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It has been more than a century since the death of William Gladstone, four-time prime minister of Great Britain (1868–74, 1880–85, 1886, 1892–94) and widely regarded as the great Christian statesman of his age. One might have expected a reasonably complete and satisfying assessment to have emerged by now. Gladstone served in the public eye for more than 60 years. His views on the widest array of topics were regularly reported in the press and Hansard's Parliamentary Debates. He was also a great controversialist who published widely. Though a master of political qualification, Gladstone always attempted to be honest, and generally was. What he could not, or would not, say publicly about family, sex, or other sensitive issues he often recorded in his diary or private letters and memoranda. His library remains intact, including thousands of annotated volumes dealing with all the most controversial issues regarding his career and personality. The opportunities for insight are staggering. Yet biographies of Gladstonemost notably by John Morley (3 vols, 1903), Colin Matthew (2 vols. 1986, 1995), and Richard Shannon (2 vols., 1982, 1999)have all foundered in some way upon religion, particularly in its relation to his mental and moral choices. Just as Victorian cartoonists could never quite locate the visual characteristic necessary to successful caricature, so biographers have struggled to distinguish the active elements of Gladstone's faith from those that were largely matters of form, and thus less important to understanding his sometimes baffling behavior.
The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer , and Politics by David Bebbington Oxford Univ. Press, 2004 331 pp., $95 |
David Bebbington's The Mind of Gladstone takes a large step forward. It is not a study of his religion per se, nor a full intellectual biography, but a "case-study in the evolution of Gladstone's thinking" on the foundational subjects that were most important to him: politics, religion, and Homer. Bebbington judiciously balances evidence drawn from Gladstone's public and private papers, personal library, and published writings, as well as from the most recent scholarly research. He is the first scholar to make significant use of some 200 sermons prepared by Gladstone and delivered to his household between 1840 and 1866, and the first to examine the significant evolution of Gladstone's views on the Homeric question. This is an important book that succeeds in highlighting the interdependence of received Christianity and rational humanism in the mind of Gladstone.
Early in the book, it becomes clear that Gladstone will not be satisfied by religious explanations that do not embrace both the traditional historicity of God's work in the world through Christ and the rational use of his intellect. In the opening chapter on "The Foundations of Gladstonian Conservatism," Bebbington demonstrates, not surprisingly, that the Bible was an important source of Gladstone's earliest conservatism. On the following page, however, one learns that "the preponderant" influence was Aristotle. In the next chapter on "The Emergence of Church Principles," Gladstone is characterized as "militantly Anglican," though his "ideal of state-church relations" is shown to have "rested on the holistic premise that he had learned from antiquity." When Gladstone's first book, The State in its Relations with the Church (1838), was savagely attacked by Thomas Macaulay, Gladstone turned to Aristotle for a defense. For Gladstone, faith was "an intellectual act." Though it is true that the fundamental elements of traditional Christianity were always present to Gladstone's mind, his appeal to antiquity in resolving intellectual problems eventually became habitual, with the Greeks often being dragged into controversies by the ears.
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