In December 1887, the North American Review published an essay by the leader of the British Liberal party, William Gladstone, entitled ‘Universitas hominum; or, the unity of history’. As its title indicated, the piece addressed ‘that field where study finds its highest and most fruitful employment…the plan of the world, material and moral, seen and unseen’.Footnote 1 As its seventy-eight-year-old author noted, it was to be expected that one so near death would feel a responsibility to share his insights with those younger than himself. Gladstone had first entered parliament in 1830 as a high church tory, and opposed the 1832 Great Reform Act. Over the following decades, he became a Liberal. As chancellor of the exchequer (1852–5, 1859–66) and as prime minister (1868–74), Gladstone fashioned state finance into a moral economy built on Peelite principles of free trade, peace, and retrenchment. In the late 1870s, he became ‘The People's William’: charismatic rhetorician and champion of the working man, whose moral claim to the franchise Gladstone openly avowed. A series of presidential progresses propelled Gladstone into a second term as premier in 1880, marked by a major franchise extension in 1884.
In 1887, Gladstone's political career appeared to be over. Failure to carry Irish home rule through parliament the previous year not only led him to resign as prime minister after only six months in office, it split the Liberal party, driving Liberal opponents of home rule to join what would thereafter be known as the Conservative and Unionist party. Gladstone's sense of a divinely imposed duty to a series of moral crusades and repeated threats to leave the political stage altogether frustrated leading Liberals, caught between outdated whiggery and the new, caucus-based politics of Joseph Chamberlain and his Birmingham machine.Footnote 2 Gladstone's passion for Homeric scholarship and Christian apologetic confused them. What, when the party's very existence hung in the balance, was Gladstone doing picking fights in the pages of the periodical the Nineteenth Century, battling palaeontologist Thomas Henry Huxley over whether Genesis and evolution could be reconciled? Former cabinet colleagues like the duke of Argyll had their hands full reconciling ‘The People's William’ with Gladstone the statesman. Trying to make sense of Gladstone the scholar as well seemed impossible.
For Gladstone writing in the North American Review, the ‘unity of history’ afforded one key to reconciling ‘numbers’, ‘power’, and ‘knowledge’:
History, then, complex and diversified as it is, and presenting to our view many a ganglion of unpenetrated and perhaps impenetrable enigmas, is not a mere congeries [sic] of disjointed occurrences, but is the evolution of a purpose steadfastly maintained, and advancing towards some consummation, greater probably than what the world has yet beheld, along with advancing numbers, power, knowledge, and responsibilities of the race.Footnote 3
As Arnaldo Momigliano noted, ‘the universal historian isolates and defines types of events and tries to make their appearance and disappearance meaningful’.Footnote 4 For Gladstone, events were the evolution (as in unfolding) of Providence, its pace matching the ‘brain forces’ and ‘moral energies’ which each passing generation devoted to realizing their destiny in the universe. But history was also ‘a chequered picture…designed to give instruction’, to the English in the first instance, but ultimately to other races and perhaps other forms of life.Footnote 5 God did not just carry his purpose out, he did so in such a way that he might be observed going about it: evolution was the education of creation.
As one of his recent biographers has noted, alongside ‘immense natural energy and talents’ it was a ‘sense of the divinely intimate embrace of Providence’ which made Gladstone such a formidable force.Footnote 6 The aim of this article is to explore this sense, to reconstruct Gladstone's concept of history as a discipline, understood not as a discrete branch of secular science, but as divine instruction, even a salutary form of divinely imposed suffering. As ‘tradition’ and ‘experience’, history lent a truth, an authority to ideas, institutions, and individuals different to the authority and truth acquired by logical demonstration or revelation. Probability derived from knowledge of past events and truths passed down through the generations were guides to conduct in the present. Providence held out the promise of salvation from sin in the ‘consummation’ of Christ's Incarnation. As a student of this Providential history, Gladstone felt he had been vouchsafed discernment to recognize when a political question was ripe.
Gladstone's vision of Providence started and finished with his study of the eighteenth-century Anglican philosopher and divine Joseph Butler, whose Analogy of reason, natural and revealed, to the constitution and course of nature (1736) was ‘worshipped almost as a fetish’ in early nineteenth-century Britain.Footnote 7 This study culminated in 1896, two years before Gladstone's death, when he published his own edition of Butler's works, accompanied by a volume of his own Studies subsidiary to Butler.Footnote 8 Butler presented Creation and revelation as spheres of human enquiry locked together by analogy and probability. The ‘mysterious economy’ of Christianity was complemented by the ‘natural world…not a fixed [system], but a progressive one’.Footnote 9 In the 1840s, another Anglican (at least until 1845, when he converted to Roman Catholicism) theologian, John Henry Newman, and the Scottish publisher Robert Chambers's anonymous Vestiges of the natural history of Creation saw this elegant ‘economy’ challenged by two inter-related forms of ‘development’, challenging Gladstone to refine his vision of how Christian doctrine and life itself evolved, within the universal church and the universe.
Butler's ‘economy’ looked backwards to the Fall. It had ‘been carrying on from the time the world came into its present wretched state’.Footnote 10 Gladstone's Homeric studies of the 1850s and 1860s saw him turn from a retrospective model of history that involved sifting Homer and Hebrew scripture alike for vestiges of primitive revelation in favour of a more balanced model; one which balanced the ‘wretched state’ of Creation with the vision of redeemed, divine life vouchsafed by the Incarnation of Christ. This vision of history as preparation for Christ anticipated that of the Liberal Catholic theologians later identified with the controversial 1889 volume Lux mundi: a series of studies in the religion of the Incarnation.
