William Ewart Gladstone - Religion

Religion

His mother, intensely religious, was an evangelical of Scottish Episcopal origins, and his father joined the Church of England, having been a Presbyterian when he first settled in Liverpool. The boy was baptised into the Church of England. He had previously rejected a call to enter the ministry, and on this his conscience always tormented him. In compensation he aligned his politics with the evangelical faith in which he fervently believed. In 1838 Gladstone nearly ruined his career when he tried to force a religious mission upon the Conservative Party. He wrote The State in its Relations with the Church, a book which argued that England had neglected its great duty to the Church of England. He announced that since that Church possessed a monopoly of religious truth, Nonconformists and Roman Catholics ought to be excluded from all government jobs. The historian Thomas Babington Macaulay and other critics ridiculed his weak arguments to shreds. Sir Robert Peel, Gladstone's chief, was outraged because this would upset the delicate political issue of Catholic Emancipation and anger the Nonconformists. Since Peel greatly admired his protégé, he redirected his focus from theology to finance.

Gladstone altered his approach to religious problems, which always held first place in his mind. Before entering Parliament he had already substituted a High Church Anglican attitude, with its dependence upon authority and tradition, for the evangelical outlook of his boyhood, with its reliance upon the direct inspiration of the Bible. Now in middle life he decided that the individual conscience would have to replace authority as the inner citadel of the Church. That view of the individual conscience affected his political outlook and changed him gradually from a Conservative into a Liberal.