world received unexpected and potent confirmation from the fact that in
December, 1875, he had, at the house of Lord Mount Temple, at
Broadlands, Romsey, some psychic experience so definite that he was
convinced that he had true communication with her whom he had lately
lost, the “Rosie” of _Præterita_, No. XXVII.[20] It was a confirmation
to his faith. He became an Honorary Member of the Society for Psychical
Research the year after its formation in 1882, joining in that
well-grounded hope that a true science of human Personality might be
built up by its patient experimental methods. To Lady Mount Temple,
_née_ Tollemache, the Egeria of the winter of 1840 in Rome, we owe much
for the help she was to Ruskin all through life; and much also that from
her came the stimulus to Frederick W. H. Myers and Edmund Gurney to
begin the Society for Psychical Research. Two of Ruskin’s stories of
Death wraiths may be found in _Fors_,[21] also a dream in Letter LXV. He
never took to ordinary spiritualism; it is indeed from an attack upon it
that he turns to a note describing the happiness of his own experience.
“I leave this passage as it was written; though as it passes through the
press, it is ordered by Atropos that I should hear a piece of evidence
on this matter no less clear as to the present ministry of such powers
as that which led Peter out of prison, than all the former, or nearly
all the former, evidence examined by me was of the presence of the
legion which ruled among the tombs of Gennesaret.”[22] He allows the
contradiction to stand; indeed, in this puzzling and partially known
subject, a consistent position is beyond the knowledge of most. He
returns to the attack on Spiritualism, however, in his 1883 note to the
second volume of _Modern Painters_, p. 244.
In the following year, 1876, at Venice at Christmas, he had vouchsafed
to himself the inward assurance of an immortal life; he entered into a
singular happiness; _Fors_ became the organ of a mysticism truly
Johannine; he loved to expound universal Christian truth, so catholic
indeed in the true sense that Cardinal Manning aspired to turn him to
Rome. That was a vain hope. He still retained his analytical faculty. He
says that he would “give up Moses” if criticism demanded it.[23]
Concerning his lectures of 1877 at Oxford he writes to Miss Beever in
the “hortus inclusus” at Coniston that he has been able for the first
time to speak boldly to the students of immortal life. The concluding
passage of the last lecture is this:[24]
“But obey the word in its simplicity, in wholeness of purpose and with
severity 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.” “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.” It came to be true of himself that “if life be led under
heaven’s law, the sense of heaven’s nearness only deepens with advancing
years, and is assured in death.”[25]
“The faith of the saints and prophets rising into serenity of knowledge,
‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’ is a state of mind of which ordinary
men cannot reason; but which, in the practical power of it, has always
governed the world, and must for ever. No dynamite will ever be invented
that can rule--it can but dissolve and destroy. Only the Word of God and
the heart of man can govern.”[26]
We cannot conclude this analysis better than by quoting from the last
number of _Fors_ in 1884:
“Looking back upon my efforts for the last twenty years, I believe that
their failure has been in great part owing to my compromise with the
infidelity of this outer world, and my endeavours to base my pleading
upon motives of ordinary prudence and kindness, instead of on the
primary duty of loving God; foundation other than which no man can lay.
I thought myself speaking to a crowd which could only be influenced by
visible utility; nor was I the least aware how many entirely good and
holy persons were living in the faith and love of God as vividly and
practically now as ever in the early enthusiasm of Christendom. These
have shown me, with lovely initiation, in how many secret places the
prayer was made which I had foolishly listened for at the corners of the
streets, and on how many hills which I had thought left desolate, the
hosts of heaven still moved in chariots of fire.”[27] These passages
show that F. W. H. Myers, in the beautiful obituary which I am permitted
to print as an Epilogue, was not correct in describing the experience
with the medium at Broadlands, as Ruskin’s one brief season of blissful
trust in the Unseen. It is true of his temporary belief in spiritualism.
I trust it will have become clear that Ruskin’s spiritual history is not
a story of arbitrary and fanciful changes without connected
significance. It is the orderly development of a research, by a man
singularly qualified to hold a religious Research Fellowship.
He may be said to have matriculated in religion at his mother’s knee.
