BRANTWOOD, _14th July, 1879._

232. DEAR MR. MALLESON,--Sincere thanks for both your letters

and the proofs[159] sent. Your comment and conducting link, when needed,

will be of the greatest help and value, I am well assured, suggesting

what you know will be the probable feeling of your hearers, and the

point that will come into question.

Yes, certainly, that "His" in the fourth line was meant to imply that

eternal presence of Christ; as in another passage,[160] referring to

the Creation, "when His right hand strewed the snow on Lebanon, and

smoothed the slopes of Calvary," but in so far as we dwell on that

truth, "Hast thou seen _Me_, Philip, and not the Father?"[161] we are

not teaching the people what is specially the Gospel of _Christ_ as

having a distinct function--namely, to _serve_ the Father, and do the

Father's will. And in all His human relations to us, and commands to us,

it is as the Son of Man, not as the "power of God and wisdom of God,"

that He acts and speaks. Not as the Power; for _He_ must pray, like one

of us. Not as the Wisdom; for He must not know "if it be possible" His

prayer should be heard.

233. And in what I want to say of the third clause of His prayer (_His_,

not merely as His ordering, but His using), it is especially this

comparison between _His_ kingdom, and His Father's, that I want to see

the disciples guarded against. I believe very few, even of the most

earnest, using that petition, realize that it is the Father's--not the

Son's--kingdom, that they pray may come,--although the whole prayer is

foundational on that fact: "_For_ Thine is the kingdom, the power, and

the glory." And I fancy that the mind of the most faithful Christian is

quite led away from its proper hope, by dwelling on the reign--or the

coming again--of Christ; which, indeed, they are to look for, and

_watch_ for, but not to pray for. Their prayer is to be for the greater

kingdom to which He, risen and having all His enemies under His feet, is

to surrender _His_, "that God may be All in All."

And, though the greatest, it is that everlasting kingdom which the

poorest of us can advance. We cannot hasten Christ's coming. "Of the day

and hour, knoweth none." But the kingdom of God is as a grain of mustard

seed:--we can sow of it; it is as a foam-globe of leaven:--we can mingle

it; and its glory and its joy are that even the birds of the air can

lodge in the branches thereof.

Forgive me for getting back to my sparrows; but truly, in the present

state of England, the fowls of the air are the only creatures, tormented

and murdered as they are, that yet have here and there nests, and peace,

and joy in the Holy Ghost. And it would be well if many of us, in

reading that text, "The kingdom of God is not meat and drink," had even

got so far as to the understanding that it was at least _as much_, and

that until we had fed the hungry, there was no power in us to inspire

the unhappy.

Ever affectionately yours,

J. RUSKIN.

I will write my feeling about the pieces of the Life of Christ you have

sent me, in a private letter. I may say at once that I am sure it will

do much good, and will be upright and intelligible, which how few

religious writings are!

VIII.

[Greek: genêthêtô to thelêma sou hôs en ouranô, kaì epì gês.]

_Fiat voluntas tua sicut in caelo et in terra._

BRANTWOOD, _9th August, 1879._

234. I was reading the second chapter of Malachi this morning by chance,

and wondering how many clergymen ever read it, and took to heart the

"commandment for _them_."

For they are always ready enough to call themselves priests (though they

know themselves to be nothing of the sort) whenever there is any dignity

to be got out of the title; but, whenever there is any good, hot

scolding or unpleasant advice given them by the prophets, in that

self-assumed character of theirs, they are as ready to quit it as ever

Dionysus his lion-skin, when he finds the character of Herakles

inconvenient. "Ye have wearied the Lord with your words" (yes, and some

of His people, too, in your time): "yet ye say, Wherein have we wearied

Him? When ye say, Everyone that doeth evil is good in the sight of the

Lord, and He delighteth in them; or, Where is the God of judgment?"

How many, again and again I wonder, of the lively young ecclesiastics

supplied to the increasing demand of our west-ends of flourishing Cities

of the Plain, ever consider what sort of sin it is for which God (unless

they lay it to heart) will "curse their blessings, and spread dung upon

their faces," or have understood, even in the dimmest manner, what part

_they_ had taken, and were taking, in "corrupting the covenant of the

Lord with Levi, and causing many to stumble at the Law"?

235. Perhaps the most subtle and unconscious way which the religious

teachers upon whom the ends of the world are come, have done this, is in

never telling their people the meaning of the clause in the Lord's

Prayer, which, of all others, their most earnest hearers have oftenest

on their lips: "Thy will be done." They allow their people to use it as

if their Father's will were always to kill their babies, or do

something unpleasant to them, instead of explaining to them that the

first and intensest article of their Father's will was their own

sanctification, and following comfort and wealth; and that the one only

path to national prosperity and to domestic peace was to understand what

the will of the Lord was, and to do all they could to get it done.

Whereas one would think, by the tone of the eagerest preachers nowadays,

that they held their blessed office to be that, not of showing men how

to do their Father's will on earth, but how to get to heaven without

doing any of it either here or there!

236. I say, especially, the most eager preachers; for nearly the whole

Missionary body (with the hottest Evangelistic sect of the English

Church) is at this moment composed of men who think the Gospel they are

to carry to mend the world with, forsooth, is that, "If any man sin, he

hath an Advocate with the Father;" while I have never yet, in my own

experience, met either with a Missionary or a Town Bishop who so much as

professed himself "to understand what the will of the Lord" was, far

less to teach anybody else to do it; and for fifty preachers, yes, and

fifty hundreds whom I have heard proclaiming the Mediator of the New

Testament, that "they which were called might receive the promise of

eternal inheritance," I have never yet heard so much as _one_ heartily

proclaiming against all those "deceivers with vain words" (Eph. v. 6),

that "no covetous person which is an idolater hath _any_ inheritance in

the kingdom of Christ, or of God;" and on myself personally and publicly

challenging the Bishops of England generally, and by name the Bishop of

Manchester, to say whether usury was, or was not, according to the will

of God, I have received no answer from any one of them.[162]

_13th August._

237. I have allowed myself, in the beginning of this letter, to dwell on

the equivocal use of the word "Priest" in the English Church (see

Christopher Harvey, Grosart's edition, p. 38), because the assumption of

the mediatorial, in defect of the pastoral, office by the clergy fulfill

itself, naturally and always, in their pretending to absolve the sinner

from his punishment, instead of purging him from his sin; and

practically, in their general patronage and encouragement of all the

iniquity of the world, by steadily preaching away the penalties of it.

So that the great cities of the earth, which ought to be the places set

on its hills, with the temple of the Lord in the midst of them, to which

the tribes should go up,[163]--centers to the Kingdoms and Provinces of

Honor, Virtue, and the Knowledge of the law of God,--have become,

instead, loathsome centers of fornication and covetousness--the smoke of

their sin going up into the face of Heaven like the furnace of Sodom,

and the pollution of it rotting and raging through the bones and the

souls of the peasant people round them, as if they were each a volcano

whose ashes broke out in blains upon man and upon beast.[164]

And in the midst of them, their freshly-set-tip steeples ring the crowd

to a weekly prayer that the rest of their lives may be pure and holy,

while they have not the slightest intention of purifying, sanctifying,

or changing their lives in any the smallest particular; and their clergy

gather, each into himself, the curious dual power, and Janus-faced

majesty in mischief, of the prophet that prophesies falsely, and the

priest that bears rule by his means.

And the people love to have it so.

BRANTWOOD, _12th August._

I am very glad of your little note from Brighton. I thought it needless

to send the two letters there, which you will find at home; and they

pretty nearly end all _I_ want to say; for the remaining clauses of the

prayer touch on things too high for me. But I will send you one

concluding letter about them.

IX.

[Greek: ton arton êmôn ton epiousion dos hêmin sêmeron.]

_Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie._

BRANTWOOD, _19th August._

238. I retained the foregoing letter by me till now, lest you should

think it written in any haste or petulance; but it is every word of it

deliberate, though expressing the bitterness of twenty years of vain

sorrow and pleading concerning these things. Nor am I able to write,

otherwise, anything of the next following clause of the prayer;--for no

words could be burning enough to tell the evils which have come on the

world from men's using it thoughtlessly and blasphemously, praying God

to give them what they are deliberately resolved to steal. For all true

Christianity is known--as its Master was--in breaking of bread, and all

false Christianity in stealing it.

Let the clergyman only apply--with impartial and level sweep--to his

congregation the great pastoral order: "The man that will not work,

neither should he eat;" and be resolute in requiring each member of his

flock to tell him _what_--day by day--they do to earn their

dinners;--and he will find an entirely new view of life and its

sacraments open upon him and them.

239. For the man who is not--day by day--doing work which will earn his

dinner, must be stealing his dinner;[165] and the actual fact is that

the great mass of men, calling themselves Christians, do actually live

by robbing the poor of their bread, and by no other trade whatsoever:

and the simple examination of the mode of the produce and consumption of

European food--who digs for it, and who eats it--will prove that to any

honest human soul.

Nor is it possible for any Christian Church to exist but in pollutions

and hypocrisies beyond all words, until the virtues of a life moderate

in its self-indulgence, and wide in its offices of temporal ministry to

the poor, are insisted on as the normal conditions in which, only, the

prayer to God for the harvest of the earth is other than blasphemy.

In the second place. Since in the parable in Luke, the bread asked for

is shown to be also, and chiefly, the Holy Spirit (Luke xi. 13), and the

prayer, "Give us each day our daily bread," is, in its fullness, the

disciples', "Lord, evermore give us _this_ bread,"--the clergyman's

question to his whole flock, primarily literal: "Children, have ye here

any meat?" must ultimately be always the greater spiritual one:

"Children, have ye here any Holy Spirit?" or, "Have ye not heard yet

whether there _be_ any? and, instead of a Holy Ghost the Lord and Giver

of Life, do you only believe in an unholy mammon, Lord and Giver of

Death?"

The opposition between the two Lords has been, and will be as long as

the world lasts, absolute, irreconcilable, mortal; and the clergyman's

first message to his people of this day is--if he be faithful--"Choose

ye this day whom ye will serve."

Ever faithfully yours,

J. RUSKIN.

X.

[Greek: kai aphes hêmin ta opheilêmata hêmôn, ôs kai hêmeis aphiemen

tois opheiletais hêmôn.]

_Et dimitte nobis debita nostra, sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus

nostris._

BRANTWOOD, _3rd September._

240. DEAR MR. MALLESON,--I have been very long before trying to

say so much as a word about the sixth clause of the Pater; for whenever

I began thinking of it, I was stopped by the sorrowful sense of the

hopeless task you poor clergymen had, nowadays, in recommending and

teaching people to love their enemies, when their whole energies were

already devoted to swindling their friends.

But, in any days, past or now, the clause is one of such difficulty,

that, to understand it, means almost to know the love of God which

passeth knowledge.