From Newman's perspective, that theory of development he had published in 1845 as An essay on the development of doctrine had destroyed the claims of Gladstone and other high church Anglicans to Apostolic tradition. The only true church was Rome, whose pope claimed sole (and, from 1870, infallible) knowledge of which developments were true and which were not. Huxley saw the position adopted in Lux mundi as natural theology's last ditch, in which doomed reconcilers of science and the church were exposed to both ‘the advancing forces of science’, as well as fellow Christians critical of their liberal views.Footnote 11 For Gladstone, this position was one, not of humiliation, but humility. Though both Newman and Huxley claimed to be Butlerians (to Gladstone's intense irritation), as far as Gladstone was concerned, both were guilty of betraying Butler in favour of Ultramontanism and scientism respectively. Each had dispensed with tradition, with reason, and, most importantly, with the understanding that all knowledge is partial and conditioned.
Some scholars have argued that parliament's decision to increase its financial support of the Roman Catholic seminary at Maynooth in Ireland (1845) and admit Jews as MPs (1847), as well as the conversion of his friend Henry Manning to Roman Catholicism (1851) led Gladstone to abandon that high tory vision of a state conscience advanced in his book The state in its relations with the church (1838). As M. D. Stephen put it, Gladstone's ‘political self’ and ‘religious self’ parted ways.Footnote 12 Boyd Hilton disagreed, arguing that for Gladstone ‘politics ceased to be merely an instrument for implementing dogmatic truths, derived from religious authority, and became instead the main arena in which to trace the operational workings of divine providence’.Footnote 13 Building on Bebbington's 2004 survey of The mind of Gladstone: religion, Homer and politics, this article argues that the evolution of Gladstone's thought on development was, to borrow terms familiar from nineteenth-century natural history, uniformitarian rather than catastrophist.
Consistent or not, Gladstone's historical significance renders his vision of historical ‘development’ worthy of investigation. This article addresses some less familiar passages of that vast corpus of annotations, diary entries, memoranda, correspondence, essays, speeches, and treatises penned by this titan and polymath, and hence contributes to our understanding of how Gladstone's reading, writing, and speaking fit together.Footnote 14 It challenges a tendency to yoke all Victorians to that ‘Whig interpretation of history’, first proposed by Herbert Butterfield in 1944.Footnote 15 Rather than view either ‘the Victorian crisis of faith’Footnote 16 or the emergence of a ‘science of history’Footnote 17 in positivistic terms, as the inevitable triumph of secular ‘professionals’ over pious ‘amateurs’, it recognizes both for what they were: a way of staking a claim to ‘a certain kind of cultural authority’, in Stephan Collini's words.Footnote 18 Finally, it reveals something of the foundations of that ‘moral temper’ whose influence was felt from the Liberal party of his own times right through to the ‘League of Nations Mind’ in the 1930s.Footnote 19
This article is divided into six parts. The first explores how Newman and Chambers provoked Gladstone to thrash out his position on development in a series of private memoranda in 1847. The second and third consider the Incarnationalist turn to Gladstone's historical understanding in the 1850s and 1860s, as well as his increasing frustration at the exclusion of revelation from scholarly endeavour, which led to his first public excoriations of his age's alleged scientism in the 1870s. The fourth and fifth address the debate with Huxley, focusing on the implications for our understanding of Gladstone's relationship with party and public opinion. The final section uses Gladstone's 1896 edition of Butler to explore where the statesman remained faithful to Butler, and where his thought on the ‘moral temper’ required of the historian had moved on.
I
The ‘true historian’, Gladstone wrote in the introduction to his Church principles considered in their results (1840), ‘read[s] history only in the light of revelation’.Footnote 20 He addressed
the bearings of particular truths of religion with respect to the shifting circumstances of the world from time to time, and to the different degrees and modes in which those truths are apprehended. That which we familiarly call the history of men is not their history. It is a part indeed of their history, but not the most important and essential part.Footnote 21
Here, as in his ‘Universitas hominum’ essay, there were elements redolent of that ‘Liberal Anglican idea of history’ identified with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, H. T. Milman, and Thomas Arnold, whose 1842 regius lectures popularized the ‘unity of history’ at Oxford University.Footnote 22
As Jane Garnett notes, however, the ‘Liberal Anglican’ label ‘has become too capacious to be helpful’.Footnote 23 Gladstone's approach is better described as Anglo-Catholic, like that of the historians Edward Augustus Freeman and William Stubbs, both of whom would later enjoy preferment from Gladstone.Footnote 24 As James Kirby puts it, Burrow's Liberal descent: Victorian historians and the English past (1981) sought to knock ‘squarely High-Church’ historians such as William Stubbs ‘into the round hole of a Whig-liberal descent’.Footnote 25 Yet far from being ‘confident, conciliatory, Whiggish’ in the style of Thomas Macaulay, this ‘Tractarian interpretation of history’ was ‘engaged in an intellectual insurgency against Protestant and Whiggish orthodoxies’.Footnote 26 Gladstone never joined the likes of Henry Buckle, author of a History of civilization in England (1857–61) in whiggish celebration: as he wrote in Church principles, ‘the rapid extension of commerce and manufacture, the accumulation of capital, the unprecedented progression of national wealth’ encouraged a ‘hardened utilitarianism’ feeding ‘upon the seen and deprecating the unseen’.Footnote 27 Rather than establishing the nationality of Anglicanism, the Reformation had idolized ‘private judgment’, establishing that ‘throne of authority’ in each individual, ‘depriving the Church of her prerogative’.Footnote 28 ‘I do not believe that a Dissenter could write a History of England’, Stubbs noted in a letter to Freeman.Footnote 29 Gladstone would probably have agreed.
