"ROBERT ELSMERE." Mr Gladstone and the Battle of Belief. HIS REVIEW IN THE "NINETEENTH CENTURY." (From Our Own Correspondent.) London, May 4.

Te Aroha News, Volume VI, Issue 280, 11 July 1888, Page 3

"ROBERT ELSMERE. " Mr Gladstone and the Battle of Belief. HIS REVIEW IN THE "NINETEENTH CENTURY." (From Our Own Correspondent.) London, May 4.

A tremendous fillip has been given to tteh c ale of " Robert Elsmere " by Mr Gladtone's review in the ciment number of the " Nineteenth Century." The article is entitled " Robert Elsmere and the Battle of Belief,'' and deals ably and fervently with the problems raised by Mrs Ward's hero. Nevertheless, I'm sure the story i s not one the average novel - reader will care a great deal about Now Mr Gladstone and the "Times" and the "Spectator' have made it the book of the season. Mrs Shallowbrain and Miss Giddygirl will feel compelled to order c% Robert Elsmere" from Mudies, and to wade confusedly through some of its sombre pages. Whether, however, they will be much the wiser or better tor the attempt, I doubt. Even the G.O.M. admits the novel is tough. He says : — " ' Robert Elsmeve ' is hard reading, and requires toil and effort. Yet, if it be difficult to persist, it is impossible to shop. The prisoner on the treadmill must work sevei'ely to pc form hio task ; but if he J stops he at once receives a blow which brings him to his senses. Here, as there, it is" human inn* unity which shrinks; but here, as not there, the propelling motive is, within. Deliberate judgment and deep interest alike rebuke a fainting reader. The strength of the book, overbearing every obstacle, seems to lie in an extraordinary wealth of diction, never separated from thought ; in a close and searching faculty of social observation : in generous appreciation of what is morally good, impartially exhibited in all directions ; above all in the sense of mission with which the writer is evidently possessed, and in the earnestness and persistency of purpose with which through every page and line it is pursued. The book is eminently an offspring of the time, and will probably make a deep or at least a very sensible impression ; not, however, among mere novel-readers, but among those who share, in whatever sense, the deeper thought of the period. " In a note to the word impartially, Mr Gladstone says that Mrs Ward has given evidence of her impartiality " in her dedication to the memory of two friends, of whom one, Mrs Alfred Lyttelton, lived and died unshaken in belief. The other is more or less made known in the pages of the work." He then briefly epitomises the story, criticising several of the characters. He pi'otests against the language put into the mouth of Newcome, the High Church cleric, as " one of a series of indications by which this gifted authoress conveys to us what appears to be her thoroughly genui> c conviction that historical Christianity has, indeed, broad grounds and deep roots in emotion, but in reason, none whatevei." He complains that " the fruit of these eighteen centuries and of the prime countries of the world Bella, immortal, benefica Fede, ai trionfi avvezza is dismissed without a hearing- "' He humbly retorts oh Elsmere, " considered intellectually his proceedings in regard to belief appear to me from the beginning, as well as in the downward process, to present dismal gaps." Of the stery of Catherine's two sisters, Mr Gladstone ask a , "From the standing point of art can this portion of the book fail to stir much misgiving V" He chinks Mrs Ward " has loaded her ship, though a gallant one, with more cargo than it will well bear ;" and lie " appeals to the laws of art against the final disposal of Catherine." Of the whole theological tendency of the book he says : "It may, I think, be fairly described as a devout attempt, made in good faith, to simplify the difficult mission of religion in the worldby discarding the supposed lumber of the Christian theology, while retaining and applying, in their undiminished breadth of scope, the whole personal, social, and spiritual morality which has now, a& matter of fact, entered into the patrimony of Christendom : and, since Christendom is the dominaut power of the world, into the patrimony of the race. It is impossible indeed to conceive a more religious life than the later life of Robert Elsmere, in his sense of the word religion. Aud that sense is faxabove the sense in which religion is held, or practically applied, by great multitudes of Christians. It is, however, a new form of religion.' Mr Gladstone then proceeds to discuss this " new form of religion " in about a dozen eloquent pages. The controversy is, in fact, a very old one : " Although the Divinity of Christ) 1 is not put prominently forward in this book, but rather the broader objection to supernatural manifestations, yet it will be found to be the real hinge of the entire question. For, if Christ be truly God, few will deny that the exceptional incidents, which follow in the train of His appearance upon earth, raise, in substance, no new difficulty. Is it true, then, that Christiana have been so divided on this subject as to promise us a return of peace and progress by its elimination ?' To answer this question he appeals to the progress ot Christian history. Many generations passed before Arianism wholly ceased to be the basis of Christrian profession in parts ot Christendom, "but not so long before the central thought of the body as a whole had come to be fixed in the form of what has ever since, and now for fourteen hundred years been known as the orthodox belief." It is most instructive, Mr Gladstone thinks, that " the onward movement of negation ha? not more largely increased the number of professed Unitarians." We find Mrs Ward "herself describing fche old Unitarian &cheme as one wholly destitute of logic, but in what respect she improves upon it I have not yet perceived. " The historical argument for the orthodox view of Christianity — the argument of long prevalence - is developed at considerable length, and we are told "The solemn voice of the ages, the securus judicat orbis terrarum, amounts simply to zero for Robert Elsmere." Christianity is then compared with " the restricted, almost tribal systems " it superseded. Its early victories, its eventual triumph, its ti-ans-formation of the world's ideals, till Christianity came to pervade the very air we breathe, are all due to that religion in its historic form — " All this has been done, not by eclectic and arbitrary fancies, but by the creed of the Homoousoin, in which the philosophy of modern times sometimes appears to find a favourable theme of ridicule. But it is not less material to observe that the whole fabric, social as well as personal, rests on the new type of individual character which the Gospel brought into life and action : enriched and completed withoutdoubt from collateral sources which made part of the ' Evangelical preparation,' but in its central essence due enth-ely to the dispensation which had been founded and wrought out in the land of Judea, and in the history of the Hebrew race. What right have we to

