spontaneously generated by an inner
experience of conversion. They were the religious beneficiaries of the Glorious Revolution. Their cool rationalism, which had made them hostile to Stuart claims of divine right, made them at home
with a Whig oligarchy and well attuned to the mannered cultivation of the so-called Augustan age. They were somewhat insular (although, if they were rich enough, venturing into the occasional grand
tour and the importation of Italian works of art), which made them anti-Catholic, and they were against excessive enthusiasm, which made them anti-Evangelical. They thought that religion should be
an affair of sense, morals (within reason) and good behaviour. John Locke and Bishop Butler were their philosophers and Jane Austen was the best chronicler of the background against which they
flourished.
This liberal (in ecclesiastical terms) or Broad Church approach has over the three centuries since the Whig Revolution shown a persistent if fluctuating strength and has been the dominant trend
within the Church under different manifestations alike in Butler’s Durham, Trollope’s Barchester and Runcie’s Canterbury. But it was at a relatively low ebb
circa
1830,
when the clerical spirit of eighteenth-century Oxford had encouraged Latitudinarianism to degenerate into lethargy. In any eventit never held much appeal for Gladstone. It was
too cool and detached for him, and it was not religious liberalism but the rival enthusiasms of the Apostolic and the Evangelical Churches which, as in Housman’s
Welsh Marches
,
‘ceased not fighting, east and west, on the marches of [his] breast’.
An important engagement of that continuing conflict occurred during his Italian sojourn in the spring of 1832, when he was just over twenty-two years of age and poised between his Oxford
academic triumphs of December 1831 and his election to Parliament in December 1832. He had travelled for two months, mostly finding English services for Sunday mornings (although having to make do
with Prussian Protestantism in Turin), but also taking in, generally with disapproval, a wide range of Roman Catholic observances. The low mass at the Cathedral of St Gudule in Brussels was
‘an unmeaning and sorrowful ceremony’. 8 In Florence he saw two baptisms administered in the Baptistery and wrote of himself as
‘dissatisfied with the matter, disgusted (I cannot use a weaker term) with the
manner
of the service’. 9 The next day he went to a
minor church and was at once sad and severe: ‘It is painful to speak disrespectfully of any religious services but these certainly seemed no better than mummery.’ 10 The underlying causes of his trans-European censoriousness were idolatry, the elevation of the Virgin to a position almost above Christ, and the disengaged mumbling of the
services by unprepossessing priests (although he ought to have become used to the last fault by ‘the mumblings of toothless fellows’, as he had expressed it, in Eton Chapel).
On 31 March, his first day in Rome, he went to St Peter’s. He was not at first impressed by the architecture (’my humble homage is reserved for that Gothic style, which prevails in
our own English cathedrals’) 11 and could not easily equate the baroque with a religious atmosphere. Yet the great basilica achieved what must be
adjudged its central purpose and set him meditating on the unity of Christendom in a way that he had never done before. In so doing he made few concessions to the authority of the Holy See:
In entering such a Church as this, most deeply does one feel the pain and shame of the schism which separates us from Rome – whose guilt (for guilt I at least am
well persuaded there always is where there is schism) surely rests not upon the Venerable Fathers of the English Reformed Church, but upon Rome itself [there then follow nine balancing
subordinate clauses of a convolution which make the net effect almost impossible to follow]. . . . May God
experience of conversion. They were the religious beneficiaries of the Glorious Revolution. Their cool rationalism, which had made them hostile to Stuart claims of divine right, made them at home
with a Whig oligarchy and well attuned to the mannered cultivation of the so-called Augustan age. They were somewhat insular (although, if they were rich enough, venturing into the occasional grand
tour and the importation of Italian works of art), which made them anti-Catholic, and they were against excessive enthusiasm, which made them anti-Evangelical. They thought that religion should be
an affair of sense, morals (within reason) and good behaviour. John Locke and Bishop Butler were their philosophers and Jane Austen was the best chronicler of the background against which they
flourished.
This liberal (in ecclesiastical terms) or Broad Church approach has over the three centuries since the Whig Revolution shown a persistent if fluctuating strength and has been the dominant trend
within the Church under different manifestations alike in Butler’s Durham, Trollope’s Barchester and Runcie’s Canterbury. But it was at a relatively low ebb
circa
1830,
when the clerical spirit of eighteenth-century Oxford had encouraged Latitudinarianism to degenerate into lethargy. In any eventit never held much appeal for Gladstone. It was
too cool and detached for him, and it was not religious liberalism but the rival enthusiasms of the Apostolic and the Evangelical Churches which, as in Housman’s
Welsh Marches
,
‘ceased not fighting, east and west, on the marches of [his] breast’.
An important engagement of that continuing conflict occurred during his Italian sojourn in the spring of 1832, when he was just over twenty-two years of age and poised between his Oxford
academic triumphs of December 1831 and his election to Parliament in December 1832. He had travelled for two months, mostly finding English services for Sunday mornings (although having to make do
with Prussian Protestantism in Turin), but also taking in, generally with disapproval, a wide range of Roman Catholic observances. The low mass at the Cathedral of St Gudule in Brussels was
‘an unmeaning and sorrowful ceremony’. 8 In Florence he saw two baptisms administered in the Baptistery and wrote of himself as
‘dissatisfied with the matter, disgusted (I cannot use a weaker term) with the
manner
of the service’. 9 The next day he went to a
minor church and was at once sad and severe: ‘It is painful to speak disrespectfully of any religious services but these certainly seemed no better than mummery.’ 10 The underlying causes of his trans-European censoriousness were idolatry, the elevation of the Virgin to a position almost above Christ, and the disengaged mumbling of the
services by unprepossessing priests (although he ought to have become used to the last fault by ‘the mumblings of toothless fellows’, as he had expressed it, in Eton Chapel).
On 31 March, his first day in Rome, he went to St Peter’s. He was not at first impressed by the architecture (’my humble homage is reserved for that Gothic style, which prevails in
our own English cathedrals’) 11 and could not easily equate the baroque with a religious atmosphere. Yet the great basilica achieved what must be
adjudged its central purpose and set him meditating on the unity of Christendom in a way that he had never done before. In so doing he made few concessions to the authority of the Holy See:
In entering such a Church as this, most deeply does one feel the pain and shame of the schism which separates us from Rome – whose guilt (for guilt I at least am
well persuaded there always is where there is schism) surely rests not upon the Venerable Fathers of the English Reformed Church, but upon Rome itself [there then follow nine balancing
subordinate clauses of a convolution which make the net effect almost impossible to follow]. . . . May God
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