“Not many years ago one might throw almost any calumny against the
Church or her clergy without fear of contradiction or exposure.
Happily, for the cause of truth and justice, those days are
gone—unhappily, however, for the unfortunate individuals born too late
for the safe indulgence of their spleen. Amongst these, we fear, must
be reckoned Mr. Ruskin, the Oxford Professor of Fine Art. He issues
monthly a pamphlet, entitled ‘Fors Clavigera,’ being ostensibly
‘Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain,’ but the
contents of which do not appear likely to edify that class, even if the
price (tenpence) were not prohibitory. In the forty-ninth of these
letters a furious and wholly unjustifiable attack is made upon the
Church. No abuse is deemed too unjust or too coarse to bestow upon the
clergy, and they are assailed in a tone of vituperation worthy of the
last century. The Professor says that, [42] ‘in general, any man’s
becoming a clergyman in these days implies that, at best, his sentiment
has overpowered his intellect, and that, whatever the feebleness of the
latter, the victory of his impertinent piety has been probably owing to
its alliance with his conceit, and its promise to him of the
gratification of being regarded as an oracle, without the trouble of
becoming wise, or the grief of being so.’ Much more there is in the
same insolent strain, as if the Professor’s head had been turned by the
height of critical infallibility to which he has elevated himself, and
from which he looks down with self-complacent scorn and arrogance upon
all fallible humanity, clerical or lay. He concludes by appending ‘a
specimen of the conduct of the Saints to whom our English clergymen
have delivered the Faith.’ This specimen is afforded, according to Mr.
Ruskin, in two cases of revolting and almost incredible barbarism,
tried recently at Liverpool Assizes, in one of which an unoffending man
was kicked to death by a gang of street ruffians, in the presence of an
admiring crowd; and in the other case, a drunken female tramp, drenched
with the rain, was taken into a field and outraged by half-a-dozen
youths, after which they left her, and she was found there next day
dead. We need not enter into the details of these cases, which were
given fully enough at the time; suffice it to say that in the records
of no age or nation will any tales be found surpassing these two in
savagery of mind and body, and in foulness of heart and soul. And what
is Mr. Ruskin’s reason for resuscitating the memory of these horrors?
What is the explanation that he has to give of them? What is the
judgment that he has to pass upon them? Let our readers behold it for
themselves in his own words:—‘The clergy may vainly exclaim against
being made responsible for this state of things. They, and chiefly
their Bishops, are wholly responsible for it; nay, are efficiently the
causes of it, preaching a false gospel for hire.’ These words have the
one merit of being perfectly plain. Mr. Ruskin does not insinuate his
vile charge by any indirect hints or roundabout verbiage, but expresses
his infamous meaning as unambiguously as possible. The clergy, he says,
are ‘wholly responsible’ for the murders and rapes which horrify us,
which, indeed, they ‘efficiently cause’; and the chiefs of these
incarnate fiends are the Bishops.
“This very intemperate attack elicited a few temperate remarks from one
of the maligned class. The Rev. E. Z. Lyttel, of Werrington, near
Peterborough, wrote to Mr. Ruskin thus:—‘I have been reading your words
to my conscience, but is it my unconscious hypocrisy, my self-conceit,
or my sentiment overpowering intellect which hinders me from hearing
the word Guilty? The Gospel I endeavour with all my might to preach and
embody is this—Believe on, be persuaded by, the Lord Jesus Christ; let
His life rule your lives, and you shall be safe and sound now and
everlastingly. Is this a false Gospel preached for hire? If not, what
other Gospel do you refer to?’ Mr. Lyttel seems to have thought that
the charge brought against himself and his clerical brethren of causing
murders and rapes was too gross for notice, or too intoxicated to merit
denial. He contented himself with the foregoing very mild reply, which,
however, proved adequate to the occasion which called it forth. Mr.
Lyttel was recently curate of St. Barnabas, in this town, and has also
held a curacy in London. His personal experience gives him a claim to
be heard when he assures the Professor that he knows that the morality
of the parishes with which he is best acquainted has been made better,
and not worse, by the self-sacrificing efforts of the clergy. It is
also pointed out that while Mr. Ruskin has been freely travelling about
in the enjoyment of beautiful scenery and fresh air, Mr. Lyttel and
other clergymen have been occupied from day to day in stuffy rooms, in
crowded parishes, amongst ignorant and immoral people. And whilst this
censorious Oxford luminary makes a great fuss about getting paid for
‘Fors Clavigera’ and his other writings, Mr. Lyttel hints that surely
the clergy should be paid for their teachings too, being quite equally
worthy of their hire.
