Clevedon | Sep. 29th.
My dear Dr. Tyndall,
I received your warm impromptu reply to my letter2 in due course, and was much pleased by the friendly – brotherly – feeling which pervaded it. I thought it probable that I should receive another note explaining the scheme of redemption, in which you believe, as you promised again to write to me when you found your mind in a suitable condition. However as no such note has come, and as you say that you will always be glad to hear from me, I thought I would just remind you of it.
Although I cannot subscribe to every sentiment of your warm-hearted note, I can most thoroughly sympathize with the general feeling, and the earnest aspirations, and the kind wishes expressed in it. If indeed we be both ‘born of the Spirit’3 as you evidently feel confidant is the case, I do feel deeply interested in knowing how such subjective similarity can coexist with such great dis-similarity in our objective faith.4 No doubt you have some positive belief, else you a sinner could not have that happiness in the contemplation of God, which you possess. No doubt too you seek for truth in this matter as in your more philosophical pursuits, seeking honestly to ascertain what it is that God has revealed – for certainly this subject lies far beyond the reach of our unaided reason.
Well I know, my dear friend, that all our conceptions of the sublime truths of religion must be extremely faulty, and my own theory is of course more or less incorrect.
I have been staying a while at Dr. Leeson’s5 country residence at Bonchurch;6 now I am here in Somersetshire: on Wednesday our session at St. Thomas’s Hosp. commences.
With Christian affection I remain | Most sincerely yours | J. H. Gladstone.
RI MS JT/1/TYP/1/404
LT Transcript Only
[1851]: the relationship of this letter to letters 0511 and 0513 between Gladstone and Tyndall dates this letter to 1851.
your … reply to my letter: letters 0513 (Tyndall’s reply) and 0511 (Gladstone’s letter).
born of the spirit: Gladstone is repeating Tyndall’s quotation from John 3:8.
great dissimilarity in our objective faith: one of the many indications in this letter that Gladstone recognised, as he did not in letter 0511, the extent of the differences between his faith and Tyndall’s.
Dr. Leeson’s: Henry Beaumont Leeson (1803–72), FRS 1849; physician and lecturer on chemistry and forensic medicine (1840–52) at St Thomas’s Hospital in London, where Gladstone was lecturer in chemistry.
Bonchurch: a village on the south coast of the Isle of Wight.
Please cite as “Tyndall0537,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on 28 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/tyndall/letters/Tyndall0537