But, at all events, it is surely the pastor's duty to prevent his flock

from _mis_understanding it; and above all things to keep them from

supposing that God's forgiveness is to be had simply for the asking, by

those who "willfully sin after they have received the knowledge of the

truth."

241. There is one very simple lesson also, needed especially by people

in circumstances of happy life, which I have never heard fully enforced

from the pulpit, and which is usually the more lost sight of, because

the fine and inaccurate word "trespasses" is so often used instead of

the single and accurate one "debts." Among people well educated and

happily circumstanced it may easily chance that long periods of their

lives pass without any such conscious sin as could, on any discovery or

memory of it, make them cry out, in truth and in pain,--"I have sinned

against the Lord." But scarcely an hour of their happy days can pass

over them without leaving--were their hearts open--some evidence written

there that they have "left undone the things that they ought to have

done," and giving them bitterer and heavier cause to cry, and cry

again--forever, in the pure words of their Master's prayer, "Dimitte

nobis _debita_ nostra."

In connection with the more accurate translation of "debts" rather than

"trespasses,"[166] it would surely be well to keep constantly in the

mind of complacent and inoffensive congregations that in Christ's own

prophecy of the manner of the last judgment, the condemnation is

pronounced only on the sins of omission: "I was hungry, and ye gave Me

no meat."

242. But, whatever the manner of sin, by offense or defect, which the

preacher fears in his people, surely he has of late been wholly remiss

in compelling their definite recognition of it, in its several and

personal particulars. Nothing in the various inconsistency of human

nature is more grotesque than its willingness to be taxed with any

quantity of sins in the gross, and its resentment at the insinuation of

having committed the smallest parcel of them in detail. And the English

Liturgy, evidently drawn up with the amiable intention of making

religion as pleasant as possible, to a people desirous of saving their

souls with no great degree of personal inconvenience, is perhaps in no

point more unwholesomely lenient than in its concession to the popular

conviction that we may obtain the present advantage, and escape the

future punishment, of any sort of iniquity, by dexterously concealing

the manner of it from man, and triumphantly confessing the quantity of

it to God.

243. Finally, whatever the advantages and decencies of a form of prayer,

and how wide soever the scope given to its collected passages, it cannot

be at one and the same time fitted for the use of a body of well-taught

and experienced Christians, such as should join the services of a Church

nineteen centuries old,--and adapted to the needs of the timid sinner

who has that day first entered its porch, or of the remorseful publican

who has only recently become sensible of his call to a pew.

And surely our clergy need not be surprised at the daily increasing

distrust in the public mind of the efficacy of Prayer, after having so

long insisted on their offering supplication, _at least_ every Sunday

morning at eleven o'clock, that the rest of their lives hereafter might

be pure and holy, leaving them conscious all the while that they would

be similarly required to inform the Lord next week, at the same hour,

that "there was no health in them!"

Among, the much-rebuked follies and abuses of so-called "Ritualism,"

none that I have heard of are indeed so dangerously and darkly "Ritual"

as this piece of authorized mockery of the most solemn act of human

life, and only entrance of eternal life--Repentance.

Believe me, dear Mr. Malleson,

Ever faithfully and respectfully yours,

J. RUSKIN.

XI.

[Greek: kai mê eisenenkês hêmas eis peirasmon, alla rhysai hêmas apo tou

ponêrou; hoti sou estin hê basileia, kai hê dynamis, kai hê doxa, eis

tous aiônas. Amên.]

_Et ne nos inducas in tentationem; sed libera nos a malo; quia tuum est

regnum, potentia, et gloria in sceeula sceculorum. Amen._

BRANTWOOD, _14th September, 1879._

244. DEAR MR. MALLESON,--The gentle words in your last letter

referring to the difference between yourself and me in the degree of

hope with which you could regard what could not but appear to the

general mind Utopian in designs for the action of the Christian Church,

surely might best be answered by appeal to the consistent tone of the

prayer we have been examining.

Is not every one of its petitions for a perfect state? and is not this

last clause of it, of which we are to think to-day--if fully

understood--a petition not only for the restoration of Paradise, but of

Paradise in which there shall be no deadly fruit, or, at least, no

tempter to praise it? And may we not admit that it is probably only for

want of the earnest use of this last petition that not only the

preceding ones have become formal with us, but that the private and

simply restricted prayer for the little things we each severally desire,

has become by some Christians dreaded and unused, and by others used

faithlessly, and therefore with disappointment?

245. And is it not for want of this special directness and simplicity of

petition, and of the sense of its acceptance, that the whole nature of

prayer has been doubted in our hearts, and disgraced by our lips; that

we are afraid to ask God's blessing on the earth, when the scientific

people tell us He has made previous arrangements to curse it; and that,

instead of obeying, without fear or debate, the plain order, "Ask, and

ye shall receive, that your joy may be full," we sorrowfully sink back

into the apology for prayer, that "it is a wholesome exercise, even when

fruitless," and that we ought piously always to suppose that the text

really means no more than "Ask, and ye shall _not_ receive, that your

joy may be _empty_"?

Supposing we were first all of us quite sure that we _had_ prayed,

honestly, the prayer against temptation, and that we would thankfully be

refused anything we had set our hearts upon, if indeed God saw that it

would lead us into evil, might we not have confidence afterwards that He

in whose hand the king's heart is, as the rivers of water, would turn

our tiny little hearts also in the way that they should go, and that

_then_ the special prayer for the joys He taught them to seek would be

answered to the last syllable, and to overflowing?

246. It is surely scarcely necessary to say, farther, what the holy

teachers of all nations have invariably concurred in showing,--that

faithful prayer implies always correlative exertion; and that no man can

ask honestly or hopefully to be delivered from temptation, unless he has

himself honestly and firmly determined to do the best he can to keep out

of it. But, in modern days, the first aim of all Christian parents is to

place their children in circumstances where the temptations (which they

are apt to call "opportunities") may be as great and as many as

possible; where the sight and promise of "all these things" in Satan's

gift may be brilliantly near; and where the act of "falling down to

worship me" may be partly concealed by the shelter, and partly excused,

as involuntary, by the pressure, of the concurrent crowd.

In what respect the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of _them_,

differ from the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, which are God's

forever, is seldom, as far as I have heard, intelligibly explained from

the pulpit; and still less the irreconcilable hostility between the two

royalties and realms asserted in its sternness of decision.

Whether it be, indeed, Utopian to believe that the kingdom we are taught

to pray for _may_ come--verily come--for the asking, it is surely not

for man to judge; but it is at least at his choice to resolve that he

will no longer render obedience, nor ascribe glory and power, to the

Devil. If he cannot find strength in himself to advance towards Heaven,

he may at least say to the power of Hell, "Get thee behind me;" and

staying himself on the testimony of Him who saith, "Surely I come

quickly," ratify his happy prayer with the faithful "Amen, even so,

come, Lord Jesus."

Ever, my dear friend,

Believe me affectionately and gratefully yours,

J. RUSKIN.

NOTE.--The following further letters from Mr. Ruskin to Mr.

Malleson were printed in "Letters to the Clergy."

_Sept. 13th._

247. DEAR MR. MALLESON,--I am so very grateful for your

proposal to edit the letters without any further reference to me. I

think that will be exactly the right way; and I believe I can put you at

real ease in the doing of it, by explaining, as I can in very few words,

the kind of _carte blanche_ I should rejoicingly give you.

Interrupted to-day! more to-morrow with, I hope, the last letter.

J. RUSKIN.

_14th Sept._

I've nearly done the last letter, but will keep it till to-morrow,

rather than finish hurriedly, for the first post. Your nice little note

has just come; and I can only say that you cannot please me better than

by acting with perfect freedom in all ways; and that I only want to see,

or reply to, what you wish me for the matter's sake. And surely there is

no occasion for any thought or waste of type about _me_ personally,

except only to express your knowledge of my real desire for the health

and power of the Church, More than this praise you must not give me; for

I have learned almost everything, I may say, that I know, by my errors.

I am affectionately yours,

J. RUSKIN.

_17th Oct._

248. I am thankful to see that the letters read clearly and easily, and

contain all that was in my mind to get said; and nothing can possibly be

more right in every way than the printing and binding,[167] nor more

courteous and firm than your preface.

Yes, there _will_ be a chasm to cross--a _tauriformis

Aufidus_[168]--greater than Rubicon, and the roar of it for many a year

has been heard in the distance, through the gathering fog on the earth,

more loudly.

The River of spiritual Death to this world, and entrance to Purgatory in

the other, come down to us.

When will the feet of the Priests be dipped in the still brim of the

water? Jordan overflows his banks already.

* * * * *

When you have put your large edition, with its correspondence, into

press, I should like to read the sheets as they are issued; and put

merely letters of reference to be taken up in a short "Epilogue." But I

don't want to do or say anything more till you have all in perfect

readiness for publication. I should merely add my reference letters in

the margin, and the shortest possible notes at the end.

J. RUSKIN.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 153: These letters were written by Mr. Ruskin to the Rev. F.

A. Malleson, Vicar of Broughton-in-Furness, by whom they were read,

after a few introductory remarks, before the Furness Clerical Society.

They originated, as may be gathered from the first of them, in a request

by Mr. Malleson that Mr. Ruskin would address the society on the

subject. They have been printed in three forms:--(1) in a small pamphlet

(October 1879) "for private circulation only," among the members of the

Furness and one or two other clerical societies; (2) in the

_Contemporary Review_ of December 1879; (3) in a volume (Strahan & Co.,

1880) entitled "The Lord's Prayer and the Church," and containing also

various replies to Mr, Ruskin's letters, and an epilogue by way of

rejoinder by Mr. Ruskin himself. This volume was edited by Mr. Malleson,

with whose concurrence Mr. Ruskin's contributions to it are reprinted

here.--ED.]

[Footnote 154: Called Letter II. in the Furness pamphlet,--where a note

is added to the effect that there was a previous unpublished

letter.--ED.]

[Footnote 155: In answer to the proposal of discussing the subject

during a mountain walk.--F. A. M.]

[Footnote 156: Art, xi.]

[Footnote 157: Homily xi. of the Second Table.]

[Footnote 158: "_Arrows of the Chace._"]

[Footnote 159: See postscript to this letter.--ED.]

[Footnote 160: Referring to the closing sentence of the third paragraph

of the fifth 'ter, which _seemed_ to express what I felt could not be

Mr. Ruskin's full meaning, I pointed out to him the following sentence

in "Modern Painters:"--

"When, in the desert, Jesus was girding Himself for the work of life,

angels of life came and ministered unto Him; now, in the fair world,

when He is girding Himself for the work of death, the ministrants come

to Him from the grave; but from the grave conquered. One from the tomb

under Abarim, which _His_ own hand had sealed long ago; the other from

the rest which He had entered without seeing corruption."

