‘The answer may, I believe, be conveyed in moderate compass. The design of the Almighty, as we everywhere find, was to prepare the human race, by a varied and a prolonged education, for the arrival of the great Redemption. The immediate purposes of the Abrahamic selection may have been to appoint, for the task of preserving in the world the fundamental bases of religion, a race which possessed qualifications for that end decisively surpassing those of all other races. We may easily indicate two of these fundamental bases. The first was the belief in one God. The second was the knowledge that the race had departed from His laws—without which knowledge how should they welcome a Deliverer whose object it was to bring them back? It may be stated with confidence that among the dominant races of the world the belief in one God was speedily destroyed by polytheism, and the idea of sin faded gradually but utterly away. Is it audacious to say that what was wanted was a race so endowed with the qualities of masculine tenacity and persistency, as to hold over these all-important truths until that fulness of time when, by and with them, the complete design of the Almighty would be revealed to the world? A long experience of trials beyond all example has proved since the Advent how the Jews, in this one essential quality, have surpassed every other people upon earth. A marvellous and glorious experience has shown how among their ancestors before the Advent were kept alive and in full vigour the doctrine of belief in one God and the true idea of sin. These our Lord found ready to His hand, essential preconditions of His teaching. And in the exhibition of this great and unparalleled result of a most elaborate and peculiar discipline we may perhaps recognise, sufficiently for the present purpose, the office and work of the Old Testament.’ In another article Mr. Gladstone objects to Universalism as a contradiction of Divine utterance. He writes: ‘To presume on overriding the express declarations of the Lord Himself delivered upon His own authority, is surely to break up revealed religion in its very ground-work, and to substitute for it a flimsy speculation spun like a spider’s web by the private spirit, and as little capable as that web of bearing the strain by which the false is to be severed from the true.’ Speaking of the theory which denies future punishment, he says: ‘What is this but to emasculate all the sanctions of religion, and to give wickedness, already under a too feeble restraint, a new range of license?’ It is vain to seek to chronicle Mr. Gladstone’s publications. Even at the time of his last illness he was said to have been engaged in a work on the Fathers. His writings fill six columns in the library catalogue of the British Museum. CHAPTER XIV. ANECDOTAL AND CHARACTERISTIC.