Gladstone’s Church Principles considered in their Results: A Layman’s Ecclesiastical Treatise

Abstract

In 1840 W.E. Gladstone, the future British Prime Minister, published Church Principles considered in their Results. Although he had wanted to become a clergyman, he wrote self-consciously as a layman of the Church of England and so addressed not the truth of its ecclesiastical principles but their effects. He argued that they produced moral benefits, confuted the opinions of the latitudinarian party and should attract the support of the Evangelical party. His views were that the Church of England could claim catholicity without intolerance and form a center for church unity, a position he was at pains to differentiate from that of the Oxford Movement. Gladstone’s book was prolix and opaque, but it led him to modify the argument of his earlier work, The State in its Relations with the Church, and it helps explain his later attitudes and behavior.