[Greek: ton arton hemon ton epiousion dos hemin semeron.]
_Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie._
BRANTWOOD, _19th August_.
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.
For the man who is not--day by day--doing work which will earn his
dinner, must be stealing his dinner; 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 fulness, 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 hemin ta opheilemata hemon, hos kai
hemeis aphiemen tois opheiletais hemon.]
_Et dimitte nobis debita nostra, sicut et nos dimittimus
debitoribus nostris._
BRANTWOOD, _3rd September_.
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 "wilfully sin after they have received the knowledge of the
truth."
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 simple 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--for ever, 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," 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."
But, whatever the manner of sin, by offence 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.
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.