On this I made a remark somewhat to the following effect: that I felt

sure Mr. Ruskin regarded the loving work of the Father and of the Son to

be _equal_ in the forgiveness of sins and redemption of mankind; that

what is done by the Father is in reality done also by the Son; and that

it is by a mere accommodation to human infirmity of understanding that

the doctrine of the Trinity is revealed to us in language, inadequate

indeed to convey divine truths, but still the only language possible;

and I asked whether some such feeling was not present in his mind when

he used the pronoun "His," in the above passage from "Modern Painters,"

of the Son, where it would be usually understood of the Father; and as a

corollary, whether, in the letter, he does not himself fully recognize

the fact of the redemption of the world by the loving self-sacrifice of

the Son in entire concurrence with the equally loving will of the

Father. This, as well as I can recollect, is the origin of the passage

in the second paragraph in the seventh letter.--F. A. M.]

[Footnote 161: The "Letters to the Clergy" adds note: "Yet hast thou not

known Me, Philip? he that hath seen Me hath seen the Father" (John xiv.

9).--ED.]

[Footnote 162: _Fors Clavigera_, Letter lxxxii. (See _ante_, §

148.--ED.)]

[Footnote 163: "Bibliotheca Pastorum," Vol. i. "The Economist of

Xenophon," Pref., p. xii--ED.]

[Footnote 164: See _ante_, p. 319, § 154; p. 330, § 166.--ED.]

[Footnote 165: "_Arrows of the Chace._"]

[Footnote 166: "_Arrows of the Chace._"]

[Footnote 167: Referring to the first edition, printed for private

circulation.--F. A. M.]

[Footnote 168:

"Sic tauriformis volvitur Aufidus,

Qua regna Dauni praefluit Appuli

Quum saevit, horrendamque cultis

Diluviem meditatur agris."

--HOR., _Carm._, iv. 14.]

EPILOGUE.

BRANTWOOD, CONISTON, _June 1880._

249. MY DEAR MALLESON,--I have glanced at the proofs you send;

and _can_ do no more than glance, even if it seemed to me desirable that

I should do more,--which, after said glance, it does in no wise. Let me

remind you of what it is absolutely necessary that the readers of the

book should clearly understand--that I wrote these Letters at your

request, to be read and discussed at the meeting of a private society of

clergymen. I declined then to be present at the discussion, and I

decline still. You afterwards asked leave to print the Letters, to which

I replied that they were yours, for whatever use you saw good to make of

them: afterwards your plans expanded, while my own notion remained

precisely what it had been--that the discussion should have been

private, and kept within the limits of the society, and that its

conclusions, if any, should have been announced in a few pages of clear

print, for the parishioners' exclusive reading.

I am, of course, flattered by the wider course you have obtained for the

Letters, but am not in the slightest degree interested by the debate

upon them, nor by any religious debates whatever, undertaken without

serious conviction that there is a jot wrong in matters as they are, or

serious resolution to make them a tittle better. Which, so far as I can

read the minds of your correspondents, appears to me the substantial

state of them.[169]

250. One thing I cannot pass without protest--the quantity of talk about

the writer of the Letters. What I am, or am not, is of no moment

whatever to the matters in hand. I observe with comfort, or at least

with complacency, that on the strength of a couple of hours' talk, at a

time when I was thinking chiefly of the weatherings of slate you were

good enough to show me above Goat's Water, you would have ventured to

baptize me in the little lake--as not a goat, but a sheep. The best I

can be sure of, myself, is that I am no wolf, and have never aspired to

the dignity even of a Dog of the Lord.

You told me, if I remember rightly, that one of the members of the

original meeting denounced me as an arch-heretic[170]--meaning,

doubtless, an arch-pagan; for a heretic, or sect-maker, is of all terms

of reproach the last that can be used of me. And I think he should have

been answered that it was precisely as an arch-pagan that I ventured to

request a more intelligible and more unanimous account of the Christian

Gospel from its preachers.

251. If anything in the Letters offended those of you who hold me a

brother, surely it had been best to tell me between ourselves, or to

tell it to the Church, or to let me be Anathema Maranatha in peace,--in

any case, I must at present so abide, correcting only the mistakes about

myself which have led to graver ones about the things I wanted to speak

of.[171]

The most singular one, perhaps, in all the Letters is that of Mr.

Wanstall's, that I do not attach enough weight to antiquity. I have only

come upon the sentence to-day (29th May), but my reply to it is partly

written already, with reference to the wishes of some other of your

correspondents to know more of my reasons for finding fault with the

English Liturgy.

252. If people are taught to use the Liturgy rightly and reverently, it

will bring them all good; and for some thirty years of my life I used to

read it always through to my servant and myself, if we had no Protestant

church to go to, in Alpine or Italian villages. One can always tacitly

pray of it what one wants, and let the rest pass. But, as I have grown

older, and watched the decline in the Christian faith of all nations, I

have got more and more suspicious of the effect of this particular form

of words on the truthfulness of the English mind (now fast becoming a

salt which has lost his savor, and is fit only to be trodden underfoot

of men). And during the last ten years, in which my position at Oxford

has compelled me to examine what authority there was for the code of

prayer, of which the University is now so ashamed that it no more dares

compel its youths so much as to hear, much less to utter it, I got

necessarily into the habit of always looking to the original forms of

the prayers of the fully developed Christian Church. Nor did I think it

a mere chance which placed in my own possession a manuscript of the

perfect Church service of the thirteenth century, written by the monks

of the Sainte Chapelle for St. Louis; together with one of the same

date, written in England, probably for the Diocese of Lincoln; adding

some of the Collects, in which it corresponds with St. Louis's, and the

Latin hymns so much beloved by Dante, with the appointed music for them.

253. And my wonder has been greater every hour, since I examined closely

the text of these and other early books, that in any state of declining,

or captive, energy, the Church of England should have contented itself

with a service which cast out, from beginning to end, all these

intensely spiritual and passionate utterances of chanted prayer (the

whole body, that is to say, of the authentic _Christian_ Psalms), and in

adopting what it timidly preserved of the Collects, mangled or blunted

them down to the exact degree which would make them either

unintelligible or inoffensive--so vague that everybody might use them,

or so pointless that nobody could be offended by them. For a special

instance: The prayer for "our bishops and curates, and all congregations

committed to their charge," is, in the Lincoln Service-book, "for our

bishop, and all congregations committed to _his_ charge." The change

from singular to plural seems a slight one. But it suffices to take the

eyes of the people off their own bishop into infinite space; to change a

prayer which was intended to be uttered in personal anxiety and

affection, into one for the general good of the Church, of which nobody

could judge, and for which nobody would particularly care; and, finally,

to change a prayer to which the answer, if given, would be visible, into

one of which nobody could tell whether it were answered or not.

254. In the Collects, the change, though verbally slight, is thus

tremendous in issue. But in the Litany--word and thought go all wild

together. The first prayer of the Litany in the Lincoln Service-book is

for the Pope and all ranks beneath him, implying a very noteworthy piece

of theology--that the Pope might err in religious matters, and that the

prayer of the humblest servant of God would be useful to him:--"Ut

Dompnum Apostolicum, et omnes gradus ecclesie in sancta religione

conservare digneris." Meaning that whatever errors particular persons

might, and must, fall into, they prayed God to keep the Pope right, and

the collective testimony and conduct of the ranks below him. Then

follows the prayer for their own bishop and _his_ flock--then for the

king and the princes (chief lords), that they (not all nations) might be

kept in concord--and then for _our_ bishops and abbots,--the Church of

England proper; every one of these petitions being direct, limited, and

personally heartfelt;--and then this lovely one for themselves:--

"Ut obsequium servitutis nostre rationabile facias."--"That Thou wouldst

make the obedience of our service reasonable" ("which is your reasonable

service").

This glorious prayer is, I believe, accurately an "early English" one.

It is not in the St. Louis Litany, nor in a later elaborate French

fourteenth century one; but I find it softened in an Italian MS. of the

fifteenth century into "ut nosmet ipsos in tuo sancto servitio

confortare et conservare digneris,"--"that Thou wouldst deign to keep

and comfort us ourselves in Thy sacred service" (the comfort, observe,

being here asked for whether reasonable or not!); and in the best and

fullest French service-book I have, printed at Rouen in 1520, it

becomes, "ut congregationes omnium sanctorum in tuo sancto servitio

conservare digneris;" while victory as well as concord is asked for the

king and the princes,--thus leading the way to that for our own Queen's

victory over all her enemies, a prayer which might now be advisedly

altered into one that she--and in her, the monarchy of England--might

find more fidelity in their friends.

255. I give one more example of the corruption of our Prayer-Book, with

reference to the objections taken by some of your correspondents to the

distinction implied in my Letters between the Persons of the Father and

the Christ.

The "Memoria de Sancta Trinitate," in the St. Louis service-book, runs

thus:--

"Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, qui dedisti famulis tuis in confessione

vere fidei eterne Trinitatis gloriam agnoscere, et in potentia

majestatis adorare unitatem, quesumus ut ejus fidei firmitate ab omnibus

semper muniemur adversis. Qui vivis et regnas Deus, per omnia secula

seculorum. Amen."

"Almighty and everlasting God, who has given to Thy servants, in

confession of true faith to recognize the glory of the Eternal Trinity,

and in the power of Majesty to pray to the Unity; we ask that by the

firmness of that faith we may be always defended from all adverse

things, who livest and reignest God through all ages. Amen."

256. Turning to our Collect, we find we have first slipped in the word

"us" before "Thy servants," and by that little insertion have slipped in

the squire and his jockey, and the public-house landlord--and anyone

else who may chance to have been coaxed, swept, or threatened into

Church on Trinity Sunday, and required the entire company of them to

profess themselves servants of God, and believers in the mystery of the

Trinity. And we think we have done God a service!

"Grace." Not a word about grace in the original. You don't believe by

having grace, but by having wit.

"To acknowledge." "Agnosco" is to recognize, not to acknowledge. To

_see_ that there are three lights in a chandelier is a great deal more

than to acknowledge that they are there.

"To worship." "Adorare" is to pray to, not to worship. You may worship a

mere magistrate; but you _pray_ to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

The last sentence in the English is too horribly mutilated to be dealt

with in any patience. The meaning of the great old collect is that by

the shield of that faith we may quench all the fiery darts of the devil.

The English prayer means, if it means anything, "Please keep us in our

faith without our taking any trouble; and, besides, please don't let us

lose our money, nor catch cold."

"Who livest and reignest." Right; but how many of any extant or instant

congregations understand what the two words mean? That God is a living

God, not a dead Law; and that He is a reigning God, putting wrong things

to rights, and that, sooner or later, with a strong hand and a rod of

iron; and not at all with a soft sponge and warm water, washing

everybody as clean as a baby every Sunday morning, whatever dirty work

they may have been about all the week.