In the 1830s, John Henry Newman, Henry Manning, and John Keble had undertaken historical research into the Arians of the fourth century and other episodes in the history of the Christian church, seeking to trace a lineage for the formularies of the Church of England, such as the Thirty-Nine Articles.Footnote 30 Struggling to construct a historical pedigree, in 1835 Manning and Newman were led by a fellow Tractarian, S. F. Wood, to consider the ‘development of doctrine’ as a solution. The concept dated back at least to the fifth-century monk Vincent of Lérins (Vincentius), and was understood as the process by which successive generations of Christians consider revelation and doctrine under new aspects.Footnote 31 Though the Tractarian leaders had initially been sceptical of Butler's claim that new historical and scientific discoveries would contribute to our evolving understanding of revealed truth, seeing an invitation to arrogant speculation, Wood encouraged them to view the church's own power of ‘developing the Truth itself more fully’ as analogous to the process by which God made his truth known through successive revelations. Church tradition was much more than merely the interpreter of scripture, but contained truths not found in scripture.Footnote 32
Newman delivered a sermon on ‘The theory of developments in religious doctrine’ at the University Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford on 2 February 1843.Footnote 33 Newman spoke of a ‘large fabric of divinity…irregular in structure’. Its diverse forms nonetheless shared certain relations with each other, ‘betokening a common origin’. For all the apparent caprice and hesitation of its course, it was nonetheless clear that doctrine had ‘evolved’ in the minds of Christians, finding even in heresy itself a spur to ‘fresh forms’ and ‘farther developments’.Footnote 34 Newman worked on development from March 1844 to September 1845, and his Essay on the development of doctrine was published in November of that year, the month following his conversion to Roman Catholicism. As he later noted in his Apologia pro vita sua, it was a book ‘in favour of the Roman Church, and indirectly against the English’.Footnote 35
The Essay compared the doctrines of the early church with those, such as Purgatory and the veneration of the Virgin Mary, upheld by the Roman Catholic church since the Reformation, but denied by Anglicans. The book proposed a series of seven tests by which one could discern whether such developments were true or false. True doctrine could be recognized if it ‘retains one and the same type, the same principles, the same organization; if its beginnings anticipate its subsequent phases, and its later phenomena protect and subserve its earlier; if it has a power of assimilation and revival, and a vigorous action from first to last’.Footnote 36
For Newman, the ‘idea’ of Christianity could be seen as habitual judgement and, more platonically, as something which inhabits human minds and ‘employs’ them ‘as instruments’: the degree to which the idea could be apprehended was conditioned, not by intellect, but the moral temper of the mind it inhabited.Footnote 37 When a development comes to ‘term’ it is incorporated into ‘Episcopal Tradition’ by ecclesiastical decision.Footnote 38 By this argument, the only developments which can exist must be those deemed true by the latter ‘external authority’.Footnote 39
Gladstone read Newman's University sermons when they were published in March 1843.Footnote 40 The pair met by chance the following month (17 April) and in early 1845 they exchanged letters discussing Gladstone's resignation over the Maynooth grant.Footnote 41 Conversations with the Liberal Catholics François Rio and Ignaz Döllinger fuelled a series of long ‘mind clearing memoranda’ (to use Richard Shannon's term), in which Gladstone recorded fears that ‘Roman theologians’’ use of ‘the doctrine of development’ was obscuring ‘the truth of history…the experience and the reason of mankind’.Footnote 42 None of Newman's seven tests worked: ‘Apply the criterion of “chronic continuance” to history…Is Chartism a legitimate development of Magna Charta? It is in the same direction.’Footnote 43 This variety of development apparently constituted an advance to magisterium, but, like Evangelicalism and other forms of Protestantism, it was really a retreat into ‘private judgment’, ‘to that which eludes reason and shuts itself up in self will’.Footnote 44
Though Newman's conversion helped the first edition of 1,500 copies of the Essay to sell out in less than a fortnight, it was Robert Chambers's anonymous Vestiges of the natural history of Creation (1844) which brought development to a large, middle-class audience.Footnote 45 Chambers presented ‘the developmental hypothesis’ as the overarching evolutionary process at work in the creation of the galaxy, our solar system, and life itself, understood as a relentless march from primordial ooze through men via apes and other creatures. Something that had been reviled as dangerously blasphemous, materialist, and foreign became a source of safe intellectual thrill-seeking. Chambers co-opted newer hypotheses in the many subsequent editions, and was careful to include passages wondering at the divine intelligence they supposedly indicated. Although Jim Secord and other historians of science have overlooked the connection, such an accommodating, loose, and open-ended text made it easy to see Vestiges and Newman's earlier Essay as related projects.
They came together for Gladstone in the summer of 1847, which he largely spent with his father at Fasque, the Gladstones’ Scottish seat. It was there that he finally got round to reading Vestiges between 12 and 17 July. The day he finished, he recorded in his diary that he ‘Wrote on Vestiges, or rather off it, for Butl[er].’Footnote 46 This eight-page memorandum concluded that the book contained nothing ‘which ought in the slightest degree to shake the faith of the Christian’.Footnote 47 On Sunday 8 August, Gladstone began writing what would eventually be a sixty-eight-page screed on Newman's Essay. Footnote 48
In the 1847 memo, Gladstone conceded that Vestiges’ hypothesis ‘places us in nearer relation’ to higher as well as lower ‘orders of animated beings…and even with the vegetable world from which it may be that the animal kingdom took its rise. But are we not so already?’Footnote 49
