GOD'S POLITICIAN

On the 100th anniversary of William Ewart more leaders like him

IN the United States, it has become some- thing of a cliché of political life that ex- presidents are commemorated by a memorial library — even those presidents who were not notable devotees of books in their lifetimes. So far in Great Britain, I think only Mr Gladstone is remembered in this way among former prime ministers. St Deiniol's Library in Hawarden on the Welsh border, the national memorial to Gladstone, is a remarkable place, uniquely a residential library, where you can live as well as work. With its decorous Gothic architecture set in a small village amidst quiet countryside, it is deceptively tranquil. — deceptive, because to stand amidst its books is an intimidating experience, for it is an encounter with the restless, brooding intelligence that was William Ewart Glad- stone.

And there is a surprise at Hawarden for those who know no more of Gladstone than that he addressed Queen Victoria as if she were a public meeting. The thou- sands of books which Gladstone left his memorial library largely focus on the scrip- tures, theology and the history of the Church, for these are the themes which Gladstone considered the most important of all. His memorial library was avowedly set up to promote 'divine learning' and to combat unbelief.

This is the fascination of Gladstone. He was a politician who was not a politician. All his life he felt that he should have taken holy orders in the Anglican Church. Repeatedly throughout his career, and without insincerity, he wanted to leave pol- itics behind and devote himself to some- thing more useful. Although he proved a brilliant chancellor of the exchequer, all political or economic issues which mat- tered became for him at root moral issues. It was anger, moral outrage, the sense of things left undone which ought to have been done, and things done which ought not to have been done, which impelled him from retirement to complete that extraordinary political saga, still prime minister at the age of 85.

He loathed moral evil, with that intensi- ty of revulsion which the King James Bible seeks to convey in Chapter 12 from the Epistle to the Romans with the translation `abhor that which is evil'. If he recognised the face of evil in national and internation-

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al affairs, it must be denounced, and it must be made the subject of a public cru- sade. On this subject, his diary for 7 May 1857 has an entry in fortunately rather more lucid words than many of the millions which he has left us. With `Balaam, Bal- aam, Balaam,' he reproached those who were not prepared to make an all-out effort to be in harmony with the will of God. His priority was the worship of God, and after that, service to the Church which sought to do God's will. On his lips as he died was the hymn, 'Praise to the Holiest in the height, and in the depths be praise.' For him, the everyday, the political struggle in those depths must be shot through with the divine, or it was not worthy of considera- tion. The combination of sacred and secu- lar could be engagingly incongruous. On one occasion, on the sudden resolution of a particularly knotty crisis in his foreign poli- cy, he was able to exclaim, 'God Almighty be praised! I can catch the 2.45 to Hawar- den.'

The 12th chapter of the Epistle to the Romans is virtually Gladstone's manifesto, the agenda to which he worked, the expres- sion of his conviction that the Christian faith led to a carefully prescribed life of action. The chapter is one of the central expositions of the Christian life.

`Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.' These words from the epistle could serve as William Ewart Gladstone's epi- taph. In a life of exceptional length and energy, he showed great zest in refusing to conform, and in renewing his mind. From being the highest of high Tories, he ended up leading the newly shaped Liberal party:, the party of the nonconformist conscience. Paradoxically, he, the High Church Angli- can who lived in a castle, was the greatest nonconformist of them all; that is why all those millions of newly enfranchised voters who flocked to his cause, and called him the Grand Old Man, saw him as their champion against corruption and entrenched privilege. But the extraordinary aspect of his life is the contradiction between his first and his last nonconformity. To begin with, in the 1820s and 1830s, he was radically out of step with a society which had changed for ever; he was living in a vanished past. Notoriously, and as his enemies did not allow him to forget, his first parliamentary speech was a defence of the interests of West Indian slave-owners, of whom his father was one. He was the last advocate of a world which had already disappeared: the England in which to be fully English was to be a member of the Church of England, not a Dissenter or a Roman Catholic. Gladstone wrote a book to express this view and, characteristically, when he found that virtually no one else in the country agreed with him, he wrote the same book at twice the length, just to make sure that he had not been misunderstood. Yet this was the same man who in later Years became a fervent advocate of the dis- establishment of the Anglican Church in Ireland and Wales, and who even contem- plated the prospect of English disestablish- ment without horror. Of the Church of Ireland, which once he had defended to the hilt, he was prepared to say that it was a menace to religion, to civil justice and to peace'. To many, this seems like a wicked and cynical turnabout in opinion. That was certainly how the senior members of Oxford University regarded his change of View. He was honoured by Oxford Univer- sity both at the beginning and at the end of his career, but when he backed the dises- tablishment of the Irish Church Oxford voters regarded him as a traitor, and unseated him as University MP in the 1865 general election.