257. On which latter supposition your modern Liturgy, in so far as it

has supplemented instead of corrected the old one, has entirely modeled

itself,--producing in its first address to the congregation before the

Almighty precisely the faultfulest and foolishest piece of English

language that I know in the whole compass of English or American

literature. In the seventeen lines of it (as printed in my

old-fashioned, large-print Prayer-Book), there are seven times over two

words for one idea.

1. Acknowledge and confess.

2. Sins and wickedness.

3. Dissemble nor cloke.

4. Goodness and mercy.

5. Assemble and meet.

6. Requisite and necessary.

7. Pray and beseech.

There is, indeed, a shade of difference in some of these ideas for a

good scholar, none for a general congregation;[172] and what difference

they can guess at merely muddles their heads: to acknowledge sin is

indeed different from confessing it, but it cannot be done at a minute's

notice; and goodness is a different thing from mercy, but it is by no

means God's infinite goodness that forgives our badness, but that judges

it.

258. "The faultfulest," I said, "and the foolishest." After using

fourteen words where seven would have done, what is it that the whole

speech gets said with its much speaking? This Morning Service of all

England begins with the assertion that the Scripture moveth us in sundry

places to confess our sins before God. _Does_ it so? Have your

congregations ever been referred to those sundry places? Or do they take

the assertion on trust, or remain under the impression that, unless with

the advantage of their own candor, God must remain ill-informed on the

subject of their sins?

"That we should not dissemble nor cloke them." _Can_ we then? Are these

grown-up congregations of the enlightened English Church in the

nineteenth century still so young in their nurseries that the "Thou,

God, seest me" is still not believed by them if they get under the bed?

259. Let us look up the sundry moving passages referred to.

(I suppose myself a simple lamb of the flock, and only able to use my

English Bible.)

I find in my concordance (confess and confession together) forty-two

occurrences of the word. Sixteen of these, including John's confession

that he was not the Christ, and the confession of the faithful fathers

that they were pilgrims on the earth, do indeed move us strongly to

confess Christ before men. Have you ever taught your congregations what

that confession means? They are ready enough to confess Him in church,

that is to say, in their own private synagogue. Will they in

Parliament? Will they in a ballroom? Will they in a shop? Sixteen of the

texts are to enforce their doing _that_.

The most important one (1 Tim. vi. 13) refers to Christ's own good

confession, which I suppose was not of His sins, but of His obedience.

How many of your congregations can make any such kind of confession, or

wish to make it?

The eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth (1 Kings viii. 33, 2 Chron.

vi. 26, Heb. xiii. 15) speak of confessing thankfully that God is God

(and not a putrid plasma nor a theory of development), and the

twenty-first (Job xl. 14) speaks of God's own confession, that no doubt

we are the people, and that wisdom shall die with us, and on what

conditions He will make it.

260. There remains twenty-one texts which do speak of the confession of

our sins--very moving ones indeed--and Heaven grant that some day the

British public may be moved by them.

(1.) The first is Lev. v. 5, "He shall confess that he hath sinned _in

that thing_." And if you can get any soul of your congregation to say he

has sinned in _any_thing, he may do it in two words for one if he likes,

and it will yet be good liturgy.

(2.) The second is indeed general--Lev. xvi. 21: the command that the

whole nation should afflict its soul on the great day of atonement once

a year. The Church of England, I believe, enjoins no such unpleasant

ceremony. Her festivals are passed by her people often indeed in the

extinction of their souls, but by no means in their intentional

affliction.

(3, 4, 5.) The third, fourth, and fifth (Lev. xxvi. 40, Numb. v. 7,

Nehem. i. 6) refer all to national humiliation for definite idolatry,

accompanied with an entire abandonment of that idolatry, and of

idolatrous persons. How soon _that_ form of confession is likely to find

a place in the English congregations the defenses of their main idol,

mammon, in the vilest and cruelest shape of it--usury--with which this

book has been defiled, show very sufficiently.

261. (6.) The sixth is Psalm xxxii. 5--virtually the whole of that

psalm, which does, indeed, entirely refer to the greater confession,

once for all opening the heart to God, which can be by no means done

fifty-two times a year, and which, once done, puts men into a state in

which they will never again say there is no health in them; nor that

their hearts are desperately wicked; but will obey forever the instantly

following order, "Rejoice in the Lord, ye righteous, and shout for joy,

all ye that are true of heart."

(7.) The seventh (Acts xxiv. 14) is the one confession in which I can

myself share:--"After the way which they call heresy, so worship I the

Lord God of my fathers."

(8.) The eighth (James v. 16) tells us to confess our faults--not to

God, but "one to another"--a practice not favored by English

catechumens--(by the way, what _do_ you all mean by "auricular"

confession--confession that can be heard? and is the Protestant

pleasanter form one that can't be?)

(9.) The ninth is that passage of St. John (i. 9), the favorite

evangelical text, which is read and preached by thousands of false

preachers every day, without once going on to read its great companion,

"Beloved, if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and

knoweth all things; but if our heart condemn us _not_, then have we

confidence toward God." Make your people understand the second text, and

they will understand the first. At present you leave them understanding

neither.

262. And the entire body of the remaining texts is summed in Joshua vii.

19 and Ezra x. 11, in which, whether it be Achan, with his Babylonish

garment, or the people of Israel, with their Babylonish lusts, the

meaning of confession is simply what it is to every brave boy, girl,

man, and woman, who knows the meaning of the word "honor" before God or

man--namely, to say what they have done wrong, and to take the

punishment of it (not to get it blanched over by any means), and to do

it no more--which is so far from being a tone of mind generally enforced

either by the English, or any other extant Liturgy, that, though all my

maids are exceedingly pious, and insist on the privilege of going to

church as a quite inviolable one, I think it a scarcely to be hoped for

crown and consummation of virtue in them that they should tell me when

they have broken a plate; and I should expect to be met only with looks

of indignation and astonishment if I ventured to ask one of them how she

had spent her Sunday afternoon.

"Without courage," said Sir Walter Scott, "there is no truth; and

without truth there is no virtue." The sentence would have been itself

more true if Sir Walter had written "candor" for "truth," for it is

possible to be true in insolence, or true in cruelty. But in looking

back from the ridges of the Hill Difficulty in my own past life, and in

all the vision that has been given me of the wanderings in the ways of

others--this, of all principles, has become to me surest--that the first

virtue to be required of man is frankness of heart and lip: and I

believe that every youth of sense and honor, putting himself to faithful

question, would feel that he had the devil for confessor, if he had not

his father or his friend.

263. That a clergyman should ever be so truly the friend of his

parishioners as to deserve their confidence from childhood upwards, may

be flouted as a sentimental ideal; but he is assuredly only their enemy

in showing his Lutheran detestation of the sale of indulgences by

broadcasting these gratis from his pulpit.

The inconvenience and unpleasantness of a catechism concerning itself

with the personal practice as well as the general theory of duty, are

indeed perfectly conceivable by me: yet I am not convinced that such

manner of catechism would therefore be less medicinal; and during the

past ten years it has often been matter of amazed thought with me, while

our President at Corpus read prayers to the chapel benches, what might

by this time have been the effect on the learning as well as the creed

of the University, if, forty years ago, our stern old Dean Gaisford, of

the House of Christ, instead of sending us to chapel as to the house of

correction, when we missed a lecture, had inquired, before he allowed us

to come to chapel at all, whether we were gamblers, harlot-mongers, or

in concealed and selfish debt.

264. I observe with extreme surprise in the preceding letters the

unconsciousness of some of your correspondents, that there ever was such

a thing as discipline in the Christian Church. Indeed, the last

wholesome instance of it I can remember was when my own great-great

uncle Maitland lifted Lady ---- from his altar-rails, and led her back to

her seat before the congregation, when she offered to take the

Sacrament, being at enmity with her son.[173] But I believe a few hours

honestly spent by any clergyman on his Church history would show him

that the Church's confidence in her prayer has been always exactly

proportionate to the strictness of her discipline; that her present

fright at being caught praying by a chemist or an electrician, results

mainly from her having allowed her twos and threes gathered in the name

of Christ to become sixes and sevens gathered in the name of Belial; and

that therefore her now needfulest duty is to explain to her stammering

votaries, extremely doubtful as they are of the effect of their

supplications either on politics or the weather, that although Elijah

was a man subject to like passions as we are, he had them better under

command; and that while the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man

availeth much, the formal and lukewarm one of an iniquitous man

availeth--much the other way.

Such an instruction, coupled with due explanation of the nature of

righteousness and iniquity, directed mainly to those who have the power

of both in their own hands, being makers of law, and holders of

property, would, without any further debate, bring about a very singular

change in the position and respectability of English clergymen.

265. How far they may at present be considered as merely the Squire's

left hand, bound to know nothing of what he is doing with his right, it

is for their own consciences to determine.

For instance, a friend wrote to me the other day, "Will you not come

here? You will see a noble duke destroying a village as old as the

Conquest, and driving out dozens of families whose names are in Domesday

Book, because, owing to the neglect of his ancestors and rackrenting for

a hundred years, the place has fallen out of repair, and the people are

poor, and may become paupers. A local paper ventured to tell the truth.

The duke's agent called on the editor, and threatened him with

destruction if he did not hold his tongue." The noble duke, doubtless,

has proper Protestant horror of auricular confession. But suppose,

instead of the local editor, the local parson had ventured to tell the

truth from his pulpit, and even to intimate to his Grace that he might

no longer receive the Body and Blood of the Lord at the altar of that

parish! The parson would scarcely--in these days--have been therefore

made bonfire of, and had a pretty martyr's memorial by Mr. Scott's

pupils; but he would have lighted a goodly light, nevertheless, in this

England of ours, whose pettifogging piety has now neither the courage to

deny a duke's grace in its church, nor to declare Christ's in its

Parliament.