It may have pleased the almighty to graduate His work and to conduct it through many stages, in order that He might make it more comprehensible to us, might establish for us a school of wisdom, with lessons adapted to our feeble powers. Creation, considered strictly, we may receive as a fact, but we cannot in the smallest degree comprehend it…But the idea of a Creation in crude forms followed by their gradual evolution and development under the same hand of God sustaining His laws of natural order, seems to have this advantage that it cleaves the wonders of simple Power apart in their majesty to excite our awe.Footnote 50
II
Vestiges and Newman's Essay left the Establishment nervously aware that it was incumbent upon them to find one among their number willing and able to make the opposing case. Despite the efforts of leading Anglican scholar-clerics such as William Whewell and J. B. Mozley, this anxiety was not dispelled.Footnote 51 Gladstone told the bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, that he fully accepted that the Anglican church had ‘some power of “development”’, but that it was ‘extremely difficult to draw out with precision against Newman the limits of this power’. Butler would have been able to do it, and much ‘that might be said’ had come to Gladstone ‘in fragments’, ‘but one would like to see a constructive as well as destructive answer’.Footnote 52 Instead, he looked to his friend Manning to publish an answer.Footnote 53 Yet the more Manning studied the Essay, the more he was drawn to Rome. In an 1849 sermon entitled ‘The analogy of nature’, he rejected Butler on analogy and probability.Footnote 54 Sent a proof, Gladstone argued that far from being attracted by ‘the formalized and technically defined infallibility of Roman theology’, he felt that ‘much of the uncertainty on the contrary is among the proofs of Divine wisdom and the effective means of our training’.Footnote 55 Once again, Gladstone emphasized the expository and educational functions of historical development, understood as the unfolding of divine Providence and as a form of discipline conducive to right moral temper. Manning converted to Roman Catholicism in April 1851. For Gladstone, it was ‘like the Death of one dearly loved, which it so much resembles’.Footnote 56
As Bebbington has noted, it is challenging to trace a trajectory for Gladstone's thought after this year of crisis.Footnote 57 In part, this was the result of Gladstone's turn to antiquarian avenues of Homeric Study, as well as the demands of high political office, beginning with the chancellorship in 1852, and continuing on to his first government (1868–74). Though his diary records his reading Spencer, Darwin, Huxley, Alfred Russel Wallace, and many other evolutionists, there are few memoranda or publications on development to match those produced in 1845–7.Footnote 58 The ‘Age of Equipoise’ left Gladstone concerned by the moral effects of Britain's economic prosperity and struggling to find outlets for intellectual and moral energies owing to the ‘demoralization of parliament, with respect to its high duties’.Footnote 59
It was in these years that Bebbington notes the emergence of ‘Broad Church Sympathies’ in Gladstone.Footnote 60 The Incarnationalist theology of Frederick Denison Maurice played a significant role in this process.Footnote 61 The son of a Unitarian minister, Maurice was baptized into the Church of England in Oxford in 1831, socializing with Gladstone and his close friends Arthur Hallam and Thomas Acland.Footnote 62 He took orders in the Anglican church in 1834, and adopted defended subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles as well as Establishment in his Subscription no bondage (1835) and The kingdom of Christ (1838). Maurice's theology replaced the ‘penal substitutionary view of the Atonement’ of Christ with a Unitarian view of man as destined to share in the life of God the father.Footnote 63 As Jeremy Morris has noted, Maurice's ‘understanding of history as the field of God's providence was closely connected with his understanding of Revelation as revelation in history’. No mere symbol of the union of God and man, Incarnation ‘actually effected in history that which it symbolized’: as ‘doctrine of a historical Incarnation’, rather than just ‘a doctrine of Incarnation in history’.Footnote 64 Like Gladstone, Maurice had been drawn to Tractarianism in the early 1830s. In 1853, Gladstone may not have shared Maurice's scepticism that the Athanasian Creed's reference to ‘eternal’ meant ‘everlasting’ punishment, but Gladstone tried to stop the council of King's College London from evicting Maurice from his chair on theology on that account.Footnote 65
This forward-looking vision of human history stood in tension with the declinist course traced in Gladstone's three-volume Studies on Homer and the Homeric age (1858), which shifted the Homeric pantheon for vestiges of that knowledge granted to Adam and Eve and passed down through their descendants to the Greeks. Greek art's focus on the human figure and the Incarnation nonetheless stood in analogy: each reflected ‘the intense humanity of the religion’, albeit under different aspects: spiritual (Incarnation) and physical (Greeks). ‘What the pattern of the Redeemer's holiness and virtue have done for the ethical type of man under the Gospel, that the anthropomorphism of their religion did for his physical type with the Greeks.’Footnote 66
III
In the 1840s, Gladstone had, it seemed, drawn the sting of development. Vestiges and the ‘developmental hypothesis’ merely added another dimension, time, to Creation. Far from throwing Creation into doubt, Chambers's apparent heresies had lent it greater authority: the authority of history. Once upon a time, Creation had been received passively and without comprehension, as a ‘fact’, a one-off act of ‘simple Power’. Now Creation was ‘an idea’, almost a constitutional one, with development enacted both under the ‘hand of God’ and by laws He was always ‘sustaining’.Footnote 67
When it came to ‘church principles’, development taught faithful patience: if Gladstone's vision of the state could not be realized in 1838, then development held out the hope of a later realization – provided artificial constraints on healthy growth were removed. As with his 1845–7 memoranda on development, however, the gestation of Gladstone's thought on history and development remained largely private. Though he was working on an edition of Butler and a reply to Newman's Essay, the latter was never published, while the former was only realized fifty years later.
