THE CONTROVERSIALIST 1 85 



political controversy, were employed to bring these 

 facts into seeming harmony with revelation. Hence 

 the serious limitations to which Mr. John Morley 

 bore witness when unveiling a statue to Mr. Glad- 

 stone at Manchester in October last year. 



Something [he says] was left out in the wide circle 

 of his interests; natural science in all its speculations 

 and extensions and increase of scientific truth, ex- 

 tension of scientific methods — all that no doubt con- 

 stitute the central activities, the intellectual activities 

 of England and Europe during the last forty years of 

 his life — to all that he was not entirely open. 1 



I remember once going with him one Sunday after- 

 noon to pay a visit to Mr. Darwin. It was in the 

 seventies. As I came away I felt that no impression 

 had reached him that that intellectual, modest, single- 

 minded lover of truth — that searcher of the secrets 

 of nature — was one who from his Kentish hilltop 

 was shaking the world. But the omission of scien- 

 tific interest was made up for. The thought with 

 which he rose in the morning and went to rest at 

 night was of the universe as a sublime moral theatre, 

 on which the Omnipotent Dramaturgist used king- 

 doms and rulers, laws and policies, to exhibit a sover- 

 eign purpose for good, to light up what I may call the 

 prose of politics with a ray from the Diviner Mind, 

 and exalted his ephemeral discourses in a sort of visible 

 relation to the counsels of all time. 



While Mr. Gladstone, as well-nigh the last of the 

 old school of reconcilers, was renewing the hopeless 



1 " Of natural science he was strangely ignorant." — Mr. Bryce, 

 " On some Traits of Mr. Gladstone," Fortnightly Review, January, 

 1902, p. 13. 