There he learnt his Bible. He took a degree with the second volume of
_Modern Painters_ and the works allied to it in spirit. He then became a
Master of Arts, qualified to teach, a recognized religious authority
among many authorities. Had he never gone to Venice and seen Tintoret he
might have built, so he says, a Catholic archiepiscopal palace at York
instead of a museum at Sheffield; or he might have been such a man as
Dean Church or John Henry Newman, on Calvinistic Protestant lines. But
Ruskin proceeded to a higher status. He must needs penetrate deeper; and
in the crisis of 1858 he took his Fellowship by a thesis on the
Irreducible Minimum of the Religious Outfit. Thenceforth he carried on
a research, he was a “seeker after God,” often wrote “in much darkness
and sorrow of heart”; and in sixteen years the conclusions were ready,
the convictions matured, the saint perfected.
_CHAPTER III_
_TO WHAT FOLD?_
To what school of thought or to which among our denominations, if to
any, can Ruskin be said to belong? He did not actively, in mature life,
belong to any, or attend Church or Chapel. Let us examine his doctrines
in this connection.
The first point which strikes the inquirer is Ruskin’s strong hostility
to professionalism in religion, to payment for preaching. Against a
separate order of clergy, maintained for that object, and claiming a
certain position by reason of their ministration, he was the most
poignant voice of his time, from inside Christianity. Letters XXXVIII,
XLIX, and LXII of _Fors Clavigera_ are full of the most unrestrained
expression of this testimony. We will quote:
“The particular kinds of folly also which lead youths to become
clergymen, uncalled, are specially intractable. That a lad just out of
his teens, and not under the influence of any deep religious enthusiasm,
should ever contemplate the possibility of his being set up in the
middle of a mixed company of men and women of the world, to instruct the
aged, encourage the valiant, support the weak, reprove the guilty, and
set an example to all; and not feel what a ridiculous and blasphemous
business it would be, if he only pretended to do it for hire; and what a
ghastly and murderous business it would be if he did it strenuously
wrong; and what a marvellous and all but incredible thing the Church and
its power must be, if it were possible for him, with all the good
meaning in the world, to do it rightly--that any youth, I say, should
ever have got himself into the state of recklessness or conceit,
required to become a clergyman at all, under existing circumstances,
must put him quite out of the pale of those whom one appeals to on any
reasonable or moral question, in serious writing.... There is certainly
no Bishop now in the Church of England who would either dare in a full
drawing-room to attribute to himself the gift of prophecy, in so many
words; or to write at the head of any of his sermons, ‘On such and such
a day, of such and such a month, in such and such a place, the Word of
the Lord came unto me, saying’:--Nevertheless he claims to have received
the Holy Ghost himself by laying on of hands; and to be able to
communicate the Holy Ghost to other men in the same manner. And he knows
that the office of the prophet is as simply recognized in the
enumeration of the powers of the ancient church, as that of the apostle
or evangelist or doctor. And yet he can neither point out in the Church
the true prophets, to whose number he dares not say that he himself
belongs, nor the false prophets, who are casting out devils in the name
of Christ without being known by him.... But the word ‘Priest’ is one
which he finds it convenient to assume himself, and to give to his
fellow clergymen. He knows, just as well as he knows prophecy to be a
gift attributed to the Christian minister, that priesthood is a function
expressly taken away from the Christian minister (as distinguished, that
is to say, from other members of the Church). He dares not say in the
open drawing-room that he offers sacrifice for any soul there; and he
knows that he cannot give authority for calling himself a priest from
any canonical book of the New Testament. So he equivocates on the sound
of the word ‘Presybter.’ ...”[28]
“This preaching of Christ has, nevertheless, become an acknowledged
profession and means of livelihood for gentlemen: and the simony of
to-day differs only from that of apostolic times, in that, while the
elder Simon thought the gift of the Holy Ghost worth a considerable
offer in ready money, the modern Simon would on the whole refuse to
accept the same gift of the Third Person of the Trinity, without a nice
little attached income, a pretty church, with a steeple restored by Mr.