In the 1870s, however, Gladstone broke his silence, beginning a public war for the truth of history against the twin magisteria of Ultramontanism and scientism. Under Pope Pius IX, the Roman Catholic church's position on papal infallibility (1870) and excommunication of Liberal Catholics such as Döllinger (1871) scotched Gladstone's long-held hopes of reuniting the Christian churches through initiatives such as the Bonn Conferences of 1874–5.Footnote 68 Having famously fought shy of discussing development's implications for homo sapiens in Origin, Darwin now published his Descent of man (1875). As Pius IX placed Descent on the Index of books prohibited to his flock, so ‘Darwin's Bulldog’, ‘Pope’ Huxley, and his fellow X Club members were busy constructing their own Erastian church scientific, which they hailed as a further step in an inevitable triumph of ‘science’ (the preserve of ‘men of science’) over superstition.Footnote 69
A somewhat sneering prize-giving address at the Liverpool Collegiate Institution in December 1872 represented Gladstone's first salvo. ‘The spirit of denial is abroad’, he thundered, challenging the scientific naturalists’ claim ‘in a pre-eminent or even an exclusive sense, [to] the name of science’.Footnote 70 Evolutionary determinism denied God the ‘labour of creation’ and stripped individuals of their free will, of the individual responsibility which in turn drew divine judgement of individual action.Footnote 71 Along with the German rationalist theologian D. F. Strauss, Gladstone took aim at Herbert Spencer's ‘doctrine of the Absolute and the Unconditioned’ (advanced in his First principles of 1862), which denied us any knowledge of God. Spencer repaid Gladstone by citing his comments in the second, 1867 edition of the First principles, describing them as ‘typical of the anti-scientific view in general’.Footnote 72
Echoing Newman's understanding of ‘ethos’, Gladstone noted in his address that study pursued in a temper of ‘pride’ and ‘perverseness’ would lead one to mistake ‘opinion’ for ‘truth’, truth which could only ever be apprehended by minds of humbler ‘temper’ and sober ‘habits’.Footnote 73 Gladstone took comfort from the cautious scientific method advanced in the economist William Stanley Jevons's Principles of science (1874), which noted how ‘the too exclusive study of particular branches of physical science seems in some cases to generate an over confident and dogmatic spirit’. ‘Those so-called laws of nature are uniformities observed to exist in the action of certain material agents’, Jevons wrote in a chapter on ‘The limits of scientific method’, ‘but it is logically impossible to show that all other agents must behave as they do’. Imagining a Creator ‘being subject like a human legislator to the laws which he has himself enacted’ reflected ‘false views of the nature of scientific inference’ as well as of ‘the degree of certainty of the knowledge which we acquire by inductive investigation’.Footnote 74
One example of the ‘perverseness’ Gladstone noted in his Liverpool address was the refusal of fellow scholars of Homer, Hebrew scripture, and religious creeds to admit primitive revelation even as a hypothesis, to place anyone proposing it as a means of organizing phenomena beyond the pale of science. Science rightly understood followed the evidence wherever it led, refusing to rule anything in or out. When self-described men of ‘science’ ruled primitive revelation out, therefore, they were not being true to their calling:
We have no right to import the consideration of results, which we may dislike, into the examination of questions of evidence. These are enquiries strictly scientific; and our handling of them, if it were governed or modified by apprehensions of the eventual issues to which we might be led, would cease to be scientific.Footnote 75
The Homeric pantheon should be investigated ‘independently of its relation to tradition, or to the exact purposes for which a creed or worship exists, or to any theory or belief concerning the origin, or genesis, of religion’.Footnote 76
Of course, it could be averred that Gladstone's own sifting of ‘Homer as a great and comprehensive depository of evidence’ for evidence of ‘anthropomorphic force’ indicative of primitive revelation was an equally unscientific endeavour.Footnote 77 Max Müller had suggested as much to Gladstone back in 1864.'You will say I brought to Homer the determination to find all this [i.e. vestiges of primitive revelation]’, Gladstone replied, ‘but I did not come to Homer with any inkling of it.’Footnote 78
The unscientific mode of enquiry Gladstone identified represented an ‘anti-traditional movement’. It was not explicitly designed ‘to get rid of Deity…or even necessarily of the Christian form of religion and its institutions’, Gladstone conceded, but by shifting ‘their basis…changes their source, and therefore the nature, of their authority’.Footnote 79 Creeds were now seen as ‘art’, produced by ‘human faculties’ in response to a ‘religious appetite’, not a ‘gift’ ‘given at one centre to a common [ancestor]’.Footnote 80 Gladstone had first encountered this approach in 1859, reading Benjamin Jowett on ‘Natural Religion’, and been revolted by it.Footnote 81 In what Gladstone called ‘Christian history’, the ‘primitive’ had been something ‘venerable'; in the very different teleology of ‘Comparative Theology’, it became ‘the more groveling, or the less elevated’.Footnote 82 This ‘scientific’ history was universal in the sense that the belief systems of ‘Melanesian savages’ and the Vedic hymns both had their place in a meliorist model of human civilization. The ‘comparative method’ popularized in the 1860s had made the drawing of such analogies across space and time commonplace, creating a new vision of ‘the unity of history’ entirely free of revelation.Footnote 83 But the ‘idea’ was profoundly different in nature, and so was the direction of travel.
This use of developmental models of (natural) history could be despotic as well as perverse. Having enjoyed several years of productive collaboration with Huxley in the 1860s, the Roman Catholic zoologist St George Jackson Mivart, a self-described ‘hearty and thoroughgoing disciple of Mr Darwin’, was frozen out after publishing On the genesis of species (1871) and other reviews which Huxley considered disrespectful towards Darwin. When Mivart subjected church doctrine to equally robust criticism, criticism he viewed as part of a broader ‘evolutionary process, guided by human reason’ that would eventually reconcile science and faith, he was excommunicated a second time.Footnote 84 As Gladstone noted in an 1876 essay on ‘Courses of religious thought’, the ‘Ultramontane system’ wielded the ‘pretext of development’ in its despotic desire to monopolize exegesis. Meanwhile, the high church or what Gladstone called the ‘Historical School’ was ‘constitutional rather than despotic’, respecting the authority of an inheritance of thought on the ‘Christian idea’.Footnote 85
Finally, the abuse of developmental models of history was often accompanied by a presumptive mindset which was unButlerian in its arrogation of absolute truth. Increasingly isolated in their disciplinary silos, ‘scientists’ tended to ‘present to the world their provisional and hypothetical results as accepted facts, or demonstrated conclusions’.Footnote 86 Fellow Liberal statesman and man of science George Douglas, 8th duke of Argyll, repeatedly drew attention to one notorious example of precipitate presentation of new facts: the 1869 episode in which Huxley had misidentified a precipitate (sulphate of lime) found floating in one of HMS Challenger's sample jars as the primordial Urschleim or ‘protoplasm’ (to which Huxley even gave a species name, bathybius haeckelii). As Argyll observed, ‘The naturalists of the “Challenger” began their voyage in the full Bathybian faith…Bathybius was accepted because of its supposed harmony with Darwin's speculations.’Footnote 87 Gladstone underlined Argyll's reference to bathybius in his copy of Argyll's Unity of nature (1884), cheekily adding an entry to his pencilled index at the back: ‘Scientists, their besetting infirmity’.Footnote 88
IV
Gladstone's debate with Huxley in the pages of the Nineteenth Century began in November 1885, when Gladstone published a reply to Albert Réville's Prélogomène de l'histoire des religions (1883). The English edition of Réville's book (1885) carried an introduction by Müller. Like Müller, Réville rejected out of hand Gladstone's hypothesis in Studies on Homer that the Genesis account of Creation contained vestiges of a primitive revelation and hence should not be lumped together with other, non-Hebraic myths, as one stage in a universal process of humanity's mytho-poetic development.
