THE FREE REVIEW A Monthly Magazine EDITED BY JOHN M. ROBERTSON VOL. III LONDON SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & Co. LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA DAVIS THE FREE REVIEW OCTOBER 1, 1894 MR. GLADSTONE ON THE ATONEMENT. I. SINCE We surveyed in these pages the personality of Mr. Gladstone as a whole, he has put a characteristic and apparently final anti-climax to a political career in which previous ebbs of action had only served to signalise the more the upward impetus. His laying down of power has been as unique as his way of using it. There is no case in English politics parallel to this of a great Minister deliberately leaving office in the midst of a great uncompleted task, on a pressure of bodily infirmity which fell far short of being irresistible. This is not the occasion on which to ask afresh the unanswered question as to the real reasons for the resignation. Doubtless the growing plainness of the need to substitute a policy of thorough Federalism for a hand-to-mouth scheme of fragmentary Home Rule counted for nearly as much as the menace of failing eye-sight; and the prospect of a death-struggle between Liberalism and the House of Lords might well be recoiled from by an aged statesman already led far beyond his one-time ideals in the path of constitutional change. But we are for the moment concerned less with his statesmanship than with that side of him which has always made such a picturesque contrast to his statesmanship-his self-imposed mission of maintaining the Christian religion against modern criticism. Unable to rest from mental conflict while strength endures, he has turned in his suddenly won leisure to his old tasks of theology; and after a perturbed tractate on "Schism", apparently designed to recommend, so No. 1, VOL. 3. B |