father's advice, been carried out, he must eventually have become a leading figure in the Church of England and have sensibly affected her recent history. The later stages in his career drew him away from the main current of political opinion within that church. He who had been the strongest advocate of the principle of the State establishment of religion came to be the chief actor in the disestablishment of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Ireland, and a supporter of the policy of disestablishment in Scotland and in Wales. But the colour which these Oxford years gave to his mind and thoughts was never effaced. While they widened the range of his interests and deepened his moral earnestness, they at the same time confirmed his natural bent toward over-subtle distinctions and fine-drawn reasonings, and put him out of sympathy not only with the attitude of the average Englishman, who is essentially a Protestant--that is to say, averse to sacerdotalism, and suspicious of any other religious authority than that of the Bible and the individual conscience--but also with two of the strongest influences of our time, the influence of the sciences of nature, and the influence of historical criticism. Mr. Gladstone, though too wise to rail at science, as many religious men did till within the last few years, could never quite reconcile himself either to the conclusions of geology and zoology regarding the history of the physical world and the creatures which inhabit it, or to modern methods of critical inquiry as applied to Scripture and to ancient literature generally. The training which Oxford then gave, stimulating as it was, and free from the modern error of over-specialisation, was defective in omitting the experimental sciences, and in laying undue stress upon the study of language. A proneness to dwell on verbal distinctions and to trust overmuch to the analysis of terms as a means of reaching the truth of things is noticeable in many eminent Oxford writers of that and the next succeeding generation--some of them, like the illustrious F. D. Maurice, far removed from Cardinal Newman and Mr. Gladstone in theological opinion.