misinformed as it is by depraved affections, as our adequate instructor
in matters of religion, is most highly irrational." Nevertheless, "the
understanding has a great function in religion and is a medium to the
affections, and may even correct their particular impulses."

In reference to the question of the reconversion of England to
Catholicism, earnestly desired by some, Mr. Gladstone forcibly remarked:
"England, which with ill grace and ceaseless efforts at remonstrance,
endured the yoke when Rome was in her zenith, and when her powers were
but here and there evoked; will the same England, afraid of the truth
which she has vindicated, or even with the license which has mingled
like a weed with its growth, recur to that system in its decrepitude
which she repudiated in its vigor?" If the Church of England ever lost
her power, it would never be by submission to Rome, "but by that
principle of religions insubordination and self-dependence which, if it
refuse her tempered rule and succeed in its overthrow, will much more
surely refuse and much more easily succeed in resisting the
unequivocally arbitrary impositions of the Roman scheme." Here is the
key-note of many of Mr. Gladstone's utterances in after years against
the pretentious and aspirations of Rome. The defense of the English
Church and its principles and opposition to the Church of Rome have been
unchanging features in Mr. Gladstone's religious course. But, in the
light of these early utterances, some have criticised severely that
legislative act, carried through by him in later years, by which the
Disestablishment of the Irish Church was effected. How could the author
of "The State in its Relations with the Church" become the destroyer of
the fabric of the Irish Church?

To meet these charges of inconsistency Mr. Gladstone issued, in 1868, "A
Chapter of Autobiography." The author's motives in putting forth this