the melancholy of my race seemed to rise up and answer them.”  Though she was a Churchwoman by practice, her own religion was a kind of undefined Unitarianism.  “The Immanence of God and the life of Christ are my treasures.”  “I am a heretic, you know, and it seems to me that all who call Christ Master with adoration of that life are of the same band.”  Her favourite theologians were James Martineau, Alfred Ainger (whose Life she wrote admirably), and Samuel Barnett, whom she elevated into a mystic and a prophet.  The ways of the Church of England did not please her.  She had nothing but scorn for “a joyless curate prating of Easter joy with limpest lips,” or for “the Athanasian Creed sung in the highest of spirits in a prosperous church” filled with “sealskin-jacketed mammas and blowsy old gentlemen.”  But the conclusion of the whole matter was more comfortable—­“All the clergymen in the world cannot make one disbelieve in God.”

X

"WILL” GLADSTONE

“He bequeathed to his children the perilous inheritance of a name which the Christian world venerates.”  The words were originally used by Bishop Samuel Wilberforce with reference to his father, the emancipator of the negro.  I venture to apply them to the great man who, in days gone by, was my political leader, and I do so the more confidently because I hold that Gladstone will be remembered quite apart from politics, and, as Bishop Westcott said, “rather for what he was than for what he did.”  He was, in Lord Salisbury’s words, “an example, to which history hardly furnishes a parallel, of a great Christian, Statesman.”  It was no light matter for a boy of thirteen to inherit a name which had been so nobly borne for close on ninety years, and to acquire, as soon as he came of age, the possession of a large and difficult property, and all the local influence which such ownership implies.  Yet this was the burden which was imposed on “Will” Gladstone by his father’s untimely death.  After an honourable career at Eton and Oxford, and some instructive journeyings in the East and in America (where he was an attache at the British Embassy), he entered Parliament as Member for the Kilmarnock Boroughs.  His Parliamentary career was not destined to be long, but it was in many respects remarkable.

In some ways he was an ideal candidate.  He was very tall, with a fair complexion and a singular nobility of feature and bearing.  To the most casual observer it was palpable that he walked the world

  “With conscious step of purity and pride.”