TOPICS OF THE DAY.
MR. GLADSTONE'S INFLUENCE ON ENGLISH LIFE. THE whole country is honouring Mr. Gladstone to-day not merely as a great statesman and a great ruler and law-maker, but also as a man who has exercised an immense influence for good upon his fellows. Had it been other- wise, and bad we not all been able to feel that his influence on our public life and the personal example he offered to his countrymen were of the noblest and highest, it might have been difficult for many to have joined as heartily as they now can, and do, in the honours paid to the dead. No doubt had he been merely a great statesman his political opponents might have agreed to mourn him, on the ground that his intentions were at any rate sound and patriotic, however mistaken his acts. This was the sort of feeling which enabled that part of the nation which did not agree with Lord Beaconsfield's policy, or rather viewed it with strong disfavour, to join in paying him respect as a great Englishman and lover of his country. Still, even though such respect is loyally and ungrudgingly paid by a man's political opponents, it is bound to want something in depth and zeal. The man who is merely a statesman, however great and renowned, cannot obtain that whole-hearted recognition which will be paid to-day to Mr. Gladstone. If in Lord Beaconsfield's case the political side of the dead man's life and work was ignored, there was comparatively little to create enthusiasm. In Mr. Gladstone's case it is possible to sink the politician altogether, and yet to find a national hero,—a man who helped his fellow-Englishmen, and touched the national heart to great issues.
It is not too much to say that Mr. Gladstone raised the whole tone of our public life. He showed us that it was possible for a man to live a most eager and exciting political life, and to be, in the fullest sense, a practical politician, and yet keep himself "unspotted from the world." No man was a keener combatant than Mr. Gladstone or more versed in the strategy and tactics of Parliament, yet he maintained always a high and lofty ideal. When he was, as we believe, most wrong, and doing, or rather trying to do, what was most injurious to his country, he still showed an earnestness and an in- tegrity of purpose which did more good to his country than his attempts at unwise legislation did harm. In modern life—perhaps it was as much the case in former ages—the greatest of all social dangers is that a divorce may take place between the government of men and the maintenance of moral and religious ideals. A twofold tendency is perpetually at work to drive politics and the religious spirit apart, and if this twofold tendency is not counteracted and held in check the nation must in the end come to shame and ruin. On one side the finest spiritual and moral natures, and therefore, in the widest sense, religious natures, tend to hang back from engaging in public life for fear of being tempted into unworthy acts. They dread being besmirched by the dust and dirt of the political arena, and are moved by the notion of leaving pitch alone lest some of it should stick. On the other hand, the men of coarser fibre who from ambition, from the instinct for rule, or from what- ever cause take to politics, are often very much inclined to magnify the dirtiness of their own trade. 'If one goes into politics one must occasionally do mean things,' they argue ; and it being settled in their own minds that they must be in politics, they often tend to give way to the temptation of saying and feeling that it would only add hypocrisy to baseness to pretend that a man can be as honest in public as in private life. In other words, there is a tendency for men of strong religious and moral feeling to desert public life as no place for them, and for the poli- ticians to set up a special and professional morality of their own. But as we have said, there can be but one end for a nation if once these tendencies prevail and get their way. It is this that "ruins kingdoms and lays cities flat." It was Mr. Gladstone's priceless contribution to our public life to make it clear, apparent, obvious, and undeniable to the whole world that a man could enter politics, could strip and wrestle in the arena, and yet retain to the full the true religious spirit. How is the religious spirit known ? By earnestness, by zeal, by the refusal to adopt the cynic's sentence that men are naturally base and brutal, that they will never be any better, and that therefore it is folly to worry about improving them ; and lastly, by an active belief that in the end the powers of good will prevail and the powers of evil be overthrown. This was the attitude of mind which Mr. Gladstone never failed to present. His enthusiasm knew no decay even when age overtook him. Very possibly it was often an ill-judged enthusiasm, and very possibly it sometimes did more practical harm than good ; but that is not the point.. The important thing is that Mr. Gladstone showed the world that there was no reason for shielding the religious spirit from the so-called contaminations of public life. No one can say that the religious fibre of Mr. Gladstone's mind was in the slightest degree impaired or deteriorated by his political work. It remained absolutely uninjured. No one, that is, could say of him that he entered public life with lofty and religious ideals, but left it with those ideals withered up, or overthrown. His zeal for what he believed to be the- good cause in life burned with as steady and as bright a flame a month ago as when he sought the votes of the electors of Newark. But if Mr. Gladstone taught the religious minded of his countrymen that they might be politicians without losing the guidance of moral and religious ideas, he also showed the politicians that they had no right to excuse unworthy acts by saying that such things are inevitable in a political career. He proved con- clusively that a man may not only hold his own in the political arena, but actually surpass all competitors, without stooping to anything base or of evil report. We do not,. of course, mean to imply by this that Mr. Gladstone did nothing wrong as a politician, or nothing which ought to- have been to him a cause for regret and dissatisfaction. He no doubt did and said many things in the heat of battle which he had very much better have left undone and, unsaid, but these failings were those of an ardent and. masterful nature, and might and would have appeared in Mr. Gladstone had he been, say, a Bishop or a Doctor of Theology, rather than a Prime Minister. The main fact is that he did not do things which he ought not to have done, and would have admitted were wrong, merely because of the alleged impossibility of acting rightly, which is so often said to attach to the politician. By showing the world that a deeply religious man might be a politician, and as a politician maintain his moral and religious ideals unimpaired, Mr. Gladstone, then, did his country an incomparable service. If for nothing else, his memory would deserve honour and respect, for no more important lesson could possibly be learnt by the nation.
We have left ourselves no space in which to speak of Mr. Gladstone's special attitude towards religious belief, though the subject is one full of interest. We can only repeat what we said last week, that he was a Puritan High Churchman. He remembered,. that is, so to be an Anglican as not to forget that he was also a Protestant and an Englishman. Again, though so devout and so convinced a member of the Church of England, Mr. Gladstone had no feeling but of kindliness and sympathy for the Free Churches. His was no cold tolerance, of the kind which gives more pain and makes more ill blood than open enmity, but a wise and compre- hensive sympathy, which included all good men, and not merely all good men who believed what he did. His was an attitude which is adopted by far more Englishmen than. the zealots either among the extreme Ritualists or among extreme Nonconformists care to admit. It is one, too, on which it is not too much to say that the future of the English Church depends. If the Anglican Church, as a whole, can become as widely comprehensive and as tolerant as Mr. Gladstone, while at the same time losing none of her energy and zeal, or of that spiritual intensity which comes from a great and sacred tradition and a common. motive, who shall put bounds to her future ?
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