_From the Rev._ CHARLES BIGG, D.D., _Rector of Fenny Compton_.
Mr. Ruskin compares the clergyman with an Alpine guide, whose business
it is simply to carry the traveller in safety over rocks and glaciers to
the mountain top. He is not to trouble himself or his charge with
needless refinements of doctrine. He is not to exaggerate the dignity of
his office, or to give himself out as anything but a guide. In
particular, he is not to assume anything of a mediatorial character. He
is to preach the Gospel--not of Luther nor of Augustine, but of Christ;
in plain words and short terms. He is to proclaim aloud, boldly and
constantly, "This is the will of the Lord,"--to apply, that is, the
morality of the Gospel, stringently and authoritatively, to the lives of
his people. To effect this application with more power, he is to
exercise a rigid discipline, and exclude from his congregation all who
are not acting up to what he conceives to be the Gospel ideal. He is not
to hamper himself with any set and formal Liturgy, which can never be
copious or flexible enough to meet the varied needs of a number of men
differing widely in knowledge and attainment.
Every one will feel what a crowd of perplexities start up here at every
sentence. In what sense is a clergyman like a Chamouni guide? There is a
resemblance, no doubt, but not of a kind on which it would be possible
to build any argument. It is not the business of the Alpine guide to
exercise any supervision over the morals of his employers, or to ask how
they earned the money with which he is paid. Again, what is meant by
the Gospel of Christ not according to anybody? It is easy to reject the
authority of St. Paul or St. John, or of Luther or Augustine, but there
is one commentator whose influence cannot be shaken off, and that is
ourselves. And our experience of those who have professed to preach the
Gospel pure and simple is not reassuring. Does Mr. Ruskin mean that we
are to burn all our theology,--even apparently the Epistles of St.
Paul,--and to forget all Church history since the day of the
Crucifixion? Does he mean that we are each to set up a theology--a
Church of his own? It would be but a poor gain to most of us to exchange
the great lamps of famous doctors for the uncertain rushlights of our
own imaginations.
Then again, what is this new and more than Genevan discipline that the
clergyman is to enforce? He is to take more pains to get wicked rich men
to stay out of the church than to persuade wicked poor ones to enter it.
After putting his own interpretation upon the Gospel, he is to lay under
an interdict all whom his own fire-new formula--for a formula he must
still have--excludes. He is to force, by the method of Procrustes, the
visible Church into co-extension with the invisible. No community of
Christians has ever attempted such a task. Any zealous (surely
over-zealous) parish priest who should so narrow the limits of his fold,
who should exclude the "usurer" from the ordinary means of grace, for
fear lest he should take God's name in vain by joining in the public
prayers, would expose himself, may we not think? to the reproach of
being less merciful than He who sends rain on the just and the unjust.
Nor, as he looked round upon his carefully-selected congregation, could
he easily flatter himself that he was preaching the Gospel "to every
creature."
Again, what is the will of the Lord, and what does Mr. Ruskin mean by
proclaiming it? That He loves righteousness and hates iniquity we know.
The difficulty is in applying this general rule in detail. What is its
bearing upon the policy of the Government, upon any particular trade
strike, upon the tangled web of good and evil motives which makes up the
moral consciousness of an average shopkeeper? I conceive Mr. Ruskin to
be thinking of preachers like Bernard, Savonarola, or Latimer, of
denunciations like those of Isaiah, or of our Lord. He seems to mean
that the clergyman should stand on a clear mountain summit, looking down
over the whole field of life, discerning with the eye of a prophet every
movement of evil on a small scale or on a large. There have been such
teachers in whose hands science, economy, politics, seemed all to become
branches of theology, members of one great body of Divine truth. But not
every man's lips are thus touched with the coal from the altar. Many an
excellent and most useful preacher would make but wild work if he took
to denouncing social movements or the spirit of the age. A singular
illustration of the danger that besets these sweeping moral judgments is
to be found in Mr. Ruskin's own denunciation of usury, that is, of
taking interest for money. Few people will agree either with the
particular opinion that every old lady who lives harmlessly on her
railway dividends ought to be excommunicated, or with the general
principle implied in this opinion, that every prohibition in the Old
Testament is still as valid as ever under social circumstances
altogether different.
