The ‘whig-liberals’ of this chapter and the next shared many of the religious views generally attributed to mid-century continental liberals. The latter viewed the Church as the willing ally of intolerant autocrats, and saw clerics as opponents of free expression and as agents of corruption. In Britain, the triumph of whig principles had ensured that such clerical pretensions had been checked, but it was seen to be the duty of the liberal state to continue to check them, and to use its considerable power to improve the moral and intellectual content of national religion. The response of whig-liberals to developments in the party after 1867 was to welcome whatever efforts continued to be made towards this end. At the same time, they tended increasingly to view Gladstone with suspicion, as a zealous high churchman, a passionate demagogue, and an inscrutable political thinker. Moreover, they disliked his tendency to place more weight than Palmerston had done on the opinions of three groups – English and Scottish nonconformists, Irish Catholics, and demagogic radicals – whose power, it seemed, had been so much strengthened by Disraeli's rather cavalier extension of the franchise in 1867.

Whig-liberals believed that national progress would be promoted by the elevation of the individual moral character to a pitch which would enable each man to appreciate his duty before God.