266. Lastly. Several of your contributors, I observe, have rashly dipped

their feet in the brim of the water of that raging question of Usury;

and I cannot but express my extreme regret that you should yourself have

yielded to the temptation of expressing opinions which you have had no

leisure either to sound or to test. My assertion, however, that the

rich lived mainly by robbing the poor, referred not to Usury, but to

Rent; and the facts respecting both these methods of extortion are

perfectly and indubitably ascertainable by any person who himself wishes

to ascertain them, and is able to take the necessary time and pains. I

see no sign, throughout the whole of these letters, of any wish

whatever, on the part of one of their writers, to ascertain the facts,

but only to defend practices which they hold to be convenient in the

world, and are afraid to blame in their congregations. Of the

presumption with which several of the writers utter their notions on the

subject, I do not think it would be right to speak farther, in an

epilogue to which there is no reply, in the terms which otherwise would

have been deserved. In their bearing on other topics, let me earnestly

thank you (so far as my own feelings may be permitted voice in the

matter) for the attention with which you have examined, and the courage

with which you have ratified, or at least endured, letters which

could not but bear at first the aspect of being written in a

hostile--sometimes even in a mocking spirit. That aspect is untrue, nor

am I answerable for it: the things of which I had to speak could not be

shortly described but in terms which might sound satirical; for all

error, if frankly shown, is precisely most ridiculous when it is most

dangerous, and I have written no word which is not chosen as the

exactest for its occasion, whether it move sigh or smile. In my earlier

days I wrote much with the desire to please, and the hope of influencing

the reader. As I grow older and older, I recognize the truth of the

Preacher's saying, "Desire shall fail, and the mourners go about the

streets;" and I content myself with saying, to whoso it may concern,

that the thing is verily thus, whether they will hear or whether they

will forbear. No man more than I has ever loved the places where God's

honor dwells, or yielded truer allegiance to the teaching of His evident

servants. No man at this time grieves more for the danger of the Church

which supposes him her enemy, while she whispers procrastinating _pax

vobiscum_ in answer to the spurious kiss of those who would fain toll

curfew over the last fires of English faith, and watch the sparrow find

nest where she may lay her young, around the altars of the Lord.

Ever affectionately yours,

J. RUSKIN.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 169: The following extracts from letters of Mr. Ruskin to Mr.

Malleson were printed in the "Letters to the Clergy":--

"_14th May_, 1880.--My dear Malleson, ... I had never seen _yours_ at

all when I wrote last. I fell first on ----, whom I read with some

attention, and commented on with little favor; went on to the next, and

remained content with that taste till I had done my Scott (_Nineteenth

Century_).

"I have this morning been reading your own, on which I very earnestly

congratulate you. God knows it is not because they are friendly or

complimentary, but because you _do_ see what I mean; and people hardly

ever do; and I think it needs very considerable power and feeling to

forgive and understand as you do. You have said everything I want to

say, and much more, except on the one point of excommunication, which

will be the chief, almost the only, subject of my final note."

"_16th May._--Yes, the omission of the 'Mr.' meant much change in all my

feelings towards you and estimates of you; for which change, believe me,

I am more glad and thankful than I can well tell you.

"J. RUSKIN."]

[Footnote 170: Only a heretic!--F. A. M.]

[Footnote 171: I may perhaps be pardoned for vindicating-at least my

arithmetic, which, with Bishop Colenso, I rather pride myself upon. One

of your correspondents greatly doubts my having heard five thousand

asserters of evangelical principles (Catholic-absolvent or

Protestant-detergent are virtually the same). I am now sixty years old,

and for forty-five of them was in church at least once on the

Sunday,--say once a month also in afternoons,--and you have above three

thousand church services. When I am abroad I am often in half-a-dozen

churches in the course of a single day, and never lose a chance of

listening to anything that is going on. Add the conversations pursued,

not unearnestly, with every sort of reverend person I can get to talk to

me--from the Bishop of Strasburg (as good a specimen of a town bishop as

I have known), with whom I was studying ecstatic paintings in the year

1850--down to the simplest traveling tinker inclined Gospelwards, whom I

perceive to be sincere, and your correspondent will perceive that my

rapid numerical expression must be far beneath the truth. He subjoins

his more rational doubt of my acquaintance with many town missionaries;

to which I can only answer, that as I do not live in town, nor set up

for a missionary myself, my spiritual advantages have certainly not been

great in that direction. I simply assert that of the few I have

known,--beginning with Mr. Spurgeon, under whom I sat with much

edification for a year or two,--I have not known any such teaching as I

speak of.]

[Footnote 172: The only explanation ever offered for this exuberant

wordiness is that if worshipers did not understand one term they would

the other, and in some cases, in the Exhortation and elsewhere, one word

is of Latin and the other of Saxon derivation.[1] But this is surely a

very feeble excuse for bad composition. Of a very different kind is that

beautiful climax which is reached in the three admirably chosen pairs of

words in the Prayer for the Parliament, "peace and happiness, truth and

justice, religion and piety."--F. A. M.

(Note 1: The repetition of synonymous terms is of very frequent

occurrence in sixteenth century writing, as "for ever and aye," "Time

and the hour run through the roughest day" (_Macbeth_, i. 3).)]

[Footnote 173: In some of the country districts of Scotland the right of

the Church to interfere with the lives of private individuals is still

exercised. Only two years ago, a wealthy gentleman farmer was rebuked by

the "Kirk Session" of the Dissenting Church to which he belonged, for

infidelity to his wife.

At the Scottish half-yearly Communion the ceremony of "fencing the

tables" used to be observed; that is, turning away all those whose lives

were supposed to have made them unfit to receive the Sacrament.]

THE NATURE AND AUTHORITY OF MIRACLE.[174]

267. Every age of the world has its own special sins, and special

simplicities; and among our own most particular humors in both kinds

must be reckoned the tendency to parade our discoveries of the laws of

Nature, as if nobody had ever heard of a law of Nature before.

The most curious result of this extremely absurd condition of mind is

perhaps the alarm of religious persons on subjects of which one would

have fancied most of the palpable difficulties had been settled before

the nineteenth century. The theory of prayer, for instance, and of

Miracles. I noticed a lengthy discussion in the newspapers a month or

two ago, on the propriety of praying for, or against rain. It had

suddenly, it seems, occurred to the public mind, and to that of the

gentlemen who write the theology of the breakfast-table, that rain was

owing to natural causes; and that it must be unreasonable to expect God

to supply on our immediate demand what could not be provided but by

previous evaporation. I noticed farther that this alarming difficulty

was at least softened to some of our Metropolitan congregations by the

assurances of their ministers, that, although, since the last lecture by

Professor Tyndall at the Royal Institution, it had become impossible to

think of asking God for any temporal blessing, they might still hope

their applications for spiritual advantages would occasionally be

successful;--thus implying that though material processes were

necessarily slow, and the laws of Heaven respecting matter, inviolable,

mental processes might be instantaneous, and mental laws at any moment

disregarded by their Institutor: so that the spirit of a man might be

brought to maturity in a moment, though the resources of Omnipotence

would be overtaxed, or its consistency abandoned, in the endeavor to

produce the same result On a greengage.

More logically, though not more wisely, other divines have asserted that

prayer is medicinally beneficial to ourselves, whether we obtain what we

ask for or not; and that our moral state is gradually elevated by the

habit of praying daily that the Kingdom of God may come,--though nothing

would more astonish us than its coming.

268. With these doubts respecting the possibility or propriety of

miracle, a more immediate difficulty occurs as to its actual nature or

definition. What is the quality of any event which may be properly

called "miraculous"? What are the degrees of wonderfulness?--what the

surpassing degree of it, which changes the wonder into the sign, or may

be positively recognized by human intelligence as an interruption,

instead of a new operation, of those laws of Nature with which, of late,

we have become so exhaustively acquainted? For my own part, I can only

say that I am so haunted by doubt of the security of our best knowledge,

and by discontent in the range of it, that it seems to me contrary to

modesty, whether in a religious or scientific point of view, to regard

_any_thing as miraculous. I know so little, and this little I know is so

inexplicable, that I dare not say anything is wonderful because it is

strange to me, or not wonderful because it is familiar. I have not the

slightest idea how I compel my hand to write these words, or my lips to

read them: and the question which was the thesis of Mr. Ward's very

interesting paper, "Can Experience prove the Uniformity of Nature?"[175]

is, in my mind, so assuredly answerable with the negative which the

writer appeared to desire, that, precisely on that ground, the

performance of any so-called miracle whatever would be morally

unimpressive to me. If a second Joshua to-morrow commanded the sun to

stand still, and it obeyed him; and he therefore claimed deference as a

miracle-worker, I am afraid I should answer, "What! a miracle that the

sun stands still?--not at all. I was always expecting it would. The only

wonder, to me, was its going on."

269. But even assuming the demonstrable uniformity of the laws or

customs of Nature which are known to us, it remains a difficult question

what manner of interference with such law or custom we might logically

hold miraculous, and what, on the contrary, we should treat only as

proof of the existence of some other law, hitherto undiscovered.

For instance, there is a case authenticated by the signatures of several

leading physicists in Paris, in which a peasant girl, under certain

conditions of morbid excitement, was able to move objects at some

distance from her without touching them. Taking the evidence for what it

may be worth, the discovery of such a faculty would only, I suppose,

justify us in concluding that some new vital energy was developing

itself under the conditions of modern bodily health; and not that any

interference with the laws of Nature had taken place. Yet the generally

obstinate refusal of men of science to receive any verbal witness of

such facts is a proof that they believe them contrary to a code of law

which is more or less complete in their experience, and altogether

complete in their conception; and I think it is therefore their province

to lay down for us the true principle by which we may distinguish the

miraculous violation of a known law from the sudden manifestation of an

unknown one.

270. In the meantime, supposing ourselves ever so incapable of defining

law, or discerning its interruption, we need not therefore lose our

conception of the one, nor our faith in the other. Some of us may no

more be able to know a genuine miracle, when we see it, than others to

know a genuine picture; but the ordinary impulse to regard, therefore,

all claim to miraculous power as imposture, or self-deception, reminds

me always of the speech of a French lady to me, whose husband's

collection of old pictures had brought unexpectedly low prices in the

auction-room,--"How can you be so senseless," she said, "as to attach

yourself to the study of an art in which you see that all excellence is

a mere matter of opinion?" Some of us have thus come to imagine that

the laws of Nature, as well as those of Art, may be matters of opinion;

and I recollect an ingenious paper by Mr. Frederic Harrison, some two

years ago, on the "Subjective Synthesis,"--which, after proving, what

does not seem to stand in need of so elaborate proof, that we can only

know, of the universe, what we can see and understand, went on to state

that the laws of Nature "were not objective realities, any more than

they were absolute truths."[176] Which decision, it seems to me, is as

if some modest and rational gnat, who had submitted to the humiliating

conviction that it could know no more of the world than might be

traversed by flight, or tasted by puncture, yet, in the course of an

experiment on a philosopher with its proboscis, hearing him speak of the

Institutes of Justinian, should observe, on its return to the society of

gnats, that the Institutes of Justinian were not objective realities,

any more than they were absolute truths. And, indeed, the careless use

of the word "Truth" itself, often misleads even the most accurate

thinkers. A law cannot be spoken of as a truth, either absolute or

concrete. It is a law of nature, that is to say, of my own particular

nature, that I fall asleep after dinner, and my confession of this fact

is a truth; but the bad habit is no more a truth than the statement of

it is a bad habit.