It was one of the bitterest blows of his career. He confided to his diary, 'A dear dream is dispelled. God's will be done!' His nonconformity and the renewal of his mind had torn him apart from the society of the university which he loved so deeply. But he went to his new constituency in familiar South Lancashire where lie those two great halls for epic oratory — the Free Trade Hall in Manchester and St George's Hall in Liverpool. Significantly, he told 12,000 of his new constituents in them, 'At last my friends, I am come amongst you and I come unmuzzled.' No personal affec- tion was to supersede the dictate of the individual conscience.

When Archbishop Manning warned him of the danger of adopting dangerous views in this new and larger field he said to the Bishop of Oxford, 'Manning has lost his humanity. No shirt collar ever took such a quota of starch.' Gladstone was not entire- ly without wit.

He could never understand those who misunderstood his cleaving to conscience. His motives for changing his mind on pro- found issues like the Church-state estab- lishment were in the most precise sense Principled: he considered the rights and wrongs of the case without much sense of particular circumstances, or the muddle of hesitations and contradictory pressures which often cloud a clear moral judgment. So his vehemence against the Church of Ireland was not modified by a considera- tion of its virtues, which were in fact con- siderable, but by the part which the Church played in a larger injustice: the relationship of England to Ireland. And his burning sense of that injustice, which famously resulted in his conviction that his mission was to pacify Ireland', was not based on any personal relationship to Ire- land. In all his long life, he visited the country only once, and that was many Years after he had taken up the Irish cause. The sense of urgent commitment which seized him on the Irish question came as the result of a conversation in Paris with a great French historian. Yet it was thanks to this abstract conviction of the rightness of his case that he was prepared to see the Liberal party split in two, and battled in his seventies and eighties for the cause of Home Rule.

One does not have to agree with the case he made in the Irish question or on the other causes for which he fought with such panache to see how intimately Glad- stone related his political action to the conviction that the service of God came first. His conscience must lead his actions, even if worldly disaster followed. If his conscience showed him that his previous sense of righteousness was misplaced, so be it. It takes a heroic variety of humility to change one's mind so radically, to admit that selfish interests and inherited presup- positions have blinded one to a path of moral rightness. It requires an insight which Gladstone displayed in full measure, that human decisions are fallible because they are mired in imperfection, and that the greatest of human creations is a small, scrabbling affair compared with the majesty and perfection of the divine cre- ation.

That is the message which Paul was directing to his audience in Rome, who would find his urging of nonconformity a very dangerous, indeed life-threatening ordinance. If the call to nonconformity in the name of God is taken seriously, then it makes politics a very difficult business indeed. Politics is the most worldly of pro- fessions: it is the business of the polis, the city, the society of human beings. St Augustine of Hippo contrasted this earthly city with the City of God and saw them in a perpetual state of conflict. Yet Glad- stone was seeking to bring his vision of the City of God to bear on such questions as Irish Home Rule, defence estimates and the sins of the Turkish Empire. It was a tangled and difficult task.

St Paul recognised this by the elaborate qualifications with which he surrounded his exhortation to 'live peaceably with all men' You will note he says, if it be possi- ble, as much as lieth in you'. The Christian way of politics is a way of struggle, and in the end it may not be possible to live peaceably with all. That is why the Church cannot always march in step with the secu- lar power, and why on occasion it must refuse to conform in order to proclaim the will of God.

It is not surprising that Gladstone was a man driven by tension and passion, or that the Grand Old Man was often subject to depression on a grand scale.

The problems of the world call for exact ethical analysis and prescription — the drawing out of policies and duties, and the creation of institutions and instruments to attain them. But the agents of change, the moral agents, are men and women; and it is into them that the Kingdom or Rule of God must break and only through them into policies.

The story of Gladstone's life is the story of a man's moral judgment refined by the Gospel. It is the story of how tensions may lead to outstanding achievement. In the course of a career admittedly littered with failures and bewildering changes of direc- tion, he inspired countless people to believe that it was worthwhile bringing the vision of the City of God to the affairs of the earthly city. Without such a vision, poli- tics may bring rewards and successes, but it also can become sordid and selfish. This is a time to pray that we may have politicians who follow Mr Gladstone in his struggle to move the nation away from short-term solutions, cynicism and sectional interest. And while his earthly life provides an example on which we may meditate, may God grant him rest eternal, and let light perpetual shine upon him.

Lord Runcie, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1980-91, delivered the above address at the Gladstone Centenary Commemoration on 18 May, in the University Church of St Mary the Vbgin, Oxford.

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