proneness to casuistry, its taste for symbolism, were already potent
influences working on the more susceptible of the younger minds. On
Mr. Gladstone they told with full force. He became, and never
ceased to be, not merely a High-churchman, but what may be called an
Anglo-Catholic, in his theology, deferential not only to
ecclesiastical tradition, but to the living voice of the visible
church, respecting the priesthood as the recipients (if duly
ordained) of a special grace and peculiar powers, attaching great
importance to the sacraments, feeling himself nearer to the Church
of Rome, despite what he deemed her corruptions, than to any of the
non-episcopal Protestant churches. Henceforth his interests in life
were as much ecclesiastical as political. For a time he desired to
be ordained a clergyman. Had this wish been carried out, it can
scarcely be doubted that he would eventually have become the leading
figure in the Church of England and have sensibly affected her
recent history. The later stages in his career drew him away from
the main current of political opinion within that church. He who
had been the strongest advocate of established churches came to be
the leading agent in the disestablishment of the Protestant
Episcopal Church in Ireland, and a supporter of the policy of
disestablishment in Scotland and in Wales. But the color which
these Oxford years gave to his mind and thoughts was never
obliterated. They widened the range of his interests and deepened
his moral zeal and religious earnestness. But at the same time they
confirmed his natural bent toward over-subtle distinctions and fine-
drawn reasonings, and they put him somewhat out of sympathy not only
with the attitude of the average Englishman, who is essentially a
Protestant,--that is to say, averse to sacerdotalism, and suspicious
of any other religious authority than that of the Bible and the
individual conscience,--but also with two of the strongest