ABSTRACT
FROM The Vatican Decrees in their bearing on Civil Allegiance: A Political Expostulation, London, 1874. Gladstone’s pamphlet was one of the most celebrated criticisms of the claims of Rome made during the nineteenth century. This passage leaves out most of the close texture of argument, presented at length, to show the potentially subversive tendencies of the Vatican Decrees. Instead, those parts in which Gladstone recounted the reasons for his expostulation are extracted: they help to explain the political circumstances which led to this sophisticated yet essentially traditional vilification of Roman Catholicism. ‘The Rome of the Middle Ages claimed universal monarchy,’ Gladstone wrote; ‘The modern Church of Rome has abandoned nothing, retracted nothing.’
