GLADSTONE'S FAITH. He Publishes a Vigorous Defence of Orthodoxy.

Te Aroha News, Volume V, Issue 268, 30 May 1888, Page 4

GLADSTONE'S FAITH. He Publishes a Vigorous Defence of Orthodoxy.

Mr Gladstone, in the "Nineteenth Century," has reviewed Mrs Humphrey Ward's novel, ".Robert Ellsmere." The spirit of this book is against orthodoxy and in favour of a, general religion, bound by no creeds nor forms. Gladstone defends orthodoxy and heads his article "The Battle of Belief." Of the whole theological tendency of the book he says : "It may, I think, be fairly described an a devout attempt, made in good faith, to simplify the difficult mission of religion in the world by discarding the supposed fetters of Christian theology while retaining and applying in their undiminished breadth ot scope, personal, social and spiritual morality, which has noAV, as a matter of fact, entered into the patrimony of Christendom, and .since Christendom is the domin ant power of the world, into the patrimony of the race. It ie> impossible, indeed, to conceive a more religious liie than the later life of Robert Ellsmere, in his sense of the word religion, and that sense is far above the sense in which religion is held or practically applied by great multitudes of Christians. It is, however, a new form of religion." Gladstone then proceeds to discuss this new form of religion in about a dozen pages. Jfcsnys: "Although the divinity of Christ is not put prominently forward in this book, but rather broader objections to His supernatural manifestation, it will bo found to be the leal hinge of the entire question, tor if Christ lie truly God, few will deny that the exceptional incidents which follow in the tiain of his appearance upon earth raise in substance any new difficulty. Is it true then that Christians have been so decided on this subject as to pi oinise us a return of peace and progress on its elimination V" Gladstone, after stoutly reviewing tho standard argument in favour of orthodoxy, says, in hi 1 * objection to a religion of meio leahori: "Theic has come upon the scene the figure of a ] led corner, human and divine. If it be granted that His incarnation is a marvel wholly beyond our roach, and that the miracle of the resin rection to-day ghes .serious trouble to fastidious intellect*-, the diihcultics of baffled understanding lying e\ery\\heie around us in daily experience are to be expected from its limitations. Not so the shocks encountered by the moial sense. Even if the Chnsthn scheme has slightly lengthened the immeasurable catalogue of the first, this is dust in the balance compared with the iclief it furnishes to the second in supplying the most powerful remedial agency ever known in teaching how pain may be made a helper and evil transmitted into good, and in opening clearly the vision of another world, in which we arc taught to look for yet larger counsels of Almighty wisdom. To take asvay, then, an agency so benciicial, which has so softened and reduced the moral problems that lie thickly spread around us, and to leaic us with them i?i all their original rigour, is to enhance and not to mitigate the difficulties of belief." In conclu&ion he says :—": — " We are bound to behove — and I, for one, do believe — that in many cases the reason why doctrines ot grace so profoundly imbedded in the Gospel ai c dispensed with by the negative writers of the da}' is in many cases because they have not fully had to feel the need of them, because they have not traveled with St. i'aul through the daik valley of agonising conflict, or with Dante along ihe ciiclcs down ward to hell and upward to heavi-n ; because having to bear a smaller shaie than others of the common cm&e and binder 1 , they stagger and falter less beneath its weight. 13ut ought they nob to know th.it thej' are physicians who have not kcirned the piincipal peril of their patient's (<\^e, and v> ho^e prescription accordingly omits, the main lequi&itc lor cure?"'