We have traced the life and career of Alfred Deakin thus far to the eve of the inauguration of the Commonwealth and the beginning of the new century. From this point, a combination of health problems and other factors such as the extreme factionalism of the early Commonwealth Parliament would make him a less effective leader than his early career might have promised, although there were more triumphs for Liberalism to come. Through an alliance with Labor, the first two Deakin ministries produced an impressive list of social legislation, liberal in character, making Australia at its day among the most progressive societies in the world.

It is necessary now to leave the narrative mode temporarily, and to retrace some ground in a survey of two specific genres in Deakin's private writing, the ‘Gospels’ and what I have called the experience narratives, that attempts to place them in an appropriate context of Deakin's energetic literary activity. Considered together, they illustrate the evolution of Deakin's beliefs and concepts from his late teens, when he produced a precocious gospel ascribed to the Puritan moralist John Bunyan, to the eve of Federation, the hour of his greatest political triumph, when he was writing and thinking about Islam's ‘seal of the Prophets’, Mohammed.