with contempt upon the mummeries of superstition. Justified indeed was Bright's stern rebuke to a prime minister of the Queen who thus allowed himself to offend and to indict eight millions of his countrymen, recklessly to create fresh discords between the Irish and English nations, and to perpetuate animosities that the last five-and-twenty years had done so much to assuage. Having thus precipitately committed himself, the minister was forced to legislate. 'I suspect,' wrote Mr. Gladstone to his great friend, Sir Walter James, 'John Russell has more rocks and breakers ahead than he reckoned upon when he dipped his pen in gall to smite first the pope, but most those who not being papists are such traitors and fools as really to mean something when they say, "I believe in one Holy Catholic Church."' There was some division of opinion in the cabinet,259 but a bill was settled, and the temper of the times may be gauged by the fact that leave to introduce it was given by the overwhelming majority of 395 votes to 63.
In his own language, Mr. Gladstone lamented and disapproved of the pope's proceeding extremely, and had taken care to say so in parliament two and a half years before, when 'Lord John Russell, if he had chosen, could have stopped it; but the government and the press were alike silent at that period.'260 His attitude is succinctly described in a letter to Greswell, his Oxford chairman, in 1852: 'Do not let it be asserted without contradiction that I ever felt or counselled indifference in regard to the division of England into Romish dioceses. So far is this from being the truth that shortly after I was elected, when the government were encouraging the pope to proceed, and when there was yet time to stop the measure (which I deplore sincerely) by amicable means, I took the opportunity in the House (as did Sir R. Inglis, I think a little later), of trying to draw attention to it. But it was nobody's game then, and the subject fell to the ground. Amicable prevention I desired; spiritual and ecclesiastical resistance I heartily approved; but while I say this, I cannot recede from one inch of the ground I took in opposing the bill, and I would far rather quit parliament for ever than not have voted against so pernicious a measure.'
Other matters, as we have seen, brought on a ministerial crisis, the bill was stopped, and after the crisis was over the measure came to life again with changes making it still more futile for its ends. The Peelites while, like Mr. Bright, 'despising and loathing' the language of the Vatican and the Flaminian Gate, had all of them without concert taken this outburst of prejudice and passion at its right value, and all resolved to resist legislation. How, they asked, could you tolerate the Roman catholic religion, if you would not tolerate its tenet of the ecclesiastical supremacy of the pope; and what sort of toleration of such a tenet would that be, which forbade the pope to name ecclesiastics to exercise the spiritual authority exercised in any other voluntary episcopal church, Scottish, colonial, or another? Why was it more of a usurpation for the pope to make a new Archbishop of Westminster, than to administer London by the old form of vicars apostolic? Was not the action of the pope, after all, a secondary consideration, and the frenzy really and in essence an explosion of popular wrath against the Puseyites? What was to be thought of a prime minister who, at such risk to the public peace, tried to turn the ferment to account for the sake of strengthening his tottering government? To all this there was no rational reply; and even the editor of a powerful newspaper that every morning blew up the coals, admitted to Greville that 'he thought the whole thing humbug and a pack of nonsense!'261
GREAT SPEECH AGAINST THE BILL
The debate on the second reading was marked by a little brutality and much sanctimony. Mr. Gladstone (March 25, 1851) spoke to a House practically almost solid against him. Yet his superb resources as an orator, his transparent depth of conviction, the unmistakeable proofs that his whole heart was in the matter, mastered his audience and made the best of them in their hearts ashamed. He talked of Boniface VIII. and Honorius IX.; he pursued a long and close historical demonstration of the earnest desire of the lay catholics of this country for diocesan bishops as against vicars apostolic; he moved among bulls and rescripts, briefs and pastorals and canon law, with as much ease as if he had been arguing about taxes and tariffs. Through it all the House watched and listened in enchantment, as to a magnificent tragedian playing a noble part in a foreign tongue. They did not apprehend every point, nor were they converted, but they felt a man with the orator's quality of taking fire and kindling fire at a moral idea. They felt his command of the whole stock of fact and of principle belonging to his topics, as with the air and the power of a heroic master he cleared the way before him towards his purpose. Along with complete grasp of details, went grasp of some of the most important truths in the policy of a modern state. He clearly perceived the very relevant fact, so often overlooked by advocates of the free church in a free state, that 'there is no religious body in the world where religious offices do not in a certain degree conjoin with temporal incidents.' But this did not affect the power of his stroke, as he insisted on respect for the frontier—no scientific frontier—between temporal and spiritual. 'You speak of the progress of the Roman catholic religion, and you pretend to meet that progress by a measure false in principle as it is ludicrous in extent. You must meet the progress of that spiritual system by the progress of another; you can never do it by penal enactments. Here, once for all, I enter my most solemn, earnest, and deliberate protest against all attempts to meet the spiritual dangers of our church by temporal legislation of a penal character.' The whole speech is in all its elements and aspects one of the great orator's three or four most conspicuous masterpieces, and the reader would not forgive me if I failed to transcribe its resplendent close. He went back to a passage of Lord John Russell's on the Maynooth bill of 1845. 'I never heard,' said Mr. Gladstone, 'a more impressive passage delivered by any statesman at any time in this House.'
The noble lord referred to some beautiful and touching lines of Virgil, which the house will not regret to hear:—
Scilicet et tempus veniet, cum finibus illis
Agricola, incurvo terram molitus aratro,
Exesa inveniet scabra rubigine pila;
Aut gravibus rastris galeas pulsabit inanes,
Grandiaque effossis mirabitur ossa sepulcris.'262
And he said, upon those scenes where battles have been fought, the hand of nature effaces the traces of the wrath of man, and the cultivator of the soil in following times finds the rusted arms, and looks upon them with calm and joy, as the memorials of forgotten strife, and as quickening his sense of the blessings of his peaceful occupation. The noble lord went on to say, in reference to the powerful opposition then offered to the bill for the endowment of Maynooth, that it seems as if upon the questions of religious freedom, our strife is never to cease, and our arms are never to rust. Would any man, who heard the noble lord deliver these impressive sentiments, have believed not only that the strife with respect to religious liberty was to be revived with a greater degree of acerbity, in the year 1851, but that the noble lord himself was to be a main agent in its revival—that his was to be the head that was to wear the helmet, and his the hand that was to grasp the spear? My conviction is, that this great subject of religious freedom is not to be dealt with, as one of the ordinary matters in which you may, with safety or with honour, do to-day and undo to-morrow. This great people, whom we have the honour to represent, moves slowly in politics and legislation; but, although it moves slowly, it moves steadily. The principle of religious freedom, its adaptation to our modern state, and its compatibility with ancient institutions, was a principle which you did not adopt in haste. It was a principle well tried in struggle and conflict. It was a principle which gained the assent of one public man after another. It was a principle which ultimately triumphed, after you had spent upon it half a century of agonising struggle. And now what are you going to do? You have arrived at the division of the century. Are you going to repeat Penelope's process, but without the purpose of Penelope? Are you going to spend the decay and the dusk of the nineteenth century in undoing the great work which with so much pain and difficulty your greatest men have been achieving during its daybreak and its youth? Surely not. Oh, recollect the functions you have to perform in the face of the world. Recollect that Europe and the whole of the civilised world look to England at this moment not