detach, or to suppose we can defcach.this type of personal character from the causes out of which as matter of history it lias grown, and to assume that without its roots it will thrive as well as with them ?" Mr Gladstone then proceeds to show that — as, for example, among the Shakers — it is possible to reserve allegiance to Christian morals, while renouncing the Christian tradition. But the severance is not permanently possible. " Tnc Christian type is the product and the property of the Christian scheme.' He concludes that "from the history ot all that has lain within the reach ot the great Mediterranean basin not a titt'o of encouragement can be drawn tor the idoas of those who would surrender the doctrines of Christianity and yet retain its moral and spiritual fruit*." Mr Gladstone then puts three questions : Is the new system better adapted to the needs of human natuie than the old ? and does it mitigate or enhance the difficulties of belief ? If these two questions are to be answered in the negative, how are we to account for the strange phenomena of persons painfully desiroi^ of seeing the Divine Government moie and more accepted in the world, yet enthusiastically busied in cutting away its best props '! The first two questions Mr Gladstone docanswer in the negative. The scheme of Redemption removed men's sense of dib tance from God, but to "strike out the redemptive clauses fiom the scheme is to orate the very feature by uhich it essentially differed from all other schemes ; and to substitute a didactic exhibition ol supeiior morality, with the lays of an example in the preterite tense, set by a dead man m Juden, lor that scheme ol living forces, by which the powers of a living Saviour's humanity are daily and hourly given to man, under a charter which expires only with the world itself. Is it possible here to discern, either from an ideal or from a practical point, of view, anything but depletion and impoverishment, and the substitution of a spectral for a living form ?" En an&wering the second question he quotes the ca.se of James Mril, who, "arrested by the strong hand of Bishop Butler, halted rather than rested for awhile in theism in hib progress towards general negation.' The theist is confronted with the awful problem of evil, by the mystery of pain, by the apparent anomalies of waste and caprice in creation, and by the diiliculties of free will. But in this bewildered state ol things — this great enigma of the world — 'There has come upon the &cene the figure of a Redeemer, human and divine. Let it be granted that the Incarnation is a marvel wholly beyond our reach, and that the miracle of the Resurrection to-day giveo serious trouble to fastidious intellects. But the difficulties of a baffled understanding, lying everywhere around us in daily experience, are to be expected from its limitations : not so the shocks encountered by the moral sense. Even if the Christian scheme slightly lengthened the immeasurable catalogue of the first, this is dust in the balance compared with the relief 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 transmuted into good ; and in opening clearly the vision of another woi Id, in which we are taught to look for yet larger counsel* of the Almighty wisdom. To take away, then, the agency so beneficent, which has so softened and reduced the moral pioblems that lie thickly spread around us, and to leave us face to face with them in all their original rigour, is to enhance and not to mitigate the difficulties of beliei." Lastly, the writers who '* desire to retain what was manifested, but to thrust aside the manifesting Peison. and all that His living personality entails," seem to Mr Gladstone to have " a low estimate both of the quantity and the quality of sin." This may be due in some degree to the fact that "There are a happy few on whom nature's, degeneracy has but lightly laid its hand. In the biography of the late Dr. Marsh we have an illustration apt for my purpose. His family was strictly JLvangelical. He underwent what he deemed to be conversion. A like-minded friend congratulated his mother on the work of Divine grace in her son. But, in the concrete, she mildly resented the remark, and replied that in truth { Divine grace would find very little to do in her son William.' " This leads to the conclusion — " We are bound to believe, and I for one do believe, that in many cases the reason why the doctrines of grace, fo profoundly embedded in the Gospel, are dispensed with by the negative writers of the day, is in many ca?e* because they have not iully had to feel the need of them ; because they have not travelled with St. Paul through the dark valley of agonising conflict, or with Dante along the cire'es downward and the hill upward ; because, having to bear a smaller share than others of the common curse and burden, they stagger and falter less beneath its weight. But ought they not to know that they are physicians, who have not learned thd principal peril of the patient's case, and whose prescription accordingly omits the main requisite for a cure ?"