“The Parsonage, Werrington, Peterborough,
March 4, 1875.
“My dear Sir,—I have no doubt you know better than I do what Gospel is
the more widely preached, for while you have been wandering, freer than
a bee, from place to place, and from church to church, I have been
‘entangled’ from day to day in stuffy rooms among ignorant and immoral
people, in crowded parishes in London and elsewhere; and on Sundays
have listened chiefly to the gathered voices of the same ignorant
people, led by my own.
“But, not to move from the ground of ascertained fact, I have a right
to say that I know that the morality of the parishes best known to me
has been made better, and not worse, by the shepherding of the Pastors.
“I have heard and read a good deal, in clerical circles, and clerical
books, of doctrines of ‘substitution’ and ‘vicarious righteousness’
such as you rightly condemn as immoral; but if all the sermons preached
in the English Church on any given Sunday were fully and fairly
reported, I question if a dozen would contain the least trace of these
doctrines.
“Amidst all the isms and dogmas by which Clerics are entangled, I find
the deep and general conviction getting clearer and clearer utterance,
that the one supremely lovely, admirable and adorable thing,—the one
thing to redeem and regenerate human life, the one true Gospel for
mankind,—is the Spirit and Life of Jesus Christ.
“As to your terrible charge against the Pastors, that they preach for
hire, I need only quote your own opinion in this month’s Fors, that all
honest minstrels and authors, manifestly possessing talent for their
business, should be allowed to claim ‘for their actual toil, in
performance of their arts, modest reward, and daily bread.’
“Surely the labourer who spends his life in speaking salutary truth is
not less worthy of his hire than he who sings or writes it?
“The reward offered to most Pastors is ‘modest’ enough,
“I am very faithfully yours,
“Edward Z. Lyttel.
“John Ruskin, Esq.”
I willingly insert my correspondent’s second letter, but will not at
present answer it, except privately. I wonder, in the meantime, whether
he will think the effect of the ministry of Felix Neff on the mind of
the sweet English lady whose letter next follows, moral, or immoral? A
portion of whose letter, I should have said; its opening touches on
household matters little to her mind, to which her first exclamation
refers.
“How sorrowful it all is! Yet, I don’t feel so naughty about it as I
did on Saturday, because yesterday I read the life of Felix Neff, who
went to live by his own wish at that dismal Dormilleuse in the high
Alps, amongst the wretched people who were like very unclean animals,
and for whom he felt such sublime pity that he sacrificed himself to
improve them; and as I read of that terrible Alpine desert, with eight
months’ hopeless dreariness, and of the wretched food and filthy hovels
in which the miserable people lived, I looked up at my good fire and
clean room, with dear white Lily lying so soft on my lap, and the
snowdrops outside the window, and I really did feel ashamed of having
felt so grumbly and discontented as I did on Saturday. So good Felix
Neff’s good work is not done yet, and he will doubtless help others as
long as the world lasts.”
The following letter is an interesting and somewhat pathetic example of
religious madness; not a little, however, connected with mismanagement
of money. The writer has passed great part of his life in a
conscientious endeavour to teach what my correspondent Mr. Lyttel
would, I think, consider “salutary truth”; but his intense egotism and
absence of imaginative power hindered him from perceiving that many
other people were doing the same, and meeting with the same
disappointments. Gradually he himself occupied the entire centre of his
horizon; and he appoints himself to “judge the United States in
particular, and the world in general.”
The introductory clause of the letter refers somewhat indignantly to a
representation I had irreverently made to him that a prophet should
rather manifest his divine mission by providing himself miraculously
with meat and drink, than by lodging in widows’ houses without in
anywise multiplying their meal for them; and then leaving other people
to pay his bill.
“So long as you deliberately refuse to help in any way a man who (you
have every reason to know) possesses more of the righteousness of God
than yourself, (when you have ample means to do so,) how can you be
said to ‘do the will of your Father which is in Heaven’? or how can you
expect to receive understanding to ‘know of the doctrine’ of the
Saviour, (or of my doctrine,) ‘whether it be of God, or whether I speak
of myself’? If you possessed a genuine ‘faith,’ you would exercise
humanity towards such a man as myself, and leave the result with God;
and not presumptuously decide that it was ‘wrong’ to relieve ‘a
righteous man’ in distress, lest you should encourage him in delusions
which you choose to suppose him to be labouring under.
