10. My good working readers, I will try to-day to put you more clearly in understanding of this modern gospel,of what truth there is in it for some there is, and of what pestilent evil. I call it a modern gospel: in its deepest truth it is as old as Christianity. "This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them." And it was the most distinctive character of Christianity. Here was a new, astonishing religion indeed; one had heard before of righteousness; before of resurrection;-never before of mercy to sin, or fellowship with it. But it is only in strictly modern times (that is to say, within the last hundred years) that this has been fixed on, by a large sect of thick-headed persons, as the essence of Christianity,-nay, as so much its essence, that to be an extremely sinful sinner is deliberately announced by them as the best of qualifications for becoming an extremely Christian Christian. But all the teachings of Heaven are given-by sad law -in so obscure, nay, often in so ironical manner, that a blockhead necessarily reads them wrong. Very marvellous it is that Heaven, which really in one sense is merciful to sinners, is in no sense merciful to fools, but even lays pitfalls for them, and inevitable snares.3 2 11. Again and again, in the New Testament, the publican (supposed at once traitor to his country, and thief) and the harlot are made the companions of Christ. She out of whom He had cast seven devils, loves Him best, sees Him first, after His resurrection. The sting of that old verse, "When thou sawest a thief, thou consentedst to him, and hast been partaker with adulterers," seems done away with. Adultery itself uncondemned,-for, behold, in your hearts is not every one of you alike? "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her." And so, 1 [Luke xv. 2.] 2 [Compare Ethics of the Dust, § 51 (Vol. XVIII. pp. 265-266).] [See Letter 53, §§ 4-8 (pp. 319-322); and compare Vol. V. p. liii.] [See Mark xvi. 9. The other Bible references in § 11 are Psalms I. 18; John viii. 7; 2 Samuel xii. 5, 6; Matthew v. 7; and Luke vii. 47.] and so, no more stones shall be cast nowadays; and here,' on the top of our epitaph on the Bishop, lies a notice of the questionable sentence which hanged a man for beating his wife to death with a stick. "The jury recommended him strongly to mercy.' 2 They did so, because they knew not, in their own hearts, what mercy meant. They were afraid to do anything so extremely compromising and disagreeable as causing a man to be hanged, had no "pity" for any creatures beaten to death-wives, or beasts; but only a cowardly fear of commanding death, where it was due. Your modern conscience will not incur the responsibility of shortening the hourly more guilty life of a single rogue; but will contentedly fire a salvo of mitrailleuses into a regiment of honest menleaving Providence to guide the shot. But let us fasten on the word they abused, and understand it. Mercymisericordia: it does not in the least mean forgiveness of sins, it means pity of sorrows. In that very instance which the Evangelicals are so fond of quoting-the adultery of David-it is not the Passion for which he is to be judged, but the want of Passion,-the want of Pity. This he is to judge himself for, by his own mouth :-"As the Lord liveth, the man that hath done this thing shall surely die, -because he hath done this thing, and because he had no pity." 3 And you will find, alike throughout the record of the Law and the promises of the Gospel, that there is, indeed, forgiveness with God, and Christ, for the passing sins of the hot heart, but none for the eternal and inherent sin of the cold. "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy";-find it you written anywhere that the unmerciful shall? "Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much." But have you record of any one's sins being forgiven who loved not at all? 2 1 [That is, in Ruskin's chance pile of cuttings from various newspapers.] Compare Letter 35 (Vol. XXVII. p. 667), and the other passages there given.] [The title to this Letter.] 