LETTER 53 THESE BE YOUR GODS 1 BRANTWOOD, Good Friday, 1875. 1. I AM ashamed to go on with my own history to-day; for though, as already seen, I was not wholly unacquainted with the practice of fasting, at times of the year when it was not customary with Papists, our Lent became to us a kind of moonlight Christmas, and season of reflected and soft festivity. For our strictly Protestant habits of mind rendering us independent of absolution, on Shrove Tuesday we were chiefly occupied in the preparation of pancakes,— my nurse being dominant on that day over the cook in all things, her especially nutritive art of browning, and fine legerdemain in turning, pancakes, being recognized as inimitable. The interest of Ash-Wednesday was mainlywhether the bits of egg should be large or small in the egg-sauce; nor do I recollect having any ideas connected with the day's name, until I was puzzled by the French of it when I fell in love with a Roman Catholic French girl, as hereafter to be related:2-only, by the way, let me note, as I chance now to remember, two others of my main occupations of an exciting character in Hunter Street: watching, namely, the dustmen clear out the ash-hole, and the coalmen fill the coal-cellar through the hole in the pavement, which soon became to me, when surrounded by [Exodus xxxii. 4: see below, § 6. "Thy name in all the Earth (Psalms viii. I see below, § 9) was a rejected title for this Letter.] 2 [See Præterita, vol. i. ch. x.: the story, however, was not reached in the autobiographical passages of Fors, nor was § 1 of this Letter used in Præterita.] its cone of débris, a sublime representation of the crater of a volcanic mountain. Of these Of these imaginative delights I have no room to speak in this Fors; nor of the debates which used to be held for the two or three days preceding Good Friday, whether the hot-cross-buns should be plain, or have carraway seeds in them. For, my nurse not being here to provide any such dainties for me, and the black-plague wind which has now darkened the spring for five years,* veiling all the hills with sullen cloud, I am neither in a cheerful nor a religious state of mind; and am too much in the temper of the disciples who forsook Him, and fled,' to be able to do justice to the childish innocence of belief, which, in my mother, was too constant to need resuscitation, or take new colour, from fast or festival. 2. Yet it is only by her help, to-day, that I am able to do a piece of work required of me by the letter printed in the second article of this month's correspondence." It is from a man of great worth, conscientiousness, and kindliness; 3 but is yet so perfectly expressive of the irreverence, and incapacity of admiration, which maintain and, in great part, constitute, the modern liberal temper, that it makes me feel, more than anything I ever yet met with in human words, how much I owe to my mother for having so exercised me in the Scriptures as to make me grasp them in what my correspondent would call their "concrete *See my first notice of it in the beginning of the Fors of August 1871; and further account of it in appendix to my Lecture on Glaciers, given at the London Institution this year.5 1 [Matthew xxvi. 56.] 2 [That is, § 19: see below, p. 335.] 3 [See further, § 7. Ruskin in his copy identifies the correspondent as Peter Bayne; for whom, see Vol. XVIII. pp. xli., 195, 537.] [Letter 8, §§ 1, 2 (Vol. XXVII. p. 132).] 5 [It thus appears that Ruskin at this time intended to publish his lecture on Glaciers, as given at the London Institution on March 11, 1875. The lecture was ultimately embodied in Deucalion (see Vol. XXVI. p. 89). The intended appendix was not issued, but ultimately became the subject of two lectures in 1884, which were published in that year under the title The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century.] whole"; and above all, taught me to reverence them, as transcending all thought, and ordaining all conduct.1 This she effected, not by her own sayings or personal authority; but simply by compelling me to read the book thoroughly, for myself. As soon as I was able to read with fluency, she began a course of Bible work with me, which never ceased till I went to Oxford. She read alternate verses with me, watching, at first, every intonation of my voice, and correcting the false ones, till she made me understand the verse, if within my reach, rightly, and energetically. It might be beyond me altogether; that she did not care about; but she made sure that as soon as I got hold of it at all, I should get hold of it by the right end. In this way she began with the first verse of Genesis and went straight through