People who need denouncing do not, as a rule, come to church to be
denounced. And it would be a great error to conclude, from our Lord's
language to the Pharisees and Sadducees, that the tone in which He
addressed the individual sinner was harsh or scathing. The preacher must
remember that he is a physician of souls, and the physician's touch is
gentle. Think for a moment what worldliness is--how easy it is to say
bitter things about it!--and then picture to yourselves a little
tradesman with a wife and seven or eight children to keep on his scanty
profits. What wonder if he sets too high a value on money? How difficult
for him to understand the words which bid him take no thought for the
morrow!
There is a time, no doubt, for fierce language, but it does not often
come. The preacher is no more exempt than other people from the golden
rule to put himself in his neighbour's place, and try to see things with
his neighbour's eyes.
Another difficulty arises out of the manner in which Mr. Ruskin speaks
of the relation of his Chamouni guides to dogmatic teaching. They ought
not, he says, to be compelled to hold opinions on the subject, say, of
the height of the Celestial Mountains, the crevasses which go down
quickest to the pit, and other cognate points of science, differing
from, or even contrary to, the tenets of the guides of the Church of
France.
It is difficult in the extreme to know exactly what is here meant. No
doubt it is needless for a guide to drop a plumb-line down every
crevasse that he has to cross. It would be great waste of time to
lecture his travellers on the laws that regulate the motion of glaciers
or the dip of the mountain strata. But what are the doctrines that stand
in this relation, or this no-relation, to the spiritual life? Is it
meant that all theology should be swept away like a dusty old cobweb?
I would go myself as far as this, that the fewer and simpler the
doctrines that a clergyman preaches, the better; that all doctrines
should be required to pass the test of reason and conscience, which are
also in their degrees Divine revelations, so far, at least, as this,
that no doctrine can be admitted which is demonstrably repugnant to
either one or the other. And in the third place, the greatest care
should be taken to discriminate matters of faith, real axioms of
religion, from pious opinions or venerable practices which have no vital
connection with the Christian faith; which, to use Burke's phrase, all
understandings do not ratify, and all hearts do not approve. A grave
responsibility rests upon those who neglect this discrimination. It is
also a point of the highest importance that when most doctrinal a
clergyman should be least dogmatic; that he should remember that all
doctrine, by the necessity of the case, is cast into an antithetical,
more or less paradoxical shape; that he should never lose sight of the
harmony and balance between intersecting truths, or of that unfortunate
tendency of the human mind to seize upon and appropriate points of
difference in their crudest and most antagonistic form, to the exclusion
of points of agreement; that he should always do his best to show the
reasonableness of the Christian teaching, its analogy and harmony with
all the works of God; that where his knowledge fails, he should frankly
confess that it does fail, and not try to eke it out by guesses, or to
disguise its insufficiency by rhetoric.
But after all these allowances it remains a fact that the clergyman is
not a guide only, but a teacher, an ambassador. He is to teach his
people all that he knows about God and His relation to the soul of man.
He is to study and meditate himself, and to set forth the conclusion he
has reached fully and fearlessly. And if he discharges this duty
reasonably and zealously, he need not be afraid of finding that there is
a gulf fixed between doctrine and practice. These two must go together.
There can be no conduct deserving the name without a philosophy of
conduct, and that philosophy is a sound divinity. Even the loftiest and
most abstruse doctrines must have an influence upon life. It is a common
remark that scientific truth should be pursued for its own sake, and
that the most valuable practical results have often followed from
investigations carried out with a single eye to the truth. It is an
equally common remark that those teach the simplest things best whose
range of knowledge and belief is widest. We might point to Mr. Ruskin
himself as a striking illustration of this. What is simpler than beauty?
what more universally apprehended? what at first sight more incapable of
analysis? Yet as we listen to the great critic, what wonderful laws does
he point out--what a wealth of knowledge does he bring to bear--how
clear he makes it to us that the power of feeling (still more the power
of creating) beauty is the hard-won fruit of labour, study, and
devotion. So it is with life: those who would create a beautiful life
must know the laws of spiritual beauty,--and those laws are theology.
But criticism is a thankless task. It is a more gracious and, towards a
great man, a more respectful office to note those points on which our
debt to Mr. Ruskin is acknowledged, and our sympathy with him unalloyed.