12. I opened my oldest Bible just now, to look for the accurate words of David about the killed lamb;-a small, closely and very neatly printed volume it is, printed in Edinburgh by Sir D. Hunter Blair and J. Bruce, Printers to the King's Most Excellent Majesty in 1816. Yellow, now, with age; and flexible, but not unclean, with much use; except that the lower corners of the pages at 8th of 1st Kings, and 32nd Deuteronomy are worn somewhat thin and dark, the learning of these two chapters having cost me much pains. My mother's list of the chapters, with which, learned every syllable accurately, she established my soul in life, has just fallen out of it. And as 1 2 probably the sagacious reader has already perceived that these letters are written in their irregular way, among other reasons, that they may contain, as the relation may become apposite, so much of autobiography as it seems to me desirable to write, I will take what indulgence the sagacious reader will give me, for printing the list thus accidentally occurrent:- And truly, though I have picked up the elements of a little further knowledge,-in mathematics, meteorology, and the like, in after life, and owe not a little to the 1 [For a reference to a misprint in earlier editions, see, again, the Bibliographical Note, p. xxix.] [S 12 of this Letter was used by Ruskin when writing Præterita, where it appears, slightly revised, as the first portion of vol. i. § 48, following upon the passage in Letter 33, § 13 (Vol. XXVII, p. 617). An explanatory note is appended in Præterita to the passage "established my soul in life." His autobiographical notes are resumed in Letter 46, § 2 (p. 170).] teaching of many people, this maternal installation of my mind in that property of chapters, I count very confidently the most precious, and, on the whole, the one essential part, of all my education. 13. For the chapters became, indeed, strictly conclusive and productive to me in all modes of thought; and the body of divinity they contain, acceptable through all fear or doubt: nor, through any fear or doubt or fault have I ever lost my loyalty to them, nor betrayed the first command in the one I was made to repeat oftenest, "Let not Mercy and Truth forsake Thee."1 And at my present age of fifty-five, in spite of some enlarged observations of what modern philosophers call the Reign of Law, I perceive more distinctly than ever the Reign of a Spirit of Mercy and Truth,-infinite in pardon and purification for its wandering and faultful children, who have yet Love in their hearts; and altogether adverse and implacable to its perverse and lying enemies, who have resolute hatred in their hearts, and resolute falsehood on their lips. 14. This assertion of the existence of a Spirit of Mercy and Truth, as the master first of the Law of Life, and then of the methods of knowledge and labour by which it is sustained, and which the Saturday Review calls the effeminate sentimentality of Mr. Ruskin's political economy,3 is accurately, you will observe, reversed by the assertion of the Predatory and Carnivorous-or, in plainer English, flesh-eating spirit in Man himself, as the regulator of modern civilization, in the paper read by the Secretary at the Social Science meeting in Glasgow, 1860.* Out 1 [Proverbs iii. 3.] 2 [See Letter 41, § 7 (p. 85).] 3 [Further extracts from this paper are given in Letter 45, § 14 (p. 159): see also, above, p. 53, and below, pp. 154, 310. The author was Mr. T. J. Dunning (not the Secretary, who was Mr. G. W. Hastings). He read a paper, "which has been printed in a separate form, On the Predatory Instinct of Man, considered in relation to the Science of Social Economy'" (Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, 1860, p. 884). The separate publication of the paper has, however, not been traced.] of which the following fundamental passage may stand for sufficient and permanent example of the existent, practical, and unsentimental English mind, being the most vile sentence which I have ever seen in the literature of any country or time: "As no one will deny that Man possesses carnivorous teeth, or that all animals that possess them are more or less predatory, it is unnecessary to argue, à priori, that a predatory instinct naturally follows from such organization. It is our intention here to show how this inevitable result operates on civilized existence by its being one of the conditions of Man's nature, and, consequently, of all arrangements of civilized society." The paper proceeds, and is entirely constructed, on the assumption that the predatory spirit is not only one of the conditions of man's nature, but the particular condition on which the arrangements of Society are to be founded. For "Reason would immediately suggest to one of superior strength, that however desirable it might be to take possession by violence, of what another had laboured to produce, he might be treated in the same way by one stronger than himself, to which he, of course, would have great objection. In order, therefore, to prevent or put a stop to a practice which each would object to in his own case,” etc., etc. And so the Social Science interpreter proceeds to sing the present non-sentimental Proverbs and Psalms of England, -with trumpets also and shawms1- and steam whistles. And there is concert of voices and instruments at the Hospital of the Incurabili, and Progress-indubitably-in Chariots of the Night." 1 [Psalms xcviii. 7 (Prayer-book).] |