of its choice was in possession of the truth; but that is a different thing from saying that the object of an establishment is the propagation of truth; or that the Church of England was established with that object. Indeed, in another connexion, when the case of Ireland is not immediately before him, the essayist admits, not only that the union of Church and State appears to have grown up in the order of social nature'-a consideration which is much to the point in forming an estimate of the purpose of an establishment-but also that the State cannot be immediately and permanently cognisant of the doctrines taught' by the institution with which it forms relations. Accordingly, we are not surprised to find that, after some experience of practical statesmanship, the second principle of the theory was discarded, and the interests of 'truth' assigned to the Church alone.

Mr Lathbury takes the view that the abandonment of this secondary principle was due to Mr Gladstone's change from Evangelical to High Church opinions; but such a view is untenable in face of the fact that every chapter of the essay, as it was written, was submitted to the scrutiny of James Hope, afterwards Hope-Scott, from whom Mr Gladstone had imbibed his Tractarianism; and, indeed, nothing could be less Evangelical, in the party sense of the word, than the view of the Church of England taken throughout the essay. The change is sufficiently explained by the exigencies of practical politics. The recognition of national and social facts was one of the debts which Mr Gladstone owed and acknowledged to the study of Bishop Butler; and there were two facts especially which refused to fit into his scheme, and which, though they might be glossed over in an essay, were in the conduct of affairs less easily ignored. The first fact was that the Church established in Scotland was Presbyterian; and the second that a grant

was regularly made from the Exchequer to the Roman Catholic College at Maynooth.

In the essay these awkward facts are put aside as anomalies. The obligation to recognise the Presbyterian Establishment and to support the Roman Catholic College depended upon the Acts of Union with the respective countries. 'Fieri non debuit, factum valet.' But even in the essay we can perceive the uneasiness which they caused to the maker of theories. As a north-countryman, with an inbred respect for Scottish institutions and the Scottish character, Mr Gladstone did not feel happy in speaking of the Church of his fathers as an unjustifiable anomaly. It was not a case of 'heterodoxy,' he points out, but of 'separatism,' and possessed every feature 'that could mitigate the anomaly and evil of separatism.'

'Many persons of sincere piety do not object to consider themselves as members both of the English and the Scottish Church, according as they happen to reside, at different seasons of the year, south or north of the Border. And no man can think that the personality of the State is more stringent, or entails stricter obligations, than that of the individual.'

The logic of this last sentence is plainly of the heart, not of the head. With Ireland, in the essay, Mr Gladstone is much less sympathetic. He pronounces the Maynooth grant to be vicious, and advises its discontinuance. But already he faces the surrender of his principle as a possible alternative.

'Unless [the State] is bound in conscience to maintain the national Church as God's appointed vehicle of religious truth, it should adopt as its rule the numbers and the needs of the several classes of religionists; and in either aspect the claim of the Roman Catholics is infinitely the strongest. In amount the grant is niggardly and unworthy.'

When Sir Robert Peel proposed to increase the grant seven years later, Mr Gladstone voted for the measure, though he felt it incumbent upon him to resign his seat in the Cabinet before doing so, as a pledge that his change of mind was conscientious.

But there was another class of facts which helped to convince the practical politician that his ideal polity was not for this world. The House of Commons, to which he