Both believed that religion - understood as including education and the role of the Church - was the most important component in ensuring that society was well ordered. But the first was more anxious than the second for the wise state to superintend the community's religious life, so that the success of anti-social forces could be checked ... The other camp distrusted the capacity of those in authority to regulate morality and promote spirituality without repression and formalism.
The rigidity of these divisions must not be over-stressed but they help to explain the antagonism in the party by 1874 when the Liberals lost the General Election, and when Gladstone split the Liberal Party on the Irish Question in 1886 they were the underlying reason for the break between Liberals and Unionists. When the anti-clerical scientist, T. H. Huxley came to write in 1889 that the English 'care for nothing but religion and politics', he was writing against this background of Gladstonian influence on public life. Gladstone and his followers had an immeasurable distrust of human authority, because of the power of evil and sin in the human condition, and the particular susceptibility to temptation of the richest and the most powerful. They believed that out of the competition of genuinely zealous men would spring a popular morality. They recognised that, as with any human undertaking, the product would be flawed but they believed that such an approach represented the best guarantee that society would be regulated along lines acceptable to God - a God who spoke with equal force to all mankind, rather than primarily to the thinking classes. They therefore saw politicians who sought to dictate a position to God's creatures as being in error. In the words of the proverb which Gladstone recalled in 1876 - Vox populi vox Dei. The purpose of the politician was to inspire, not to direct. The job of the political activist was to maintain the public mind in a state of alertness against the manifestations of evil. The dissemination of knowledge would enable those manifestations to be checked. This was why the connection between faith and politics was essential. In 1874 Gladstone wrote of his faith in Britain and the role of religion: ' As to its politics, this country has much less, I think, to fear than to hope; unless through a corruption of its religion - against which, as Conservative or Liberal, I can perhaps say I have striven all my life long.'44
Gladstone's Influence and Legacy