The Harvest of Ruskin. Graham John William

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