MR. GLADSTONE'S ELASTICITY.
MR. GLADSTONE is certainly one of the most astonish. ing of Englishmen of this or any other era. At the age of eighty-one, when most men who survive so long are simply waiting for the clipping of the thread, and in the meantime perhaps drawing upon their memories for the traces of a world that has passed away, Mr. Gladstone not only leads an active political campaign, addressing immense bodies of men, but is so little cast down by serious misadventures and disappoint- ments, that he dashes off into side fields of enterprise, and engages in combat with men as adroit and as satirical as Professor Huxley, not only with no weak or faltering band, but with a vigour and a sense of mastery that must excite the hearty admiration of all who read his reply. Pro- bably most men were under the impression that Mr. Gladstone's Christmas vacation at Hawarden had been a time of depression, during which the veteran statesman had been contemplating with despondency the regress of the unfortunate political cause to which he Las committed himself, and indulging in the vain regrets which are all that is left for old age when a crushing blow descends upon the cause with which it has iden- tified itself. No conjecture could be more mistaken. Mr. Gladstone, instead of fretting over Mr. Parnell's selfishness and indifference to the Irish cause, has evidently been casting very few glances in his direction. With the elasticity and cheeriness of youth, he has been giving his whole mind to Professor Huxley's attack upon the authority of the Gospel account of the Gadarene miracle, examining German treatises, exposing the presumptuousness of one of the latest of the German critics, comparing Josephus with himself, looking up the whole story of the political attitude of Rome towards the various portions of Palestine, and endeavouring to prove,—so far as we can judge, with conspicuous sue- cess,—in his paper for the Nineteenth Century of February, that Gadara, where the miracle of the transfer of mad- ness from the demoniac to the herd of swine was wrought, was really a Jewish territory, and subject to the Mosaic law; so that, if he is right, Professor Huxley is quite wrong in speaking of this narrative as one that attributes to our Lord an unjust interference with property lawfully and in- nocently held. Professor Huxley asserts that his scientific training gives him the command of weapons of " precision" to which his theological adversaries seldom have resort. To this case at least, whether he be right or wrong, his contention has no application. The present writer is not qualified, without a long examination of the various authorities, for which he has had no opportunity, to pronounce on the controversy. But be can safely say that Mr. Gladstone has at least used weapons of precision as effective as his adversary, and made out a case which, so far as the controversy has as yet gone, looks like a very powerful one, against Professor Huxley's. Mr. Gladstone certainly demonstrates, we think, that his adversaries' case is founded chiefly, not on Josephus, but on conjectural emendations of Josephus for which there is extremely little to be said, and that the text of Josephits as it exists, is altogether favourable to the view that Gadara was Jewish, and that those who kept herds of swine in Gadarene territory were breaking the Jewish law. The matter is, to our mind, of more importance than those theologians would make it who remark, aptly enough, that if God is not unjust in sending (say) an earthquake or a volcanic eruption which suddenly destroys a city, it would be childish to call him unjust for suddenly destroying a herd of swine, whether they were kept by innocent or by guilty persons. But the difference is this,—the ordinary stroke of calamity is no part of God's revelation, is no part, that is, of what he gives us as the key to the mysteries and diffieulties of the universe. But all the miracles of our Lord do claim to be part of the key to those difficulties, and ought not, therefore, to increase them, or even to bewilder us with the exhibition of formidably dark lines in the spectrum of the divine light itself. It is one thing to say that we must not expect even reve- lation to be free from mystery. It is quite another to say that in any deliberate manifestation of the divine character and purposes, there should be precisely the same difficulty that
there is in the course of Nature. How is it revelation, if no veil is removed?
But we are speaking of this remarkable essay of Mr. Glad- stone's rather as a glimpse of his own powers and elasticity than as a contribution to history and theology, though we suspect that it is both. Nothing seems to us more amazing than the Ran, with which be consoles himself for political dis- appointments and vexations, by excursions into new fields of research which, though not new to him, are at least quite alien to his predominant sphere of work. Perhaps, however, it is elasticity which is the true key-note of his whole intellect and character. It is not merely that under disappoint- ment his mind rebounds into some other region where he is not suffering disappointment, but that when he does not get the relief he expected from a particular policy, his mind refuses to believe that he can be on the right track, and darts off into some other region of political remedy in which he supposes that the missing clue will certainly be found. Mr. Gladstone is deficient in one great political con- viction, the conviction that it is often only "dogged as does it," to use Mr. Trollope's celebrated phrase. And this is just what highly elastic minds have the utmost difficulty in realising. Up to 1885, Mr. Gladstone was on the right track, but he was discouraged by reaping no fruits, and could not help casting about him for some alternative policy which should give him the fruits he, as yet, wholly lacked. So also, in the Crimean War, he was very soon discouraged by the fruitlessness of the policy adopted, and became one of those who were most eager for premature peace. And in 1874 again, the turn of the popular tide against him so discouraged him, that he retired temporarily from politics and engaged in his campaign against the Vatican, his mind not willingly entertaining either a prospect or a retrospect in which he sees no promise or harvest of success. This is at once the strength and the weakness of his political character,—the strength, because he so easily recruits his energy in new fields of enterprise which open out again to him golden hopes of some new kind ; the weakness, because whenever he is engaged in an attempt that requires inde- fatigable patience, such as apparent failure does not exhaust, his elastic mind will not bear the wearing pressure of the strain, and carries him off into new and more immediately hopeful experi- ments. Yet even in the new field he dwells fondly on any trace of evidence that, even where he has as yet failed, his hope was not without a just and reasonable foundation. Even in the unpromising field of Jewish history be evidently finds such incidental consolations. Thus, with obvious reference to his campaign against Vaticanism, he remarks; that when Gabinius divided Palestine into five regions for the purpose of administering the Mosaic law in each of them, through an assembly of elders termed Sanhedrim, "it was probably a great gain to the population to have the Mosaic law administered at its own doors, so to speak, instead of by a priest-king sitting at a distance in Jerusalem." That is a stroke intended for the Roman supremacy. And again, he remarks that a change in the political condition of Gadara, which Professor Huxley supposes to have been popular because it involved a restoration of the Roman authority, was really popular because the city was restored "to the Home-rule" of its own proper inhabitants. So that, even in his excursions into Jewish history, Mr. Gladstone does not forget the political sallies by which he has consoled himself under his various political disappoint- ments, and by which, indeed, he has been driven into these pleasant by-ways of historical investigation. Mr. Gladstone's mind is in this respect like an india-rubber ball which finds a new impulse in every obstruction, no less than in every attraction, with which it meets. If be finds the political region more repellent than usual, he is driven aside into the ecclesiastical or historical. And if these produce disappoint- ment, he only discovers a new reason for a fresh study of Homer or Dante, or Mrs. Archer Clive, or Marie Bashkirtseff. There is no vexation which brings his indomitable energy to a standstill,—none that does not seem to impart to it a new range and field. The failure of some of his hopes only quickens the remainder. The obstacle which arrests one of his purposes only reinvigorates and renovates another. After ricochetting from Mr. Parnell, he descends on Professor Huxley with all the force and vivacity of a fresh departure. But he hardly appreciates the political force of doggedness, especially in dealing with a race only half-drilled to political life and method like the Irish,—whose elasticity is almost as great as his own, though much more disposed to deviate into mere aimless exhibitions of vivacity and caprice. The world will not soon forget the elaborate and laborious investigation into the history of Gadara, undertaken at a most critical moment in English politics, to prove that the Gadarene swine- keepers were playing false with their religious principles.
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