Scott, and an eligible neighbourhood.”[29]
And, in soberer vein: “No way will ever be found of rightly ordaining
men who have taken up the trade of preaching as a means of livelihood,
and to whom it is a matter of personal interest whether they preach in
one place or another; only those who have left their means of living,
that they may preach, and whose peace follows them as they wander, and
abides where they enter in, are of God’s ordaining; and practically
until the Church insists that every one of her ministers shall either
have an independent income, or support himself for his ministry on
Sunday by true bodily toil during the week, no word of the living Gospel
will ever be spoken from her pulpits. How many of those who now occupy
them have verily been invited to such office by the Holy Ghost may be
easily judged by observing how many the Holy Ghost has similarly invited
of religious persons already in prosperous business or desirable
position.”[30]
Another passage from another place runs: “Take the desire of
teaching--the entirely unselfish and noble instinct for telling to those
who are ignorant the truth we know, and guarding them from the errors we
see them in danger of--there is no nobler, no more constant instinct in
honourable breasts; but let the Devil formalise it, and mix the pride of
a profession with it--get foolish people entrusted with the business of
instruction, and make their giddy heads giddier by putting them up in
pulpits above a submissive crowd--and you have it instantly corrupted
into its own reverse; you have an alliance against the light (saying)
‘Light is in us only. Shut your eyes close and fast and we will lead
you.’”[31]
In another place he says the difficult question is not, why workmen
don’t go to church, but--why other people do. He asks,[32] “What
Scripture warrant there is for the offices and authority of the clergy,
and defies anyone to find any.” Their functions, he says, must depend on
the needs of the time. “Robinson Crusoe, on his island, wants no Bishop,
and makes a thunderstorm do for an evangelist. The University of Oxford
would do ill without its Bishop, but wants an evangelist besides, and
that forthwith.”
He says that by yielding to the impression that the most sacred calling
is that of the clergy, “the sacred character of the layman himself is
forgotten, and his own ministerial duty is neglected,” and so laymen
wrongly “devote their whole time and energy to the business of this
world. No mistake can possibly be greater. Every member of the Church is
equally bound to the service of the Head of the Church, and that service
is pre-eminently the saving of souls. There is not a moment of a man’s
active life in which he may not be indirectly preaching, and throughout
a great part of his life he ought to be directly preaching, and teaching
both strangers and friends.” This is from the _Sheepfolds_ pamphlet of
1851; at that time he nevertheless contemplates church officers of a
sort, as organizers, deacons, or visitors, and thinks they may be
maintained for their special work, and includes religious instruction
and exhortation among these duties. But this last advice he supersedes
in _Fors_ of 1873 and later dates, when he places preaching on a purely
amateur basis, in the passages quoted already, and similar ones.
“All good judging, and all good preaching, must be given gratis. Look
back to what I have incidentally said of lawyers and clergy, as
professional--that is to say, as living by their judgment, and sermons.
You will perhaps now be able to receive my conclusive statement, that
all such professional sale of justice and mercy is a deadly sin. A man
may sell the work of his hands, but not his equity, nor his piety. Let
him live by his spade, and if his neighbours find him wise enough to
decide a dispute between them, or if he is in modesty and simplicity
able to give them a piece of pious advice, let him do so, in Heaven’s
name, but not take a fee for it.”[33]
In Letter XIII of _Time and Tide_ and in _Sesame and Lilies_ § 22 he
explains the sort of functions he would give to his Bishops, as
described in Chapter V.
We have incidentally alluded to Ruskin’s teaching on the Priesthood of
all Believers. He asserts that all members of the Universal Church are
Priests,[34] that the exclusive priestly claim of the Clergy is
“blasphemous,” and has no shadow of excuse, “because it has been
ordained by the Holy Spirit that no Christian minister shall once call
himself a Priest as distinguished from his flock from one end of the New
Testament to the other.”
Schools of religious thought are discriminated by nothing so decisively
as by their attitude to the Bible. They are classed at once if they call
the Bible the Word of God. This bad and quite unauthorized habit has
blinded many eyes. Ruskin attacks it again and again. “The error
consists, first, in declaring a bad translation of a group of books of
various qualities, accidentally associated, to be the Word of God.
