ABSTRACT

The first thing that must strike anybody who looks at William Ewart Gladstone’s writings, or reads his private letters and his diaries, is that he is as much interested in religion as in politics. Gladstone put religion first among his interests. He was essentially European where most of his countrymen were English; catholic where they were insular. He regarded himself as engaged in a conflict between violence and justice, between wrong and right, between truth and error, not on the stage of the life of England but on the larger stage of the life of Europe. Gladstone believed that civil States could be taught to obey the law of God, and he dramatized politics as a perpetual struggle between violence and justice for the allegiance of men’s minds and wills. In the noble speech that he made on Gladstone’s death Lord Salisbury said that politics hardly provided a parallel to the example he had set of a great Christian man.