Observations placeholder
Gladstone, William Ewart - Prophecies
Identifier
026858
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Gladstone had a vision of a country whose ethics and morals were determined by conscience and the result of continuous spirit input. Where conscience is a natural part of a person’s behaviour, people prosper and the need for the heavy hand of regulation and law can be lightened.
He spent a vast amount of time thinking about how the state could help people to be guided by their conscience as opposed to be driven by the continual thirst for power and money, accompanied by aggression.
But on 8 January 1896, in conversation with L. A. Tollemache, Gladstone said in a prophetic statement that he was:
"not so much afraid of Democracy or of Science as of the love of money. This seems to me to be a growing evil. Also, there is a danger from the growth of that dreadful military spirit"
He repeated this latter view at a dinner in November with Edward Hamilton, his former private secretary, Hamilton noted that "What is now uppermost in his mind is what he calls the spirit of jingoism …which is now so prevalent".[jingoism is extreme patriotism, especially in the form of aggressive or warlike foreign policy]
World War I started in 1914.