These letters are, in spirit at any rate, not unworthy of the man who
has exercised a deeper and wider influence upon the morality of our time
than any other, except perhaps Thomas Carlyle. And the great lesson of
each of these eloquent teachers is the duty of Reality. There are many
points in which we do not agree with them: let us be all the readier to
acknowledge the debt that we owe. Both laymen,--like Amos, neither
prophets nor sons of prophets,--they have done a work which, perhaps,
under the altered circumstances of society, no professional preacher
could have achieved. Any one who considers the earnestness and reverence
of modern intellectual literature; the anxious desire even of the
Agnostic to lay the foundations of his moral life as deep as possible;
the manifold efforts, while denying all religion, yet to maintain the
union of imagination and reason, without which there can be no loftiness
of character, no nobility of aspiration, yet which nothing but religion
can consecrate and fructify,--and compares all this with the sneering,
self-satisfied flippancy of Gibbon and Voltaire, will feel how vast is
the change for the better; and these two writers have been the chief
instruments in bringing that change about.
Let me notice briefly two points on which Mr. Ruskin insists in these
letters with great force and beauty. The first is the love of the
Father. No text is more familiar than that which tells us that "God is
love." It is not indeed inconsistent with that other text which tells
us that He is "a consuming fire." But if its meaning is fully imbibed
and allowed to bear its natural fruit, it must result in the abandonment
of those forensic views of our blessed Lord's atonement, which all the
subtlety of Canon Mozley cannot bring into harmony with the dictates of
our consciences. If the Father is love, there can be no division, no
antithesis between the Father and the Son. If He is love, then the idea
of sacrifice, which is of the essence of love, must enter into our
conception of the Father also. I say no more about this, because any one
who chooses to do so may find the Fatherhood of God, and all that it
implies, treated of with great fulness and a marvellous depth of
spiritual insight in the letters of Erskine of Linlathen.
It can hardly be doubted that the kind of language which Protestants of
a certain class have been, and still are, in the habit of using, about
the "Scheme of Redemption," constitutes a most serious stumbling-block
in the way of many an earnest spirit. There are few preachers probably,
and few congregations now,--in the Establishment at any rate,--who
would not revolt against the hideous calmness with which Jonathan
Edwards contemplates the "little spiders" dropping off into the flames.
But a great deal of mischief remains to be undone. Those who are
acquainted with the biographies of Shelley, of James and of John Stuart
Mill, know well what effect the fierce doctrines of Calvinism have
produced upon minds which for the issues of morality and, surely, even
of religion, were "finely touched." And who can tell what horror and
indignation have been wrought in some minds, what agonies of despair in
others, who, when at last the blessed work of repentance began to stir
within them, and they turned their eyes for comfort to the cross, were
met by the terrible warning that none but the select few can call God
their Father, and that in all probability their own eternal tortures
were decreed before ever they entered the world?
The other point to which I must briefly advert is Mr. Ruskin's protest
against the use of words which imply--which leave the least possibility
of hoping for--a mechanical absolution, a pardon of sins that have not
been abandoned. I do not indeed think that the reproach of using such
language falls upon those who are fond of the title of priests alone,
for the doctrines of Calvinism are far more liable to abuse. Nor do I
think that any preaching of our clergy on this subject can be said to
have "turned our cities into loathsome centres of fornication and
covetousness." But here, if anywhere, we ought never to forget the
danger of even seeming to set Theology against Reason and Conscience, of
allowing the least pretext for thinking that a mere intellectual assent
to abstract truths on the one hand, a mere acceptance of ecclesiastical
ordinances on the other, can wipe away sins; or that a heart unpurified
by charity and obedience, could be at rest even in the kingdom of
heaven.
_From the Rev._ CANON COOPER, _Vicar of Grange-over-Sands_.
Thank God, all good men are broader and better than their creed,--better
and broader, I mean, than those parts of their creed which they insist
upon most, because they distinguish them from other people. (These
distinguishing points are always of the least importance, in my
opinion.) And with my experience of sermons for nearly forty years (for
I was very early "called upon to hear sermons"), I am not conscious of
such universal omissions on the part of the "priests" of the Church of
England as Mr. Ruskin affirms. The universality of the _love_ of God the
_Father_, embracing even the "_wicked rich_" as well as the "wicked
poor," is largely dwelt upon by all "schools."