“People seem to suppose that it is the Saviour who will judge the
world, if any one does. He distinctly declares that He will not. ‘If
any one hear my words, and believe not, I judge him not; for I came not
to judge the world, but to save the world. He that rejecteth me, and
receiveth not my words, hath one that judgeth him: the word that I have
spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day.’ John xii. 47, 48. I
represent that ‘WORD’ which the Saviour spoke, and I have already
judged, and condemned, this country, and the United States, in
particular; and Christendom, and the World in general. I have for
twenty years been a preacher of ‘the Righteousness of God’ to this
generation (as Noah was for a hundred years to his generation), and I
have proved by actual experiment that none among the men of this
generation can be induced to ‘enter the kingdom of heaven’ until the
predicted ‘time of trouble, such as was not since there was a nation,’
comes suddenly, and compels those who are ready to enter the kingdom of
God, to do so at once; and I know not how soon after I leave this
country the ‘trouble’ will come; perhaps immediately, perhaps in about
a year’s time; but come it must; and the sooner it comes, the sooner it
will be over, I suppose.
“Yours faithfully.”
The following specimen of the kind of letters which the “judge of the
United States in particular, and the World in general,” leaves the
people favoured by his judgment to send to his friends, may as well
supplement his own letter:—
“Mr. (J. of U.S. in p. and the W. in g.)’s name will, I trust, excuse
me to you for writing; but my house entirely failed me, and I, with my
child, are now really in great want. I write trusting that, after your
former kindness to me, you will feel disposed to send me a little
assistance.
“I would not have written, but I am seriously in need.
“Please address to me,” etc.
Whether, however, the judge of the world in general errs most in
expecting me to pay the necessary twopences to his hosts, or the world
in general itself, in expecting me to pay necessary twopences to its
old servants when it has no more need of them, may be perhaps
questionable. Here is a paragraph cut out of an application for an
hospital vote, which I received the other day:—
Mr. A., aged seventy-one, has been a subscriber to the Pension Fund
forty-five years, the Almshouse Fund eighteen years, and the Orphan
Fund four years. He is now, in consequence of his advanced age, and the
infirmities attendant on a dislocated shoulder, asthma, and failing
sight, incapable of earning sufficient for a subsistence for himself
and wife, who is afflicted with chronic rheumatic gout. He was
apprenticed to Mr. B., and has worked for Mr. C. D. forty years, and
his earnings at present are very small.
Next, here is a piece of a letter disclosing another curious form of
modern distress, in which the masters and mistresses become dependent
for timely aid on their servants. This is at least as old, however, as
Miss Edgeworth’s time; I think the custom is referred to at the
toilette of Miss Georgiana Falconer in ‘Patronage.’
“Every day makes me bitterly believe more and more what you say about
the wickedness of working by fire and steam, and the harm and insidious
sapping of true life that comes from large mills and all that is
connected with them. One of my servants told my sister to-day (with an
apology) that her mother had told her in her letter to ask me if I
would sell her my children’s old clothes, etc.—that indeed many ladies
did—her mother had often bought things. Oh! it made me feel horrible.
We try to buy strong clothes, and mend them to the last, and then
sometimes give them away; but selling clothes to poor people seems to
me dreadful. I never thought ladies and gentlemen would sell their
clothes even to shops—till we came to live here, and happened to know
of its being done. It surely must be wrong and bad, or I should not
feel something in me speaking so strongly against it, as mean and
unholy.”
A piece of country gossip on bees and birds, with a humiliating passage
about my own Coniston country, may refresh us a little after dwelling
on these serious topics:—
“A humble cow is I fancy more properly a humbled cow—it is so called in
Durham—a cow whose horn is no longer set up on high. A humble or bumble
bee is there called a ‘bumbler.’ To bumble in Durham means to go
buzzing about; a fussy man would be called a great bumbler. But don’t
believe it has no sting: it can sting worse than a honey bee, and all
but as badly as a wasp. They used to tell us as children that
‘bumblers’ did not sting, but I know from experience that they do. We
used as children to feel that we knew that the little yellow mason bee
(?) did not sting, but I have no true knowledge on that point. Do you
care to have the common village names of birds? I am afraid I can only
remember one or two, but they are universally used in the north.
“The wren which makes the hanging nest lined with feathers is called
the feather poke; yellow-hammer, yellow-yowley; golden-crested wren,
Christian wren; white-throat, Nanny white-throat; hedge-sparrow, Dicky
Diky. I could find more if you cared for them. To wind up, I will send
you an anecdote I find among father’s writings, and which refers to
your country. He is speaking of some time early in 1800. ‘Cock-fighting
was then in all its glory. When I was in the neighbourhood of
Ulverston, in 18—, [25] I was told that about the time of which I am
writing, a grave ecclesiastical question had been settled by an appeal
to a battle with cocks. The chapelry of Pennington was vacant, but
there was a dispute who should present a clerk to the vacant
benefice,—the vicar of Ulverston, the mother-church, the
church-wardens, the four-and-twenty, or the parishioners at large,—and
recourse was had to a Welsh Main.’”
Finally, the following letter is worth preserving. It succinctly states
the impression on the minds of the majority of booksellers that they
ought to be able to oblige their customers at my expense. Perhaps in
time, the customers may oblige the booksellers by paying them something
for their trouble, openly, instead of insisting on not paying them
anything unless they don’t know how much it is.
“Mr. George Allen.