It would have been evident that any intervention by Gladstone in the Nineteenth Century would draw a response from an international audience of specialists as well as laymen. This had been amply demonstrated by Gladstone's 1877 contribution on ‘The colour-sense’. In it, Gladstone brought Homeric studies and evolutionary physiology together, arguing that the poet's limited colour vocabulary represented evidence of a meliorist development at work in the ‘organ of colour’.Footnote 89 The essay elicited a European response.Footnote 90 Darwin wrote to Gladstone sharing a report he had compiled on the Darwin children's sensory faculties as infants.Footnote 91 The co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, responded in Macmillan's Magazine.Footnote 92
Recapitulating the argument he had used against Müller in the same periodical in 1879, Gladstone's ‘Dawn of creation and of worship: a reply to Dr Réville’ (Nov. 1885) began by arguing that it was unscientific to refuse to consider such hypotheses as primitive revelation. Gladstone went on to advance what he later dubbed ‘the rule of relativity’: divine revelation was modulated according to man's ability to comprehend it.Footnote 93 Revelation was a current that could be transformed by God, converted into a lower voltage that charged, but did not short-circuit, the minds of men. The exegete of Genesis was confronted, not with a treatise, but a communication: one had to consider the underlying purpose in order to understand how the message was to be received. Genesis was not intended ‘to rear cosmic philosophers’. It was produced ‘to furnish ordinary men with some idea of what the Creation had done in the way of providing for them a home, and giving them a place in nature’.Footnote 94 The form taken by this ‘idea of Creation’ was conditioned by the Hebrew mind receiving it.
Gladstone claimed that Genesis's ‘fourfold succession’ of fishes, birds, mammals, and humans indicated ‘knowledge which natural science has only within the present century for the first time dug out of the bowels of the earth’.Footnote 95 This Hebraic cosmogony was too sophisticated to have developed, as Réville and Müller claimed it had, from fragments of Egyptian or Babylonian creation myth available at the time. Unfortunately, the discovery of the bird-like Archaeopteryx (1859) rendered any concordance between Genesis and Victorian paleontology impossible.Footnote 96 Argyll warned Gladstone about this, but unfortunately Huxley's riposte had already appeared in the December issue of the Nineteenth Century.Footnote 97
Huxley interposed himself between Réville and Gladstone as ‘uncommissioned science proctor’, carefully and laboriously pointing out the many challenges facing ‘those modern representatives of Sisyphus, the reconcilers of Genesis with science’.Footnote 98 Bolstered by advice and further reading, Gladstone replied with his ‘Proem to Genesis: a plea for a fair trial’. Even the ructions caused by the ‘Hawarden Kite’ of 17 December (revealing Gladstone's ‘conversion’ to Irish home rule) did not distract the statesman.
Revelation was not like ‘a sum in arithmetic’, something which collapsed entirely if any flaw were discovered. It was a matter of Butlerian probability, ‘a question, not of demonstrative, but of probable evidence’. Was it probable that the Hebrews, a ‘race’ who ‘fell uniformly and entirely short of the great intellectual development of antiquity’ should display a knowledge of the natural world which (for all its limitations) not only ‘outstripped’ antiquity, but ‘entirely transcended, in kind even more than degree, all known exercise of human faculties'?Footnote 99
In a masterpiece of ‘comparative theology’, Huxley replied with his two-part ‘Evolution of theology’.Footnote 100 This argued that all cultures passed through the same stages of mytho-poetic development, passing from belief in ghosts, through ancestor cults to monotheism. Huxley quoted extensively from the Old Testament books of Judges and Samuel to reconstruct the Israelites’ ‘system of theology’, which he then compared with the system of present-day Tongans. Although monotheism was the highest stage in this system, it was not the last one. In his own notes, Huxley placed ‘Agnosticism and Social ideal substituted for Theological ideal’ at the top of this ladder. The Nineteenth Century essay claiming credit for having invented the neologism (i.e. ‘agnosticism’) appeared in February 1889.Footnote 101
A gap yawned between the confidence (not to say arrogance) of Huxley the ‘uncommissioned science proctor’ and the humility of Huxley the agnostic.Footnote 102 The former claimed that ‘demonstrative’ evidence was within the gift of a disinterested scientific caste, explicitly drawing on Newman and the Essay on development for its intellectual pedigree.Footnote 103 The latter denied that such certainty was possible, and explicitly drew on Butlerian probability.Footnote 104 As Garnett has noted, ‘scientific agnostics’ such as Huxley and his fellow X Club members claimed to be disciples of Butler when addressing religious knowledge, yet failed ‘to follow through the epistemological implications for scientific knowledge’.Footnote 105 Gladstone recognized the hypocrisy.Footnote 106
In the 1840s, Gladstone's argument that development rightly understood strengthened the case for Providence may have received a sympathetic hearing from Wilberforce and other Broad Church Anglicans, but the public debate was dominated by Evangelical voices dismissing development as Romanism. In the 1860s, some Broad Churchmen such as Charles Kingsley embraced evolutionary speculation as steps towards a ‘natural theology of the future’.Footnote 107 This Christian evolution also found adherents in the United States, including the Harvard botanist Asa Gray and the Yale geologist James Dwight Dana. In the 1880s, visions of what Gladstone would later call ‘devolution’, by which God entrusted the system of nature to ‘the production and government of effects at large’, gave further comfort.Footnote 108 Mivart's On the genesis of species (1871) and Argyll's Unity of nature (1884) were examples of this approach.Footnote 109
The Anglican theologians who contributed to Lux mundi: a series of studies in the religion of the Incarnation (1889) welcomed this ‘evolution by law’ as evidence of God's ‘indwelling presence in the things of his Creation’. Once ‘evolution’ was understood as a new way of perceiving how God fulfilled himself, ‘The Incarnation and Development’ slotted together.Footnote 110
