Again: "I thank you most cordially for your remarks, and I rejoice to find you act so entirely in the spirit I had anticipated. I trust you will continue to speak with freedom, which is the best compliment as well as the best service you can render me.
"I think it very probable that you may find that V and VI require quite as rigorous treatment as II, and I am very desirous to set both my mind and eyes at liberty before I go to the Continent, which I can now hardly expect to do before the first week in September. This interval I trust would suffice unless you find that the other chapters stand in equal need.
"I entirely concur with your view regarding the necessity of care and of not grudging labor in a matter so important and so responsible as an endeavor to raise one of the most momentous controversies which has ever agitated human opinion,"
Again: "Thanks for your letter. I have been pretty hard at work, and have done a good deal, especially on V. Something yet remains. I must make inquiry about the law of excommunication.... I have made a very stupid classification, and have now amended it; instead of faith, discipline and practice, what I meant was the rule of faith, discipline, and the bearing of particular doctrines upon practice.
"I send back also I and II that you may see what I have done."
The work was successfully issued in the autumn of 1838, and passed rapidly through three editions. How it was received it would be interesting to inquire. While his friends applauded, even his opponents testified to the ability it displayed. On the authority of Lord Houghton, it is said that Sir Robert Peel, the young author's political leader, on receiving a copy as a gift from his follower, read it with scornful curiosity, and, throwing it on the floor, exclaimed with truly official horror: "With such a career before him, why should he write books? That young man will ruin his fine political career if he persists in writing trash like this." However, others gave the book a heartier reception. Crabb Robinson writes in his diary: "I went to Wordsworth this forenoon. He was ill in bed. I read Gladstone's book to him."
December 13, 1838, Baron Bunsen wrote: "Last night at eleven, when I came from the Duke, Gladstone's book was lying on my table, having come out at seven o'clock. It is a book of the time, a great event—the first book since Burke that goes to the bottom of the vital question; far above his party and his time. I sat up till after midnight, and this morning I continued until I had read the whole. Gladstone is the first man in England as to intellectual power, and he has heard higher tones than any one else in the land." And again to Dr. Arnold he writes in high praise of the book, but lamenting its author's entanglement in Tractarian traditions, adds: "His genius will soon free itself entirely and fly towards Heaven with its own wings."
Sir Henry Taylor wrote to the Poet Southey: "I am reading Gladstone's book, which I shall send you if he has not.... His party begin to think of him as the man who will one day be at their head and at the head of the government, and certainly no man of his standing has yet appeared who seems likely to stand in his way. Two wants, however, may lie across his political career—want of robust health and want of flexibility."
Cardinal Newman wrote: "Gladstone's book, as you see, is making a sensation." And again: "The Times is again at poor Gladstone. Really I feel as if I could do anything for him. I have not read his book, but its consequences speak for it. Poor fellow! it is so noble a thing."
Lord Macaulay, in the Edinburgh Review, April, 1839, in his well-known searching criticism, while paying high tribute to the author's talents and character, said: "We believe that we do him no more than justice when we say that his abilities and demeanor have obtained for him the respect and good will of all parties.... That a young politician should, in the intervals afforded by his Parliamentary avocations, have constructed and propounded, with much study and mental toil, an original theory, on a great problem in politics, is a circumstance which, abstracted from all considerations of the soundness or unsoundness of his opinions, must be considered as highly creditable to him. We certainly cannot wish that Mr. Gladstone's doctrine may become fashionable among public men. But we heartily wish that his laudable desire to penetrate beneath the surface of questions, and to arrive, by long and intent meditation, at the knowledge of great general laws, were much more fashionable than we at all expect it to become."