The Real Gladstone: An Anecdotal BiographyRitchie, J. Ewing (James Ewing)
History
The Real Gladstone: An Anecdotal Biography
Ritchie, J. Ewing (James Ewing)
Gladstone, W. E. (William Ewart), 1809-1898
About this time Mr. Gladstone seems to have taken a leading part in the
establishment of the High Church College, Glenalmond, instituted for the
purpose of turning Presbyterian Scotland from the errors of its ways. At
that time Mr. Gladstone was still in bondage. He argued for the
maintenance of the Established Church in Ireland. Mr. Gladstone had not
advanced beyond his party, and belonged to the school immortalized in
‘Tom Jones.’ ‘When I mention religion,’ says the Rev. Mr. Thwackum, ‘I
mean the Christian religion, and not only the Christian religion, but the
Protestant religion, and not only the Protestant religion, but the Church
of England.’
In opening the Liverpool Collegiate Institution, he pleaded earnestly for
Christian teaching. ‘If you could erect a system,’ he said, ‘which
presents to man all branches of knowledge save the one that is essential,
you would only be building up a tower of Babel, which, when you had
completed it, would be the more signal in its fall, and which would bury
those who had raised it in its ruins. We believe that if you can take a
human being in his youth, and make him an accomplished man in natural
philosophy, in mathematics, or in the knowledge necessary for the
profession of a merchant, a lawyer, or a physician; that if in any or all
of these endowments you could form his mind—yes, if you could endow him
with the power and science of a Newton, and so send him forth, and if you
had concealed from him—or, rather, had not given him—a knowledge and love
of the Christian faith, he would go forth into the world, able, indeed,
with reference to those purposes of science, successful with the
accumulation of wealth for the multiplication of more, but poor and
miserable and blind and naked with reference to everything that
constitutes the true and sovereign purpose of our existence—nay, worse
with respect to the sovereign purpose than if he had still remained in
the ignorance which we all commiserate, and which it is the object of
this institute to assist in removing.’
But Mr. Gladstone was moving. When Lord John Russell brought in a Bill
to admit Jews to Parliament, Mr. Gladstone supported it, though at one
time against it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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