Mr. Gladstone’s humane interpretations of Scripture are lamentably destitute of one recommendation, which he considers as of the highest value: they are by no means in accordance with the general precepts or practice of the Church, from the time when the Christians became strong enough to persecute down to a very recent period. A dogma favourable to toleration is {149}certainly not a dogma _quod semper, quod ubique, quod omnibus_. Bossuet was able to say, we fear with too much truth, that on one point all Christians had long been unanimous, the right of the civil magistrate to propagate truth by the sword; that even heretics had been orthodox as to this right, and that the Anabaptists and Socinians were the first who called it in question. We will not pretend to say what is the best explanation of the text under consideration; but we are sure that Mr. Gladstone’s is the worst. According to him, government ought to exclude dissenters from office, but not to fine them, because Christ’s kingdom is not of this world. We do not see why the line may not be drawn at a hundred other places as well as that which he has chosen. We do not see why Lord Clarendon, in recommending the act of 1664 against conventicles, might not have said, “It hath been thought by some that this classis of men might with advantage be not only imprisoned but pilloried. But methinks, my Lords, we are inhibited from the punishment of the pillory by that Scripture, ‘My kingdom is not of this world.’” Archbishop Laud, when he sate on Burton in the Star-Chamber, might have said, “I pronounce for the pillory; and, indeed, I could wish that all such wretches were delivered to the fire, but that our Lord hath said that his kingdom is not of this world.” And Gardiner might have written to the Sheriff of Oxfordshire; “See that execution be done without fail on Master Ridley and Master Latimer, as you will answer the same to the Queen’s grace at your peril. But if they shall desire to have some gunpowder for the shortening of their torment, I see not but you may grant it, as it is written, _Regnum meam non est de hoc mundo_; that is to say, My kingdom is not of this world.” {150}But Mr. Gladstone has other arguments against persecution, arguments which are of so much weight, that they are decisive not only against persecution but against his whole theory. “The government,” he says, “is incompetent to exercise minute and constant supervision over religious opinion.” And hence he infers, that “a government exceeds its province when it comes to adapt a scale of punishments to variations in religious opinion, according to their respective degrees of variation from the established creed. To decline affording countenance to sects is a single and simple rule. To punish their professors, according to their several errors, even were there no other objection is one for which the state must assume functions wholly ecclesiastical, and for which it is not intrinsically fitted.”