The kingdom of God _in this present sinful world_ is preached and is
laboured for. In the present, however, it is more correctly described as
the _kingdom of Christ_. When "the end comes," "He shall deliver up the
kingdom to God, _even the Father_" (1 Cor. xv. 24, and _seqq._) As for
denouncing the sins of the rich, this is largely done, and especially by
"lively young ecclesiastics" in great towns. And as to preaching
forgiveness without amendment, no man of common sense can do that; but
Mr. Ruskin may say that common sense is rare among the clergy; and some
may be afraid to preach morality, because of an old-fashioned
superstition that _morality_ is opposed to the _Gospel_. However, I do
not hear much of such preaching. As for the duty of every man to do
something of the work of the world for his daily bread, that is largely
taught; and I believe that the kingdom of God is coming in that respect.
A great deal of the drudgery of the world is done by big men now. Also I
think that the sinfulness of _omission_ is much insisted on by the
clergy, as it is abundantly noticed in the Prayer Book, in accordance
with the clear teaching of Christ. And the same may be said upon the
_personal guilt_ of sin. A good clergyman never allows his people to
shelter themselves _in a crowd_.
I do not feel the force of the taunt about our saying every week, "There
is no health in us," because the most "healthy" Christian finds out
always fresh failings as his conscience grows more healthy (not morbidly
sensitive), and he is always ready to join in the general confession to
his dying day.
There is some value in the remark about Christian parents putting their
children into situations where they will be tempted to worship the
devil in order to win the kingdom of the world; but here, as elsewhere,
the exaggeration, for the sake of being forcible, is too marked.
_From the Rev._ HENRY M. FLETCHER.
"Yes," I should say, "it is possible to put the Gospel of Christ into
such plain words and short terms as that a plain man may understand it,
and plain men do understand it. And it is not left to be gathered out of
(any of) the Thirty-nine Articles, which are meant not for simple but
for clerkly people."
You seem to have felt it startling that Mr. Ruskin should ask for a
simple and comprehensible statement of the Christian Gospel--at least
Mr. Ruskin represents the case so. What Christ's ministers are bidden to
go into all the world and preach is--the good news that God has
reconciled the world unto Himself in Jesus Christ His Son; and that
whosoever will accept this Jesus as His Lord and Saviour shall have
eternal life through Him. You could not, I think, arrive at a
definition of what the Gospel of Christ is by explaining the terms of
the Lord's Prayer.
You must tell first about _Jesus_, our Lord, and what He has done,
before child or man can have any proper notion of "the Gospel." The
Gospel is a message from "Our Father which is in Heaven," of His love,
and of what His love--the love of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost--has
devised and executed for the redemption and glorification (through
sanctification) of His rebellious children.
There can be small objection taken to Mr. Ruskin's proposal to make the
Lord's Prayer "a foundation of Gospel teaching, as containing what all
Christians are agreed upon as first to be taught," if the "Gospel
teaching" is understood to be "teaching the truth to _Christians_." But
"the Gospel teaching or preaching," which is spoken of by Mr. Ruskin, is
"Gospel preaching" to the world not yet Christian, either Jewish or
heathen; and the Lord's Prayer cannot properly be taken as a foundation
of Gospel teaching to it. It must be told first of Jesus and His work,
and must have owned Him "Lord," before it can rightly be taught from
_His_ prayer. This prayer can have no _authority_ but to those who have
become His disciples. Those who are already His disciples learn
naturally from Him their relation and their duty to His Father and their
Father. St. Paul, in preaching to the Athenians, dwells not on the
Fatherhood _of God_, but on the need of repentance as a preparation for
the judgment which awaits all. "Jesus and the Resurrection" was what
they heard of first from this model preacher.
_From the Rev._ A. T. DAVIDSON.
MY DEAR SIR,--Permit me to say one thing with regard to the
correspondence which has passed between Mr. Ruskin and yourself.
Profitable as it is to listen to Mr. Ruskin, the student of Mr.
Maurice's writings will merely find in these remarkable letters an
additional plea on behalf of those truths for which Mr. Maurice so
bravely and so passionately contended. It is most refreshing to find two
such teachers in accord; and probably there will be many who will learn
from Mr. Ruskin what they never would have learnt, or even sought for,
from Mr. Maurice. It is, of course, for the truth, and not for his
individual statement of it, that Mr. Ruskin, even as Mr. Maurice did,
contends. It will, I am sure, be a matter of small moment to him so long
as the truth be sought for, whether it be arrived at by means of these
letters, or by means of Mr. Maurice's books on "The Lord's Prayer," "The
Prayer Book," and "The Commandments."
Believe me, my dear Sir, to be yours faithfully.
_From the Rev._ EDWARD GEOGHEGAN.