Indeed, argued Edward Talbot in his Lux mundi essay on ‘Preparation in history for Christ’, ‘our recognition of the part played in forming structure, function, character, by gradual process, by heredity, by evolution, our developed understanding of the links by which the parts and successions in all nature, and not least in what is human, are bound together’ fostered a ‘habit of mind’ better fitted to comprehend the historicity of Incarnation.Footnote 111 Far from being prone to disbelief, ‘our more historically trained modern minds’ were primed to receive the truth of Incarnation and Providence in a way denied previous generations.Footnote 112 As Illingworth noted, the ‘theory of evolution’ and Galileo's heliocentrism were not ‘merely new facts to be assimilated’. Both ‘involve new ways of looking at things’, a paradigm shift.Footnote 113 As Ruth Clayton Windscheffel has shown, Gladstone's ties with the Lux mundi authors were close, and shaped what became the St Deiniol's Library that Gladstone subsequently established in Hawarden, Flintshire: ‘an expression of his theological and not his political liberalism’.Footnote 114
V
In 1890, the Nineteenth Century debate between Gladstone and Huxley shifted from Genesis to the Gadarene swine miracle, in which Jesus heals a resident of Gadara by casting the demons possessing him into a nearby herd of swine, which subsequently stampede into the sea. The party political aspect of the debate now came to the fore, precisely because of Gladstone's position as both Christian apologist and ‘the People's William’. Gladstone's ‘law of relativity’ and his exploration of the relationship between truth and the ‘popular mind’ of the Hebrews invited comparisons with the latter-day relationship between Gladstonian Liberalism and the ‘popular mind’ of Victorian Britain.
Jonathan Parry sees Huxley as a member of a loose ‘Whig-Liberal’ camp: latitudinarian, anti-clerical yet supporting a Broad Church Establishment for its ethical teachings (not its doctrine); a defence against materialism, religious enthusiasm, and revolution. Since 1867, this camp had come to view Gladstone with ‘suspicion, as a zealous high churchman, a passionate demagogue, and an inscrutable political thinker’ whose political base consisted of nonconformists, Irish Catholics, and radicals, all groups which had done well out of the 1867 Reform Act.Footnote 115 They viewed the 1867 Act and the introduction of the secret ballot in 1872 as strengthening the power of wire-pullers and agitators, weakening that ‘individual will’ which they associated with the ‘moderate Liberal party’. Gladstone's Midlothian campaign and the introduction of the caucus system further unnerved them.Footnote 116 As Huxley commented to Benjamin Waugh around 1887, ‘If working men were to-day to vote by a majority that two and two made five, to-morrow Gladstone would believe it, and find them reasons for it which they had never dreamed of.’Footnote 117 As Paul White notes, Gladstone ‘was proof to Huxley that democracy was really despotism’.Footnote 118 In his 1890–1 Nineteenth Century essays on the swine miracle and ‘Gladstone's Controversial Methods’, Jesus the firebrand who miraculously expropriated the Gadarenes of their pigs fused with Gladstone, the charismatic Liberal demagogue who mouthed ‘pious and patriotic pretexts’ for ‘Irish landgrabbers’.Footnote 119
Similar charges of pandering, rather than leading, public opinion were voiced in private by Argyll. In December 1885, in the midst of advising Gladstone on which men of science to consult for his Nineteenth Century articles, Argyll turned to the ‘political’ discussion the pair were having in tandem. With the notable exception of Gladstone's 1850s financial reforms, Argyll wrote, which had been based on intellectual conviction
every item of Liberal policy for many years has been taken up under the pressures and inducement of some Party move [Gladstone wrote ‘No’ in the margin] The Ultramontane theory of the ‘Catholic Church’ asserts a Corporate Consciousness which develops Doctrine under Divine Guidance – and all Catholics are to ‘bow’ to its decrees as new dogmas become ripe for definition. As regards Theology you have repudiated this Doctrine and denounced it. Yet in Politics you seem to have adopted it, and your ‘Liberal Party’ comes into a place and authority analogous to that of the Catholic Church. Rosebery expressed it with beautiful simplicity when he said in some speech this year – whatever wave of public opinion we see advancing for heaven's sake let us be on the crest of it! And this is called leadership!Footnote 120
Huxley put it more cruelly when he referred to ‘the coach-dog theory of premiership’, which held ‘that the whole duty of a political chief is to look sharp for the way the social coach is driving, and then run in front and bark loud – as if being the leading noise-maker and guiding were the same things’.Footnote 121
Gladstone was not wont to write marginalia on his incoming correspondence, so the ‘No’ he wrote on Argyll's letter suggests profound disagreement. As Gladstone told another member of his cabinet, Granville, ‘the vital principle of the Liberal Party, like that of Greek art, is action.’Footnote 122 The Midlothian Campaign of 1878–80 and other campaigns of Gladstonian Liberalism can be seen as what Schreuder calls ‘a series of “experiments in truth” – drawing from both social and policy study, coupled with high moral opportunism and high emotional energy’.Footnote 123
In 1874–5, Gladstone's two pamphlets on Vatican decrees and Vaticanism failed to goad Newman or other English Roman Catholics to resist papal Ultramontanism. Gladstone chalked this up to Newman's lack of ‘“character”’.Footnote 124 But it also represented an occasion on which Gladstone's ability to discern when a political question was ‘ripe’ had failed him. If anything, Gladstone lagged behind ‘outside opinion’ on the ‘Bulgarian Horrors’.Footnote 125 But how did Gladstone discern ‘ripeness'? In a ‘General retrospect’ of c. 1895, Gladstone wrote that, if Providence had given him anything by way of a ‘striking gift’, it was a capacity, ‘at certain political junctures’ of ‘appreciation of the general situation and its result’.
