In one passage of his A Chapter of Autobiography (1868), Gladstone looked back thirty years to the time when he had published The State in its Relations with the Church. Then he had ‘believed that the Church of England, through the medium of a regenerated clergy and an intelligent and attached laity, would not only hold her ground, but would even in great part probably revive the love and allegiance both of the masses who were wholly falling away from religious observances, and of those large and powerful nonconforming bodies’. Yet, within a dozen years of 1838 ‘at least a moiety of the most gifted sons, whom Oxford had reared for the service of the Church of England, would be hurling at her head the hottest bolts of the Vatican; that, with their deviation on the one side, there would arise a not less convulsive rationalistic movement on the other. Since that time, the Church of England may be said to have bled in every pore; and at this hour it seems occasionally to quiver to its very base’.