271. Nevertheless, in spite of the treachery of our conceptions and

language, and in just conclusion even from our narrow experience, the

conviction is fastened in our hearts that the habits or laws of Nature

are more constant than our own and sustained by a firmer Intelligence:

so that, without in the least claiming the faculty of recognition of

miracle, we may securely define its essence. The phenomena of the

universe with which we are acquainted are assumed to be, under general

conditions, constant, but to be maintained in that constancy by a

supreme personal Mind; and it is farther supposed that, under

particular conditions, this ruling Person interrupts the constancy of

these phenomena, in order to establish a particular relation with

inferior creatures.

272. It is, indeed, singular how ready the inferior creatures are to

imagine such a relation, without any very decisive evidence of its

establishment. The entire question of miracle is involved with that of

the special providences which are supposed, in some theories of

religion, sometimes to confound the enemies, and always to protect the

darlings of God: and in the minds of amiable persons, the natural and

very justifiable sense of their own importance to the well-being of the

world may often encourage the pleasant supposition that the Deity,

however improvident for others, will be provident for _them_. I

recollect a paper on this subject by Dr. Guthrie, published not long ago

in some religious periodical, in which the writer mentioned, as a

strikingly Providential circumstance, the catching of his foot on a

ledge of rock which averted what might otherwise have been a fatal fall.

Under the sense of the loss to the cause of religion and the society of

Edinburgh, which might have been the consequence of the accident, it is

natural that Dr. Guthrie should refer to it with strongly excited

devotional feelings: yet, perhaps, with better reason, a junior member

of the Alpine Club, less secure of the value of his life, would have

been likely on the same occasion rather to be provoked by his own

awkwardness, than impressed by the providential structure of the rock.

At the root of every error on these subjects we may trace either an

imperfect conception of the universality of Deity, or an exaggerated

sense of individual importance: and yet it is no less certain that every

train of thought likely to lead us in a right direction must be founded

on the acknowledgment that the personality of a Deity who has commanded

the doing of Justice and the showing of Mercy can be no otherwise

manifested than in the signal support of causes which are just, and

favor of persons who are kind. The beautiful tradition of the deaths of

Cleobis and Bito, indeed, expresses the sense proper to the wisest men,

that we are unable either to discern or decide for ourselves in what

the favor of God consists: but the promises of the Christian religion

imply that its true disciples will be enabled to ask with prudence what

is to be infallibly granted.

273. And, indeed, the relations between God and His creatures which it

is the function of miracle to establish, depend far more on the

correspondence of events with human volition than on the marvelous

character of the events themselves. These relations are, in the main,

twofold. Miracles are either to convince, or to assist. We are apt to

think of them as meant only to establish faith, but many are for mere

convenience of life. Elisha's making the ax-head swim, and the poisoned

soup wholesome, were not to convince anybody, but merely to give help in

the quickest way. Conviction is, indeed, in many of the most interesting

miracles, quite a secondary end, and often an unattained one. The hungry

multitude are fed, the ship in danger relieved by sudden calm. The

disciples disregard the multiplying of the loaves, yet are strongly

affected by the change in the weather.

But whether for conviction, aid (or aid in the terrific form of

punishment), the essence of miracle is as the manifestation of a Power

which can direct or modify the otherwise constant phenomena of Nature;

and it is, I think, by attaching too great importance to what may be

termed the missionary work of miracle, instead of what may in

distinction be called its pastoral work, that many pious persons, no

less than infidels, are apt to despise, and therefore to deny,

miraculous power altogether.

274. "We do not need to be convinced," they say, "of the existence of

God by the capricious exertion of His power. We are satisfied in the

normal exertion of it; and it is contrary to the idea of His Excellent

Majesty that there should be any other."

But all arguments and feelings must be distrusted which are founded on

our own ideas of what it is proper for Deity to do. Nor can I, even

according to our human modes of judgment, find any impropriety in the

thought that an energy may be natural without being normal, and Divine

without being constant. The wise missionary may indeed require no

miracle to confirm his authority; but the despised pastor may need

miracle to enforce it, or the compassionate governor to make it

beneficial. And it is quite possible to conceive of Pastoral Miracle as

resulting from a power as natural as any other, though not as perpetual.

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and some of the energies granted to

men born of the Spirit may be manifested only on certain conditions and

on rare occasions; and therefore be always wonderful or miraculous,

though neither disorderly nor unnatural.

Thus St. Paul's argument to Agrippa, "Why should it be thought with you

a thing impossible that God should raise the dead?" would be suicidal,

if he meant to appeal to the miracle as a proof of the authority of his

mission. But, claiming no authority, he announces as a probable and

acceptable fact the opening of a dispensation in which it was as natural

for the dead to be raised as for the Gospel to be preached to the poor,

though both the one and the other were miraculous signs that the Master

of Nature had come down to be Emmanuel among men, and that no prophet

was in future to look for another.

We have indeed fallen into a careless habit of using the words

supernatural and superhuman, as if equivalent. A human act may be

super-doggish, and a Divine act superhuman, yet all three acts

absolutely Natural. It is, perhaps, as much the virtue of a Spirit to be

inconstant as of a poison to be sure, and therefore always impossible to

weigh the elements of moral force in the balance of an apothecary.

275. It is true that, in any abstract reflection on these things, one is

instantly brought to pause by questions of the reasonableness, the

necessity, or the expedient degree of miracle. Christ walks on the

water, overcoming gravity to that extent. Why not have flown, and

overcome it altogether? He feeds the multitude by breaking existent

loaves; why not have commanded the stones into bread? Or, instead of

miraculously feeding either an assembly or a nation, why not enable

them, like Himself, miraculously to fast, for the needful time? And in

generally admitting the theories of pastoral miracle the instant

question submits itself,--Supposing a nation wisely obedient to divinely

appointed ministers of a sensible Theocracy, how much would its

government be miraculously assisted, and how many of its affairs brought

to miraculous prosperity of issue? Would its enemies be destroyed by

angels, and its food poured down upon it from the skies, or would the

supernatural aid be limited to diminishing the numbers of its slain in

battle,[177] or to conducting its merchant ships safely, or

instantaneously, to the land whither they would go?

But no progress can be made, and much may be prevented, in the

examination of any really difficult human problem, by thus approaching

it on the hypothetical side. Such approach is easy to the foolish,

pleasant to the proud, and convenient to the malicious, but absolutely

fruitless of practical result. Our modesty and wisdom consist alike in

the simple registry of the facts cognizable by us, and our duty, in

making active use of them for the present, without concerning ourselves

as to the possibilities of the future. And the two main facts we have to

deal with are that the historical record of miracle is always of

inconstant power, and that our own actual energies are inconstant almost

in exact proportion to their worthiness.

276. First, I say, the history of miracle is of inconstant power. St.

Paul raises Eutychus from death, and his garments effect miraculous

cure; yet he leaves Trophimus sick at Miletum, recognizes only the mercy

of God in the recovery of Epaphroditus, and, like any uninspired

physician, recommends Timothy wine for his infirmities. And in the

second place, our own energies are inconstant almost in proportion to

their nobleness. We breathe with regularity, and can calculate upon the

strength necessary for common tasks. But the record of our best work,

and of our happiest moments, is always one of success which we did not

expect, and of enthusiasm which we could not prolong.

277. And therefore we can only look for an imperfect and interrupted,

but may surely insist on an occasional, manifestation of miraculous

credentials by every minister of religion. There is no practical

difficulty in the discernment of marvel properly to be held superhuman.

It is indeed frequently alleged by the admirers of scientific discovery

that many things which were wonderful fifty years ago, have ceased to be

so now; and I am perfectly ready to concede to them that what they now

themselves imagine to be admirable, will not in the future be admired.

But the petty sign, said to have been wrought by the augur Attus before

Tarquin, would be as impressive at this instant as it was then; while

the utmost achievements of recent scientific miracle have scarcely yet

achieved the feeding of Lazarus their beggar, still less the

resurrection of Lazarus their friend. Our Christian faith, at all

events, stands or falls by this test. "These signs shall follow them

that believe," are words which admit neither of qualification nor

misunderstanding; and it is far less arrogant in any man to look for

such Divine attestation of his authority as a teacher, than to claim,

without it, any authority to teach. And assuredly it is no proof of any

unfitness or unwisdom in such expectations, that, for the last thousand

years, miraculous powers seem to have been withdrawn from, or at least

indemonstrably possessed, by a Church which, having been again and again

warned by its Master that Riches were deadly to Religion, and Love

essential to it, has nevertheless made wealth the reward of Theological

learning, and controversy its occupation. There are states of moral

death no less amazing than physical resurrection; and a church which

permits its clergy to preach what they have ceased to believe, and its

people to trust what they refuse to obey, is perhaps more truly

miraculous in impotence, than it would be miraculous in power, if it

could move the fatal rocks of California to the Pole, and plant the

sycamore and the vine between the ridges of the sea.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 174: _Contemporary Review_, March, 1873.]

[Footnote 175: Read at the November meeting of the Metaphysical

Society.]

[Footnote 176: I quote from memory but am sure of the purport of the

sentence, though not of its expression.]

[Footnote 177: "And be it death proclaimëd through our host to boast of

this."--_Henry V._]

* * * * *

AN OXFORD LECTURE.

(_Nineteenth Century, January 1878._)

* * * * *

AN OXFORD LECTURE.[178]

278. I am sure that all in this audience who were present yesterday at

Dr. Acland's earnest and impressive lecture must have felt how deeply I

should be moved by his closing reference to the friendship begun in our

undergraduate days;--of which I will but say that, if it alone were all

I owed to Oxford, the most gracious kindness of the Alma Mater would in

that gift have been fulfilled to me.

But his affectionate words, in their very modesty, as if even standing

on the defense of his profession, the noblest of human occupations! and

of his science--the most wonderful and awful of human intelligences!

showed me that I had yet not wholly made clear to you the exactly

limited measure in which I have ventured to dispute the fitness of

method of study now assigned to you in this University.

279. Of the dignity of physical science, and of the happiness of those

who are devoted to it for the healing and the help of mankind, I never

have meant to utter, and I do not think I _have_ uttered, one irreverent

word. But against the curiosity of science, leading us to call virtually

nothing gained but what is new discovery, and to despise every use of

our knowledge in its acquisition; of the insolence of science, in

claiming for itself a separate function of that human mind which in its

perfection is one and indivisible, in the image of its Creator; and of

the perversion of science, in hoping to discover by the analysis of

death, what can only be discovered by the worship of life,--of these I

have spoken, not only with sorrow, but with a fear which every day I

perceive to be more surely grounded, that such labor, in effacing from

within you the sense of the presence of God in the garden of the earth,

may awaken within you the prevailing echo of the first voice of its

Destroyer, "_Ye_ shall be as gods."

280. To-day I have little enough time to conclude,--none to review--what

I have endeavored thus to say; but one instance, given me directly in

conversation after lecture, by one of yourselves, will enable me to

explain to you precisely what I _mean_.