Secondly, reading of this singular Word of God, only the bits they like,
and never taking any pains to understand even those. Thirdly, resolutely
refusing to practise even the small bits they do understand, if such
practice happen to go against their own worldly--especially
money--interests.”[35]
Compare this severe passage with one from _The Ethics of the Dust_, V §
59: “The way in which common people read their Bibles is just like the
way that the old monks thought hedgehogs ate grapes. They rolled
themselves (it was said), over and over, where the grapes lay on the
ground: what fruit stuck to their spines, they carried off and ate. So
your hedgehoggy readers roll themselves over and over their Bibles, and
declare that whatever sticks to their own spines is Scripture, and that
nothing else is.”[36]
But Ruskin is not satisfied with negative teaching on this great
subject. He tells us what the Word of God is, as well as what it is not:
“By that Word, or Voice, or Breath, or Spirit, the heavens and earth,
and all the host of them, were made, and in it they exist. It is your
life; and speaks to you always, so long as you live nobly; dies out of
you as you refuse to obey it; leaves you to hear, and be slain by, the
word of an evil spirit, instead. It may come to you in books--come to
you in clouds--come to you in the voices of men--come to you in the
stillness of deserts. You must be strong in evil, if you have quenched
it wholly;--very desolate in this Christian land, if you have never
heard it at all.”[37]
Much may be gleaned from a man’s use of the word Church. Is it a
building, or a select and limited outward community or more than either?
Ruskin, interpreting Scripture in his _Sheepfolds_,[38] finds a Low
Church divine giving the meaning of the word Church to be an “external
institution of certain forms of worship.” He therefore suggests the
following emendations: “Unto the angel of the external institution of
certain forms of worship at Ephesus write,” and “Salute the brethren
which are at Laodicea, and Nymphas, and the external institution of
certain forms of worship which is in his house.”
“I continually see subscriptions of ten, fifteen, or twenty thousand
pounds for new churches. Now a good clergyman never wants a church. He
can say all that his congregation essentially need to hear in any of his
parishioners’ best parlours, or upper chambers, or in the ball-room at
the Nag’s Head; or if these are not large enough, in the market-place,
or the harvest field. And until every soul in the parish is cared for,
and saved from such sorrow of body or mind as alms can give comfort in,
no clergyman, but in sin or heresy, can ask for a church at all. What
does he want with altars? Was the Lord’s Supper eaten on one? What with
pews?--unless rents for the pride of them? What with font and
pulpit?--that the next wayside brook, or mossy bank, cannot give him?
The temple of Christ is in His people--His order, to feed them--His
throne, alike of audience and of judgment, in Heaven: were it otherwise,
even the churches which we have already are not always open for
prayer.”[39]
He suggests that we can decide “who are Christ’s sheep, not by their
being in any definite fold, for many are lost sheep sometimes; but by
their sheeplike behaviour; and a great many are indeed sheep which, on
the far mountain side, in their peacefulness, we take for stones.”[40]
This is a delightful expression of the feeling that you may be a child
of God, without having heard of the Christian Revelation of Him.
To make Baptism a sign of admission into the visible Church he says is
absurd; “for we know that half the baptized people in the world are very
visible rogues. Also the Holy Ghost is sometimes given before Baptism,
and it would be absurdity to call a man on whom the Holy Ghost had
fallen, an invisible Christian.”[41]
On the Sacrament he declared to a correspondent in 1888 that he would
take it from anybody’s hand, the Pope’s, the Queen’s or a hedgeside
gipsy’s, and quoted Longfellow’s lines:
“A holy family, that makes
Each meal a supper of the Lord.”
He is drastic in his rejection of all Prayer Books. Prayers out of a
book are no prayers to him; he cannot think that varying needs are met
by routine prayer. These statements are in his _Letters to the Clergy on
the Lord’s Prayer and the Church_ (1879), reprinted in _On the Old
Road_, p. 325, and he comments on the distrust in the efficacy of prayer
likely to be produced by having to ask one day “that the rest of our
lives hereafter may be pure and holy,” knowing that next day, or at
least next Sunday, we shall be expected to confess that “there is no
health in us.” He seriously suspects the effect of the Liturgy on the
truthfulness of the English mind.
When he discusses the vital problem of the seat of Authority in religion
he declares that it ultimately resides within, not in an outward Church
or Book. He is absolutely uncompromising about this.
