William Ewart Gladstone [20]
His knowledge was not, perhaps, very wide, but it was generally exact; indeed, the accuracy with which he grasped facts that belonged to the realm of history proper was sometimes in strange contrast to the fanciful way in which he reasoned from them, or to the wildness of his conjectures in the prehistoric region. For metaphysics strictly so called he had apparently little turn-- his reading did not go far beyond those companions of his youth, Aristotle and Bishop Butler; and philosophical speculation interested him only so far as it bore on Christian doctrine. Neither, in spite of his eminence as a financier and an advocate of free trade, did he show much taste for economic studies. On practical topics, such as the working of protective tariffs, the abuse of charitable endowments, the development of fruit-culture in England, the duty of liberal giving by the rich, the utility of thrift among the poor, his remarks were always full of point, clearness, and good sense, but he seldom launched out into the wider sea of economic theory. He must have possessed mathematical talent, for he took a first class in mathematics at Oxford, at the same time as his first in classics, but it was a subject he soon dropped. Regarding the sciences of nature, the sciences of experiment and observation, he seemed to feel as little curiosity as any educated man who notes the enormous part they play in the modern world can feel. Sayings of his have been quoted which show that he imperfectly comprehended the character of the evidence they rely upon and of the methods they employ. On one occasion he astonished a dinner-table of younger friends by refusing to accept some of the most certain conclusions of modern geology. No doubt he belonged (as the famous Lord Derby once said of himself) to a pre-scientific age; still, it was hard to avoid thinking that he was unconsciously influenced by a belief that such sciences as geology and biology, for instance, were being worked in a sense hostile to revealed religion, and were therefore influences threatening the moral welfare of mankind.
CHAPTER VIII: RELIGIOUS CHARACTER
Of all the things with which men are concerned, religion was that which had the strongest hold upon his thoughts and feelings. He had desired, when quitting the university, to become a clergyman, and it was only his father's opposition that made him abandon the idea. Never thereafter did he cease to take the warmest and most constant interest in all the ecclesiastical controversies that distracted the Established Church. He was turned out of his seat for Oxford University by the country clergy, who form the bulk of the voters. He incurred the bitter displeasure of four fifths of the Anglican communion by disestablishing the Protestant Episcopal Church in Ireland, and from 1868 to the end of his life found nearly all the clerical force of the English establishment arrayed against him, while his warmest support came from the Nonconformists of England and the Presbyterians of Scotland. Yet nothing affected his devotion to the church in which he had been brought up, nor to the body of Anglo-Catholic doctrine he had imbibed as an undergraduate. After an attack of influenza which had left him very weak in the spring of 1891, he endangered his life by attending a meeting on behalf of the Colonial Bishoprics Fund, for which he had spoken fifty years before. His theological opinions tinged his views upon not a few political subjects. They filled him with dislike of the legalization of marriage with a deceased wife's sister; they made him a vehement opponent of the bill which established the English Divorce Court in 1857, and a watchfully hostile critic of all divorce legislation in America afterward. Some of his friends traced to the same cause his low estimate of German literature and even his political aversion to the German Empire. He could not forget that Germany had been the fountain of rationalism, while German Evangelical Protestantism was more schismatic and further removed from the medieval church than it pleased
CHAPTER VIII: RELIGIOUS CHARACTER
Of all the things with which men are concerned, religion was that which had the strongest hold upon his thoughts and feelings. He had desired, when quitting the university, to become a clergyman, and it was only his father's opposition that made him abandon the idea. Never thereafter did he cease to take the warmest and most constant interest in all the ecclesiastical controversies that distracted the Established Church. He was turned out of his seat for Oxford University by the country clergy, who form the bulk of the voters. He incurred the bitter displeasure of four fifths of the Anglican communion by disestablishing the Protestant Episcopal Church in Ireland, and from 1868 to the end of his life found nearly all the clerical force of the English establishment arrayed against him, while his warmest support came from the Nonconformists of England and the Presbyterians of Scotland. Yet nothing affected his devotion to the church in which he had been brought up, nor to the body of Anglo-Catholic doctrine he had imbibed as an undergraduate. After an attack of influenza which had left him very weak in the spring of 1891, he endangered his life by attending a meeting on behalf of the Colonial Bishoprics Fund, for which he had spoken fifty years before. His theological opinions tinged his views upon not a few political subjects. They filled him with dislike of the legalization of marriage with a deceased wife's sister; they made him a vehement opponent of the bill which established the English Divorce Court in 1857, and a watchfully hostile critic of all divorce legislation in America afterward. Some of his friends traced to the same cause his low estimate of German literature and even his political aversion to the German Empire. He could not forget that Germany had been the fountain of rationalism, while German Evangelical Protestantism was more schismatic and further removed from the medieval church than it pleased