“Our ex-townsman has so effectually disposed of the Professor’s
charges, that there is no need to endeavour to answer them further. We
have only noticed them so far in order to show our readers the extent
to which hatred of the Church becomes a craze with some persons,
otherwise estimable no doubt, whose judgment is for the time swept away
by passion. That there is no pleasing such persons is the more apparent
from Mr. Ruskin’s curious comments upon the well-known story of the
Rev. Septimus Hansard, the rector of Bethnal Green, who has caught the
small-pox, the typhus fever, and the scarlet fever, on three several
occasions [43] in the discharge of his pastoral duties among the sick
poor. When he fell down in his pulpit with the small-pox, he at once
said he would go to an hospital, but refused to enter the cab which his
friends called, lest he should infect it; and, a hearse happening to
pass, he went in it—a fine instance of courage and self-devotion. Mr.
Hansard’s stipend is five hundred a year, out of which he has to pay
two curates. And what has Mr. Ruskin to say to this? Surely this must
command his fullest sympathy, admiration, and approval? Far from it.
His snarling comment is as follows:—‘I am very sure that while he was
saving one poor soul in Bethnal he was leaving ten rich souls to be
damned at Tyburn, each of which would damn a thousand or two more by
their example or neglect.’ This peculiar mode of argument has the merit
of being available under all circumstances; for, of course, if Mr.
Hansard’s parish had happened to be Tyburn instead of Bethnal, Mr.
Ruskin would have been equally ready with the glib remark that while
the rector was saving one rich soul to Tyburn, he was leaving ten poor
souls to destruction in Bethnal. Are we to understand that Mr. Ruskin
thinks Mr. Hansard ought to be able to be in two places at once, or are
we to shrug our shoulders and say that some persons are hard to please?
The heroism of self-sacrifice Mr. Ruskin considers to be a waste and a
mistake. Mr. Hansard’s life has all, says the Professor, ‘been but one
fit of scarlet fever—and all aglow in vain.’ That noble-minded men
should devote themselves to the noblest work of the Church for the love
of Christ, and of those for whom He died, is apparently beyond Mr.
Ruskin’s conception. Love of sensation, he says, is the cause of it
all. ‘Sensation must be got out of death, or darkness, or
frightfulness.... And the culmination of the black business is that the
visible misery drags and beguiles to its help all the enthusiastic
simplicity of the religious young, and the honest strength of the
really noble type of English clergymen, and swallows them, as Charybdis
would life-boats. Courageous and impulsive men, with just sense enough
to make them soundly practical, and therefore complacent, in immediate
business, but not enough to enable them to see what the whole business
comes to when done, are sure to throw themselves desperately into the
dirty work, and die like lively moths in candle-grease.’ We have read
philosophy something like the above extract elsewhere before, and we
think the philosopher’s name was Harold Skimpole. What the gospel is
with which Mr. Ruskin proposes to supplant Christianity and to
regenerate the world, we do not know. A gospel of this tone, however,
published in tenpenny instalments, is not likely ever to reach the
hands of the workmen and labourers of Great Britain, much less their
hearts.
With this interesting ebullition, shall we call it, of Holy Water, or
beautiful explosion,—perhaps, more accurately,—of Holy Steam, in one of
our great manufacturing centres, a very furnace, it would appear, of
heartfelt zeal for the Church, I wish I could at once compare a
description of the effects of similar zeal for the—Chapel, given me in
a letter just received from Wakefield, for which I sincerely thank my
correspondent, and will assume, unless I hear further from him, his
permission to print a great part of said letter in next Fors.
My more practical readers may perhaps be growing desperate, at the
continued non-announcement of advance in my main scheme. But the
transference to the St. George’s Company of the few acres of land
hitherto offered us, cannot be effected without the establishment of
the society on a legal basis, which I find the most practised counsel
slow in reducing to terms such as the design could be carried out upon.
The form proposed shall, however, without fail, be submitted to the
existing members of the Company in my next letter.