After last lecture, in which you remember I challenged our physiologists

to tell me how a bird flies, one of you, whose pardon, if he thinks it

needful, I ask for this use of his most timely and illustrative

statement, came to me, saying, "You know the way in which we are shown

how a bird flies, is, that any one, a dove for instance, is given to us,

plucked, and partly skinned, and incised at the insertion of the wing

bone; and then, with a steel point, the ligament of the muscle at the

shoulder is pulled up, and out, and made distinct from other ligaments,

and we are told 'that is the way a bird flies,' and on that matter it is

thought we have been told enough."

I say that this instance given me was timely; I will say more--in the

choice of this particular bird, providential. Let me take, in their

order, the two subjects of inquiry and instruction, which are indeed

offered to us in the aspect and form of that one living creature.

281. Of the splendor of your own true life, you are told, in the words

which, to-day, let me call, as your Fathers did, words of

inspiration--"Yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove, that is covered

with silver wings and her feathers with gold." Of the manifold iris of

color in the dove's plumage, watched carefully in sunshine as the bird

moves, I cannot hope to give you any conception by words; but that it is

the most exquisite, in the modesty of its light, and in the myriad

mingling of its hue, of all plumage, I may partly prove to you in this

one fact, that out of all studies of color, the one which I would

desire most to place within your reach in these schools, is Turner's

drawing of a dove, done when he was in happy youth at Farnley. But of

the causes of this color, and of the peculiar subtlety in its

iridescence, nothing is told you in any scientific book I have ever seen

on ornithology.

282. Of the power of flight in these wings, and the tender purpose of

their flight, you hear also in your Fathers' book. To the Church, flying

from her enemies into desolate wilderness, there were indeed given two

wings as of a great eagle. But the weary saint of God, looking forward

to his home in calm of eternal peace, prays rather--"Oh that I had wings

like a dove, for then should I flee away, and be at rest." And of these

wings, and this mind of hers, this is what reverent science should teach

you: first, with what parting of plume, and what soft pressure and

rhythmic beating of divided air, she reaches that miraculous swiftness

of undubious motion, compared with which the tempest is slow, and the

arrow uncertain; and secondly, what clew there is, visible, or

conceivable to thought of man, by which, to her living conscience and

errorless pointing of magnetic soul, her distant home is felt afar

beyond the horizon, and the straight path, through concealing clouds,

and over trackless lands, made plain to her desire, and her duty, by the

finger of God.

283. And lastly, since in the tradition of the Old Covenant she was made

the messenger of forgiveness to those eight souls saved through the

baptism unto death, and in the Gospel of the New Covenant, under her

image, was manifested the well-pleasing of God, in the fulfillment of

all righteousness by His Son in the Baptism unto life,--surely alike all

Christian people, old and young, should be taught to be gladdened by her

sweet presence; and in every city and village in Christendom she should

have such home as in Venice she has had for ages, and be, among the

sculptured marbles of the temple, the sweetest sculpture; and,

fluttering at your children's feet, their never-angered friend. And

surely also, therefore, of the thousand evidences which any carefully

thoughtful person may see, not only of the ministration of good, but of

the deceiving and deadly power of the evil angels, there is no one more

distinct in its gratuitous, and unreconcilable sin, than that this--of

all the living creatures between earth and sky--should be the one chosen

to amuse the apathy of our murderous idleness, with skill-less,

effortless, merciless slaughter.

284. I pass to the direct subject on which I have to speak finally

to-day;--the reality of that ministration of the good angels, and of

that real adversity of the principalities and powers of Satan, in which,

without exception, all earnest Christians have believed, and the

appearance of which, to the imagination of the greatest and holiest of

them, has been the root, without exception, of all the greatest art

produced by the human mind or hand in this world.

That you have at present no art properly so called in England at

all--whether of painting, sculpture, or architecture[179]--I, for one,

do not care. In midst of Scottish Lothians, in the days of Scott, there

was, by how much less art, by so much purer life, than in the midst of

Italy in the days of Raphael. But that you should have lost, not only

the skill of Art, but the simplicity of Faith and life, all in one, and

not only here deface your ancient streets by the Ford of the waters of

sacred learning, but also deface your ancient hills with guilt of

mercenary desolation, driving their ancient shepherd life into exile,

and diverting the waves of their streamlets into the cities which are

the very centers of pollution, of avarice, and impiety: for this I _do_

care,--for this you have blamed me for caring, instead of merely trying

to teach you drawing. I have nevertheless yet done my best to show you

what real drawing is; and must yet again bear your blame for trying to

show you, through that, somewhat more.

285. I was asked, as we came out of chapel this morning, by one of the

Fellows of my college, to say a word to the Undergraduates, about

Thirlmere. His request, being that of a faithful friend, came to enforce

on me the connection between this form of spoliation of our native land

of its running waters, and the gaining disbelief in the power of prayer

over the distribution of the elements of our bread and water, in rain,

and sunshine,--seedtime, and harvest. Respecting which, I must ask you

to think with me to-day what is the meaning of the myth, if you call it

so, of the great prophet of the Old Testament, who is to be again sent

before the coming of the day of the Lord. For truly, you will find that

if any part of your ancient faith be true, it is needful for every soul

which is to take up its cross, with Christ, to be also first

transfigured in the light of Christ,--talking with Moses and with Elias.

The contest of Moses is with the temporal servitude,--of Elijah, with

the spiritual servitude, of the people; and the war of Elijah is with

their servitude essentially to two Gods, Baal, or the Sun God, in whose

hand they thought was their life, and Baalzebub--the Fly God,--of

Corruption, in whose hand they thought was the arbitration of death.

The entire contest is summed in the first assertion by Elijah, of his

authority as the Servant of God, over those elemental powers by which

the heart of Man, whether Jew or heathen, was filled with food and

gladness.

And Elijah the Tishbite; who was of the inhabitants of Gilead, said unto

Ahab, "As the Lord God of Israel liveth, before whom I stand, there

shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word."

286. Your modern philosophers have explained to you the absurdity of all

that: you think? Of all the shallow follies of this age, that

proclamation of the vanity of prayer for the sunshine and rain; and the

cowardly equivocations, to meet it, of the clergy who never in their

lives really prayed for anything, I think, excel. Do these modern

scientific gentlemen fancy that nobody, before they were born, knew the

laws of cloud and storm, or that the mighty human souls of former ages,

who every one of them lived and died by prayer, and in it, did not know

that in every petition framed on their lips they were asking for what

was not only fore-ordained, but just as probably fore-_done_? or that

the mother pausing to pray before she opens the letter from Alma or

Balaclava, does not know that already he is saved for whom she prays, or

already lies festering in his shroud? The whole confidence and glory of

prayer is in its appeal to a Father who knows our necessities before we

ask, who knows our thoughts before they rise in our hearts, and whose

decrees, as unalterable in the eternal future as in the eternal past,

yet in the close verity of visible fact, bend, like reeds, before the

fore-ordained and faithful prayers of His children.

287. Of Elijah's contest on Carmel with that Sun-power in which,

literally, you again now are seeking your life, you know the story,

however little you believe it. But of his contest with the Death-power,

on the Hill of Samaria, you read less frequently, and more doubtfully.

"Oh, thou Man of God, the King hath said, Come down. And Elijah answered

and said, If I be a man of God, let fire come down from Heaven, and

consume thee, and thy fifty."

How monstrous, how revolting, cries your modern religionist, that a

prophet of the Lord should invoke death on fifty men. And he sits

himself, enjoying his muffin and _Times_, and contentedly allows the

slaughter of fifty thousand men, so it be in the interests of England,

and of his own stock on Exchange.

But note Elijah's message. "Because thou hast sent to inquire of

Baalzebub the God of Ekron, therefore, thou shalt not go down from the

bed on which thou art gone up, but shalt surely die."

"Because thou hast sent to inquire:" he had not sent to _pray_ to the

God of Ekron, only to _ask_ of him. The priests of Baal _prayed_ to

Baal, but Ahaziah only _questions_ the fly-god.

He does not pray "Let me recover," but he asks "_Shall_ I recover of

this disease?"

The scientific mind again, you perceive,--Sanitary investigation; by

oracle of the God of Death. Whatever can be produced of disease, by

flies, by aphides, by lice, by communication of corruption, shall not we

moderns also wisely inquire, and so recover of our diseases?

All which may, for aught I know, be well; and when I hear of the vine

disease or potato disease being stayed, I will hope also that plague may

be, or diphtheria, or aught else of human plague, by due sanitary

measures.

288. In the meantime, I see that the common cleanliness of the earth and

its water is despised, as if _it_ were a plague; and after myself

laboring for three years to purify and protect the source of the

loveliest stream in the English midlands, the Wandel, I am finally

beaten, because the road commissioners insist on carrying the road

washings into it, at its source. But that's nothing. Two years ago, I

went, for the first time since early youth, to see Scott's country by

the shores of Yarrow, Teviot, and Gala waters. I will read you once

again, though you will remember it, his description of one of those

pools which you are about sanitarily to draw off into your

engine-boilers, and then I will tell you what I saw myself in that

sacred country.

Oft in my mind such thoughts awake,

By lone Saint Mary's silent lake;

Thou know'st it well,--nor fen, nor sedge,

Pollute the pure lake's crystal edge;

Abrupt and sheer, the mountains sink

At once upon the level brink;

And just a trace of silver sand

Marks where the water meets the land.

Far in the mirror, bright and blue,

Each hill's huge outline you may view;

Shaggy with heath, but lonely, bare,

Nor tree, nor bush, nor brake, is there,

Save where, of land, yon slender line

Bears thwart the lake the scatter'd pine.

* * * * *

And silence aids--though the steep hills

Send to the lake a thousand rills

In summer tide, so soft they weep,

The sound but lulls the ear asleep;

Your horse's hoof-tread sounds too rude,

So stilly is the solitude.

Nought living meets the eye or ear,

But well I ween the dead are near;

For though, in feudal strife, a foe

Hath laid Our Lady's chapel low,

Yet still beneath the hallow'd soil,

The peasant rests him from his toil,

And, dying, bids his bones be laid,

Where erst his simple fathers pray'd.

289. What I saw myself, in that fair country, of which the sight remains

with me, I will next tell you. I saw the Teviot oozing, not flowing,

between its wooded banks, a mere sluggish injection, among the filthy

stones, of poisonous pools of scum-covered ink; and in front of Jedburgh

Abbey, where the foaming river used to dash round the sweet ruins as if

the rod of Moses had freshly cleft the rock for it, bare and foul

nakedness of its bed, the whole stream carried to work in the mills, the

dry stones and crags of it festering unseemly in the evening sun, and

the carcass of a sheep, brought down in the last flood, lying there in

the midst of the children at their play, literal and ghastly symbol, in

the sweetest pastoral country in the world, of the lost sheep of the

house of Israel.

