“The Great Christian Man”
I have known ninety-five of the world’s great men in my time, and of these eighty-seven were followers of the Bible. The Bible is stamped with a Specialty of Origin, and an immeasurable distance separates it from all competitors.
William Gladstone, Halley’s Bible Handbook
William Ewart Gladstone is a man of such great achievement that it is nearly impossible to write an abbreviated chapter on his life. Biographer and statesman Roy Jenkins took well over six hundred pages to write a one-volume biography called Gladstone.
Born to a well-to-do family in Liverpool, Gladstone attended school at Eaton and Christ Church, Oxford, and entered Parliament soon after graduation (1832). He would spend sixty years in government, serving in various positions including four terms as prime minister, something unique in British history. Some referred to Gladstone as “G.O.M.,” the Grand Old Man. His long-term opponents said that “G.O.M.” stood for God’s Only Mistake.
Most of those who write about Gladstone write about his ups and downs in government, about how Queen Victoria disliked him, about how another powerful prime minister—Benjamin Disraeli—became and remained his rival, but there is another side to the great Gladstone.
Man of Faith
William Gladstone was a man of faith and active in the Church of England. “Most men at the head of great movements are Christian men. During my many years in the cabinet I was brought in contact with some sixty masterminds, and not more than perhaps three or four of whom were in sympathy with the skeptical movement of the day.”1
His was not the pseudo-faith of many politicians who were “believers” because voters expected them to be. Gladstone attended church regularly and took communion weekly. His diaries show he felt a sense of his own sinfulness and spiritual need. His support helped the Church of England with its growth overseas. He was known to speak with prostitutes in an effort to convince them of the error of their ways.
A story is told of a young boy he befriended who came to his home and No. 10 Downing Street to speak to the prime minister. “Mr. Gladstone, my brother is dying, will you come and show him the way to heaven?” Gladstone was working on a speech he was to deliver to Parliament that day and had yet to complete it. Nevertheless, he went to the dying boy and did as the brother had asked. The boy made a profession of faith, and when Gladstone returned to his office and to his speech, he wrote at the bottom of one page, “Today, I am the happiest man in London.”
Politics an Act of Service
Gladstone saw politics as a blessing. “My political and public life is the best part of my life: it is the part in which I am conscious of the greatest effort to do and avoid as the Lord Christ would have me do and avoid.”2 He felt blessed to be in public service. To him, public service was Christian duty.
“Christianity established . . . the duty of relieving the poor, the sick, the afflicted,”3 he said. Where many men in the public sector keep a fence between their faith and their political decisions, Gladstone blended both into an inseparable way of thinking.
More Than a Politician
“William Ewart Gladstone was, perhaps with no one other than Tennyson, Newman, Dickens, Carlyle, and Darwin, one of the stars of the nineteenth-century British life,” said Roy Jenkins in his biography Gladstone.4 Gladstone was a man of many skills. He read over twenty thousand books in his lifetime. Not content to be just a reader, he was also a writer who penned both articles and books, and in his later years wrote books defending Christianity including The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture.
He was a classical scholar and did not shy away from the theological debates of the day. His topics ranged from On Books and the Housing of Them, to poetry, economics, and church history. His was not a mind wasted.
The life of William Ewart Gladstone proves that faith and public life are left and right hands of the same cause. He serves as an example that Christians can, and some should, enter the rough-and-tumble world of politics to bolster policy with faith-driven hopes.
The Grand Old Man, with his balding head and large sideburns, retired from public life in 1894. Four years later he died of cancer and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Lord Salisbury said it best. He called Gladstone, “A great Christian man.”