To make good the idea, this must not be considered as the simple acceptance of a public opinion, founded upon the discernment that it has risen to a certain height needful for a given work, like a tide. It is an insight into the facts of particular eras, and their relations one to another, which generates in the mind a conviction that the materials exist for forming a public opinion, and for directing it to a particular end.Footnote 126
As Hilton notes, a love of ‘action’ was not the same as a love of ‘results’, understood as a set of policy objectives: Gladstone ‘preferred his followers to run on the spot, as it were, in a flurry of mental and moral activity, rather than create a heaven on earth’. Indeed, Hilton suggests that this preference led Gladstone to adopt hopeless causes over ‘bread and butter policy questions’, and endeavour to prolong campaigns, such as the 1869 campaign for Irish Church Disestablishment.Footnote 127 One might stretch the metaphor and suggest that the Liberal party's ‘action’ (as understood by Gladstone) represented a treadmill employed in order to improve one's moral fitness, rather than a race to be won. As Parry notes, ‘one essential facet of political activity’ for Gladstone involved a responsibility ‘to aid man's journey towards salvation’.Footnote 128 Keeping the ‘national pulse in a state of habitual and healthy animation’ ensured that the masses’ moral ‘tone’ was not lowered. ‘Activity’ was thus a matter of protecting the mass electorate from wire-pullers and demagogues, by keeping them focused on the higher ends of politics, rather than class interests.Footnote 129 The goal of franchise extension was not democracy. The poor were not to rule, but ensure that their natural rulers, the leisured aristocracy, governed morally.Footnote 130 As Parry notes, ‘one gauge of the success of the Liberal governing strategy is that in 1890 Britain had almost the least democratic franchise in Europe’.Footnote 131
VI
In 1896, two years before his death, Gladstone finally published his long-planned edition of Butler's work, accompanied by his own Studies subsidiary to Butler (1896). Gladstone described the subject of Butler's Analogy succinctly: ‘It is the dealings of God with man in the kingdoms of Nature, Providence, and Grace.’Footnote 132 Butler had ‘unfolded’ a universal relation between natural and providential government, an analogy vouchsafed him by a ‘habit of mind’. Butler's mind was ‘essentially free’, it could range across ‘the lower and the higher world’, across ‘human character and experience’ and the divine, and so could perceive relationships invisible to latter-day specialists. It was a humble mind, in that it accepted ‘this idea of guidance by probability’ as ‘the law of life, of life including both action and belief’.Footnote 133 This ‘habit of mind’ was far more than a piece of curious biographical trivia, it determined Butler's thought and lent his findings an authority they would otherwise lack. This ‘habit of mind’ was instilled in those who read Butler in the correct spirit, changing them in the process, and thereby changing the wider community. As Collini has demonstrated, the process by which ‘habit leaves deposits in the nervous system itself’ fascinated Victorian ‘public moralists’, including Spencer, Henry Maine, and Alexander Bain.Footnote 134
In one important respect, however, Studies subsidiary broke with Butler: Gladstone was not willing to follow Butler in viewing pleasure and pain as divine reward and punishment.Footnote 135 Instead, he argued that ‘Christian tradition’ had enhanced mankind's capacity to experience pleasure and pain. New sensitivities had in turn bred ‘powers of energetic endurance…powers not to be found among mankind in the ages anterior to the Christian dispensation’.Footnote 136 Suffering pain, like suffering doubt, was part of mankind's training: it energized, rather than weakened, the sufferer.Footnote 137 As he told the novelist Mrs Ward in 1888, sin was ‘the great fact in the world for me’, and Christianity was the only religion which ‘meets the sense of sin’.Footnote 138
This was a Providential development, one which saw humanity becoming more Christ-like in endurance. But it was very far from whiggish progress. Medical advancements did not alleviate human suffering and render endurance redundant. On the contrary, Gladstone argued that enhanced medical knowledge had deepened our experience of both. High Victorian man found himself ‘confronted with more diseases and more problems of the social kind’ than our ancestors had.Footnote 139 This is why he could not accept the New Liberal theology of Mrs Ward's novel Robert Elsmere (1888), whose author replaced sin with a ‘moral evil’, identified with ‘removable’ conditions of poverty and disease.Footnote 140 The place of suffering in Gladstone's Providential vision of history is surely worthy of further exploration, as is his sense of suffering as a ‘ground of enjoyment’, in which the individual takes pleasure from the knowledge that ‘chastisement’ brings ‘beneficial effects’.Footnote 141 It was the patient suffering Gladstone perceived in unenfranchised Lancashire cotton workers thrown out of work by the effects of the American Civil War that persuaded him that they were morally worthy of the franchise.Footnote 142 Such workers were ‘made moral through suffering’.Footnote 143 Suffering also lay behind the important distinction between religious toleration and religious indifferentism. To be indifferent is to feel nothing. Though the Oxford English Dictionary now views the use as rare and archaic, ‘to suffer’ can mean ‘to put up with, to tolerate’.Footnote 144
Though to Huxley they were perniciously evident, Gladstone himself fought shy of making explicit the connections between his role as Christian apologist and his political experience. Only in Impregnable rock of holy scripture (1890) did he cite his devotion of ‘several scores’ of years to the ‘study of the means of making himself intelligible to the mass of men’ as a qualification.Footnote 145 The comment seems coy. Gladstone was someone ‘who consistently and deliberately tried to place himself at the cross-roads of Victorian culture, society, religion and politics’.Footnote 146 The aforementioned habit of mind, salutary suffering as well as the rhetorical intelligence associated with Gladstone's sense of history as a discipline were also the ties which yoked Gladstone and Victorian Liberalism together, arguably to the ultimate harm of the latter. There was little room within this system for party political or class interest or advantage, which helps to explain the party's subsequent decline. For some historians, Gladstone's Providentialist vision of history and his place in it had been ‘an elaborate rationalization’ masking a mastery of ‘tactical purposes’.Footnote 147 It is no less worthy of study on that account.