That is your symbol to-day, of the Lamb as it had been slain; and that

the work of your prayerless science;--the issues, these, of your

enlightened teaching, and of all the toils and the deaths of the

Covenanters on those barren hills, of the prophetic martyrs here in your

crossing streets, and of the highest, sincerest, simplest patriot of

Catholic England, Sir Thomas More, within the walls of England's central

Tower. So is ended, with prayer for the bread of this life, also the

hope of the life that is to come. Yet I will take leave to show you the

light of that hope, as it shone on, and guided, the children of the ages

of faith.

290. Of that legend of St. Ursula which I read to you so lately, you

remember, I doubt not, that the one great meaning is the victory of her

faith over all fears of death. It is the laying down of all the joy, of

all the hope, nay of all the Love, of this life, in the eager

apprehension of the rejoicing and the love of Eternity. What truth there

was in such faith I dare not say that I know; but what manner of human

souls it made, you may for yourselves _see_. Here are enough brought to

you, of the thoughts of a believing people.[180] This maid in her purity

is no fable; this is a Venetian maid, as she was seen in the earthly

dawn, and breathed on by the breeze of her native sea. And here she is

in her womanhood, in her courage and perfect peace, waiting for her

death.

I have sent for this drawing for you, from Sheffield, where it is to

stay, they needing it more than you. It is the best of all that my

friend did with me at Venice, for St. George, and with St. George's help

and St. Ursula's. It shows you only a piece of the great picture of the

martyrdom--nearly all have fallen around the maid, and she kneels with

her two servant princesses, waiting for her own death. Faithful behind

their mistress, they wait with her,--not feebler, but less raised in

thought, as less conceiving their immortal destiny; the one, a gentle

girl, conceiving not in her quiet heart any horror of death, bows her

fair head towards the earth, almost with a smile; the other, fearful

lest her faith should for an instant fail, bursts into passion of prayer

through burning tears. St. Ursula kneels, as daily she knelt, before the

altar, giving herself up to God forever.

And so you see her, here in the days of childhood, and here in her

sacred youth, and here in her perfect womanhood, and here borne to her

grave.

Such creatures as these _have_ lived--do live yet, thank God, in the

faith of Christ.

291. You hear it openly said that this, their faith, was a foolish

dream. Do you choose to find out whether it was or not? You may if you

will, but you can find it out in one way only.

Take the dilemma in perfect simplicity. Either Christianity is true or

not. Let us suppose it first one, then the other, and see what follows.

Let it first be supposed untrue. Then rational investigation will in all

probability discover that untruth; while, on the other hand, irrational

submission to what we are told may lead us into any form of absurdity or

insanity; and, as we read history, we shall find that this insanity has

perverted, as in the Crusades, half the strength of Europe to its ruin,

and been the source of manifold dissension and misery to society.

Start with the supposition that Christianity is untrue, much more with

the desire that it should be, and that is the conclusion at which you

will certainly arrive.

But, on the other hand, let us suppose that it is, or may be, true.

Then, in order to find out whether it is or not, we must attend to what

it says of itself. And its first saying is an order to adopt a certain

line of conduct. _Do_ that first, and you shall know more. Its promise

is of blessing and of teaching, more than tongue can utter, or mind

conceive, if you choose to do this; and it refuses to teach or help you

on any other terms than these.

292. You may think it strange that such a trial is required of you.

Surely the evidences of our future state might have been granted on

other terms--nay, a plain account might have been given, with all

mystery explained away in the clearest language. _Then_, we should have

believed at once.

Yes, but, as you see and hear, that, if it be our way, is not God's. He

has chosen to grant knowledge of His truth to us on one condition and no

other. If we refuse that condition, the rational evidence around us is

all in proof of our death, and that proof is true, for God also tells

us that in such refusal we shall die.

You see, therefore, that in either case, be Christianity true or false,

death is demonstrably certain to us in refusing it. As philosophers, we

can expect only death, and as unbelievers, we are condemned to it.

There is but one chance of life--in admitting so far the possibility of

the Christian verity as to try it on its own terms. There is not the

slightest possibility of finding out whether it be true, or not, first.

"Show me a sign first and I will come," you say. "No," answers God.

"Come first, then you shall see a sign."

Hard, you think? You will find it is not so, on thinking more. For this,

which you are commanded, is not a thing unreasonable in itself. So far

from that, it is merely the wisest thing you could do for your own and

for others' happiness, if there were no eternal truth to be discovered.

You are called simply to be the servant of Christ, and of other men for

His sake; that is to say, to hold your life and all its faculties as a

means of service to your fellows. All you have to do is to be sure it

_is_ the service you are doing them, and not the service you do

yourself, which is uppermost in your minds.

293. Now you continually hear appeals to you made in a vague way, which

you don't know how far you can follow. You shall not say that, to-day; I

both can and will tell you what Christianity requires of you in simplest

terms.

Read your Bible as you would any other book--with strictest criticism,

frankly determining what you think beautiful, and what you think false

or foolish. But be sure that you try accurately to understand it, and

transfer its teaching to modern need by putting other names for those

which have become superseded by time. For instance, in such a passage as

that which follows and supports the "Lie not one to another" of

Colossians iii.--"seeing that ye have put on the new man, which is

renewed in knowledge after the spirit of Him that created him, where"

(meaning in that great creation where) "there is neither Greek nor Jew,

circumcision nor uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free." In

applying that verse to the conduct and speech of modern policy, it falls

nearly dead, because we suffer ourselves to remain under a vague

impression--vague, but practically paralyzing,--that though it was very

necessary to speak the truth in the countries of Scythians and Jews,

there is no objection to any quantity of lying in managing the affairs

of Christendom. But now merely substitute modern for ancient names, and

see what a difference it will make in the force and appeal of the

passage, "Lie not one to another, brethren, seeing that ye have put off

the old man, with his deeds, and have put on the new man, which is

renewed to knowledge," [Greek: eis epignôsin], according to the

knowledge of Him that created him, in that great creation where there is

neither Englishman nor German, baptism nor want of baptism, Turk nor

Russian, slave nor free, but Christ is all, and in all.

294. Read your Bible, then, making it the first morning business of your

life to understand some piece of it clearly, and your daily business to

obey of it all that you understand, beginning first with the most human

and most dear obedience--to your father and mother. Doing all things as

they would have you do, for the present: if they want you to be

lawyers--be lawyers; if soldiers--soldiers; if to get on in the

world--even to get money--do as they wish, and that cheerfully, after

distinctly explaining to them in what points you wish otherwise. Theirs

is for the present the voice of God to you.

But, at the same time, be quite clear about your own purpose, and the

carrying out of that so far as under the conditions of your life you

can. And any of you who are happy enough to have wise parents will find

them contented in seeing you do as I now tell you.

295. First cultivate all your personal powers, not competitively, but

patiently and usefully. You have no business to read in the long

vacation. Come _here_ to make scholars of yourselves, and go to the

mountains or the sea to make men of yourselves. Give at least a month in

each year to rough sailor's work and sea fishing. Don't lounge and

flirt on the beach, but make yourselves good seamen. Then, on the

mountains, go and help the shepherd at his work, the wood-men at theirs,

and learn to know the hills by night and day. If you are staying in

level country, learn to plow, and whatever else you can that is useful.

Then here in Oxford, read to the utmost of your power, and practice

singing, fencing, wrestling, and riding. No rifle practice, and no

racing--boat or other. Leave the river quiet for the naturalist, the

angler, and the weary student like me.

You may think all these matters of no consequence to your studies of art

and divinity; and that I am merely crotchety and absurd. Well, that is

the way the devil deceives you. It is not the sins which we _feel_

sinful, by which he catches us; but the apparently healthy ones,--those

which nevertheless waste the time, harden the heart, concentrate the

passions on mean objects, and prevent the course of gentle and fruitful

thought.

296. Having thus cultivated, in the time of your studentship, your

powers truly to the utmost, then, in your manhood, be resolved they

shall be spent in the true service of men--not in being ministered unto,

but in ministering. Begin with the simplest of all ministries--breaking

of bread to the poor. Think first of that, not of your own pride,

learning, comfort, prospects in life: nay, not now, once come to

manhood, may even the obedience to parents check your own conscience of

what is your Master's work. "Whoso loveth father and mother more than me

is not worthy of me." Take the perfectly simple words of the Judgment,

"Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these, ye did it unto

me:" but you must _do_ it, not preach it. And you must not be resolved

that it shall be done only in a gentlemanly manner. Your pride must be

laid down, as your avarice, and your fear. Whether as fishermen on the

sea, plowmen on the earth, laborers at the forge, or merchants at the

shop-counter, you must break and distribute bread to the poor, set down

in companies--for that also is literally told you--upon the green

grass, not crushed in heaps under the pavement of cities. Take Christ at

His literal word, and, so sure as His word is true, He will be known of

you in breaking of bread. Refuse that servant's duty because it is

plain,--seek either to serve God, or know Him, in any other way: your

service will become mockery of Him, and your knowledge darkness. Every

day your virtues will be used by the evil spirits to conceal, or to make

respectable, national crime; every day your felicities will become baits

for the iniquity of others; your heroisms, wreckers' beacons, betraying

them to destruction; and before your own deceived eyes and wandering

hearts every false meteor of knowledge will flash, and every perishing

pleasure glow, to lure you into the gulf of your grave.

297. But obey the word in its simplicity, in wholeness of purpose and

with serenity of sacrifice, like this of the Venetian maids', and truly

you shall receive sevenfold into your bosom in this present life, as in

the world to come, life everlasting. All your knowledge will become to

you clear and sure, all your footsteps safe; in the present brightness

of domestic life you will foretaste the joy of Paradise, and to your

children's children bequeath, not only noble fame, but endless virtue.

"He shall give his angels charge over you to keep you in all your ways;

and the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your

hearts and minds through Christ Jesus."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 178: Left, at the Editor's request, with only some absolutely

needful clearing of unintelligible sentences, as it was written for free

delivery. It was the last of a course of twelve given this

autumn;--refers partly to things already said, partly to drawings on the

walls; and needs the reader's pardon throughout, for faults and

abruptness incurable but by re-writing the whole as an essay instead of

a lecture.--(_Nineteenth Century_, January, 1878.)]

[Footnote 179: Of course, this statement is merely a generalization of

many made in the preceding lectures, the tenor of which any readers

acquainted with my recent writings may easily conceive.]

[Footnote 180: The references were to the series of drawings lately

made, in Venice, for the Oxford and Sheffield schools, from the works of

Carpaccio, by Mr. Fairfax Murray.]

End of Project Gutenberg's On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2), by John Ruskin