“There is, therefore, in matters of doctrine, no such thing as the
authority of the Church. We might as well talk of the authority of a
morning cloud. There may be light in it, but the light is not of it; and
it diminishes the light that it gets; and lets less of it through than
it receives, Christ being its sun. Or, we might as well talk of the
authority of a flock of sheep--for the Church is a body to be taught and
fed, not to teach and feed; and of all sheep that are fed on the earth,
Christ’s sheep are the most simple,” likely to die in the bramble
thickets; “but for their Shepherd, who is for ever finding them and
bearing them back, with torn fleeces and eyes full of fear.”[42]
There is also an interesting passage in _The Eagle’s Nest_ (p. 135) on
“The Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world.”
By way of Church discipline he advises a process of excommunication by a
jury of laymen.[43]
What of religious decorative art? Surely here the great art critic and
apostle of the Beautiful will be found on the ritualist side? Not so. He
says that Church art, pictures, images, and so on, “make us believe what
we would not otherwise have believed; and, secondly, make us think of
subjects we should not otherwise have thought of, intruding them amidst
our ordinary thoughts in a confusing and familiar manner.” “This art,”
he says, “is misapplied, and in most cases, very dangerously so. Our
duty is to believe in the existence of Divine, or any other, persons,
only upon rational proofs of their existence; and not because we have
seen pictures of them.”
“But I nevertheless believe that he who trusts much to such helps (as
‘Rafaelesque and other sacred paintings of a high order’) will find them
fail him at his need; and that the dependence, in any great degree, on
the presence or power of a picture, indicates a wonderfully feeble sense
of the presence and power of God. I do not think that any man, who is
thoroughly certain that Christ is in the room, will care what sort of
picture of Christ he has on its walls and, in the plurality of cases,
the delight taken in art of this kind is, in reality, nothing more than
a form of graceful indulgence of those sensibilities which the habits of
a disciplined life restrain in other directions. Such art is, in a word,
the opera and drama of the monk. Sometimes it is worse than this, and
the love of it is the mask under which a general thirst for morbid
excitement will pass itself off for religion. The young lady who rises
in the middle of the day, jaded by her last night’s ball, and utterly
incapable of any simple or wholesome religious exercise, can still gaze
into the dark eyes of the Madonna di San Sisto, or dream over the
whiteness of an ivory crucifix, and returns to the course of her daily
life in full persuasion that her morning’s feverishness has atoned for
her evening’s folly. And, all the while, the art which possesses these
very doubtful advantages is acting for undoubtful detriment, in the
various ways above examined (in a previous passage), on the inmost
fastnesses of faith; it is throwing subtle endearments round foolish
traditions, confusing sweet fancies with sound doctrines, and enforcing
false assertions with pleasant circumstantiality, until, to the usual,
and assuredly sufficient, difficulties standing in the way of belief,
its votaries have added a habit of sentimentally changing what they know
to be true, and of dearly loving what they confess to be false.”
“Has there then (the reader asks emphatically) been no true religious
ideal? Has religious art never been of any service to mankind? I fear,
on the whole, not.
“More, I think, has always been done for God by few words than many
pictures, and more by few acts than many words.”
“And for us all there is in this matter even a deeper danger than that
of indulgence. There is the danger of Artistical Pharisaism. Of all the
forms of pride and vanity, as there are none more subtle, so I believe
there are none more sinful, than those which are manifested by the
Pharisees of art. To be proud of birth, of place, of wit, of bodily
beauty, is comparatively innocent, just because such pride is more
natural, and more easily detected. But to be proud of our sanctities; to
pour contempt upon our fellows because, forsooth, we like to look at
Madonnas in bowers of roses, better than at plain pictures of plain
things; and to make this religious art of ours the expression of our own
perpetual self-complacency--congratulating ourselves, day by day, on
our purities, proprieties, elevations, and inspirations, as above the
reach of common mortals, this I believe to be one of the wickedest and
foolishest forms of human egotism.”[44]
These clear-sounding testimonies form a coherent whole. Is there any
religious body in England which holds all, or even most of these
positions? Remarkably enough, there is one which holds them all; indeed,
whose separate existence depends on holding just these positions,
positive and negative alike. This one is the Society of Friends. We find
to our surprise that, without knowing it, Ruskin was a real and very
completely furnished Quaker.