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Show f Gladstone and the Catholic Church. John Morley, in his "Life of Gladstone," just published by Macmillan, quotes . Gladstone him self as saying that it was in entering St. Peters in Rome, at the age of 2:j, that he experienced his "first conception of the unity of the Church." ''I had previously," wrote Gladstone, "taken a great deal of teaching direct from the Bible, as best I could; but now the figure of the Church rose before me as a teacher, too, and I gradually found m how incomplete and fragmentary a man-uer man-uer I. .had, .drawn divine trutlx.fromjheea.cred. volume, vol-ume, as, indeed, I had also missed, in the Thirty-nine Thirty-nine Articles, .-something whicl ought to have taught me better. Such, for I believe that I have given the fact as it occurred, in its silence and its solitude, was my first introduction to the august conception of the Church of Christ. It presented to me Christianity under an aspect in which I had not yet known it its ministry of symbols, its channels of gracp, its unending line of teachers joining from the head: n sublime construction based throughout upon historic fact, uplifting tb idea of the community in which we live, and of the access which it enjoys through the new and living way to the presence of the Most High. From this time I began to feel my way by degrees into or toward a true notion of the Church." |