“Look at that sycamore,” he said; “did you find in the Holy Land any more thrifty than that?  You know sometimes I am described as destroying my trees.  I only destroy the bad to help the good.  Since I have thrown my park open to visitors the privilege has never been abused.”

We drifted upon all subjects, rational, political, religious, ethical.

“Divorce in your country, is it not a menace?” he asked.

“The great danger is re-marriage.  It should be forbidden for divorced persons.  I understand that in your State of South Carolina there is no divorce.  I believe that is the right idea.  If re-marriage were impossible then divorce would be impossible,” he replied to his own question.

Gladstone’s religious instinct was prophetic in its grasp.  His intellectual approval of religious intention was the test of his faith.  He applied to the exaltations of Christianity the reason of human fact.  I was forcibly impressed with this when he told me of an incident in his boyhood.

“I read something in ‘Augustine’ when I was a boy,” he said, “which struck me then with great force.  I still feel it to-day.  It was the passage which says, ’When the human race rebelled against God, the lower nature of man as a consequence rebelled against the higher nature.’”

I asked him then if the years had strengthened or weakened his Christian faith.  We were racing up hill.  He stopped suddenly on the hillside and regarded me with a searching earnestness, a solemnity that made me quake.  Then he spoke slowly, more seriously: 

“Dr. Talmage, my only hope for the world is in the bringing of the human mind into contact with divine revelation.  Nearly all the men at the top in our country are believers in the Christian religion.  The four leading physicians of England are devout Christian men.  I, myself, have been in the Cabinet forty-seven years, and during all that time I have been associated with sixty of the chief intellects of the century.  I can think of but five of those sixty who did not profess the Christian religion, but those five men respected it.  We may talk about questions of the day here and there, but there is only one question, and that is how to apply the Gospel to all circumstances and conditions.  It can and will correct all that is wrong.  Have you, in America, any of the terrible agnosticism that we have in Europe?  I am glad none of my children are afflicted with it.”

I asked him if he did not believe that many people had no religion in their heads, but a good religion in their hearts.

“I have no doubt of it, and I can give you an illustration,” he said.