to the last verse of the Apocalypse; hard names, numbers, Levitical law, and all; and began again at Genesis the next day; if a name was hard, the better the exercise in pronunciation,-if a chapter was tiresome, the better lesson in patience,—if loathsome, the better lesson in faith that there was some use in its being so outspoken. After our chapters (from two to three a day, according to their length, the first thing after breakfast, and no interruption from servants allowed,-none from visitors, who either joined in the reading or had to stay upstairs,and none from any visitings or excursions, except real travelling), I had to learn a few verses by heart, or repeat, to make sure I had not lost, something of what was already known; and, with the chapters above enumerated (Letter 422), I had to learn the whole body of the fine old Scottish paraphrases, which are good, melodious, and forceful verse; and to which, together with the Bible itself, I owe the first cultivation of my ear in sound. 1 ["My mother and the Bible: compare Letter 54, § 6" (p. 345).—Author's MS. note in his copy. § 2, from this point onward, and the first few lines of § 3, were used by Ruskin when writing Præterita, where they appear, slightly revised as § 46 of vol. i. ch. ii. His autobiographical notes are resumed in Letter 54, § 3 (p. 343).] 2 [See § 12 (p. 101).] 66 3. It is strange that of all the pieces of the Bible which my mother thus taught me, that which cost me most to learn, and which was, to my child's mind, chiefly repulsivethe 119th Psalm-has now become of all the most precious to me, in its overflowing and glorious passion of love for the Law of God: "Oh, how love I Thy law! it is my meditation all the day; I have refrained my feet from every evil way, that I might keep Thy word";'-as opposed to the ever-echoing words of the modern money-loving fool: Oh, how hate I Thy law! it is my abomination all the day; my feet are swift in running to mischief, and I have done all the things I ought not to have done, and left undone all I ought to have done; have mercy upon me, miserable sinner,—and grant that I, worthily lamenting my sins and acknowledging my wretchedness, may obtain of Thee, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness, and give me my long purse here and my eternal Paradise there, all together, for Christ's sake, to whom, with Thee and the Holy Ghost, be all honour and glory," etc.3 And the letter of my liberal correspondent, pointing out, in the defence of usury (of which he imagines himself acquainted with the history!) how the Son of David hit his father in the exactly weak place, puts it in my mind at once to state some principles respecting the use of the Bible as a code of law, which are vital to the action of the St. George's Company in obedience to it. 4. All the teaching of God, and of the nature He formed round Man, is not only mysterious, but, if received with any warp of mind, deceptive, and intentionally deceptive. The distinct and repeated assertions of this in the conduct and words of Christ are the most wonderful things, it seems to me, and the most terrible, in all the recorded 1 [Psalms cxix. 97, 101.] 2 Compare Collect for Ash-Wednesday.] "I read my prayer of the monied man in Fors to him" (Carlyle), writes Ruskin in his diary (April 1875), "at which he laughed with sparkling eyes, adding, 'Yes, Christ and the Holy Ghost are very sure to ratify that arrangement, if it is properly brought before them.""] 4 [See below, § 19.] 1 action of the wisdom of Heaven. "To you" (His disciples) "it is given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom,—but to others, in parables, that, hearing, they might not understand." Now this is written not for the twelve only, but for all disciples of Christ in all ages, of whom the sign is one and unmistakable: "They have forsaken all that they have"; while those who "say they are Jews and are not, but do lie," or who say they are Christians and are not, but do lie, try to compromise with Christ,-to give Him a part, and keep back a part;-this being the Lie of lies, the Ananias lie, visited always with spiritual death.* 5. There is a curious chapter on almsgiving, by Miss Yonge, in one of the late numbers of the numbers of the Monthly Packet (a good magazine, though, on the whole, and full of nice writing), which announces to her disciples, that “at least the tenth of their income is God's part." Now, in the name of the Devil, and of Baal to back him,—are nine parts, then, of all we have our own? or theirs? The tithe may, indeed, be set aside for some special purposefor the maintenance of a priesthood-or as by the St. George's Company, for distant labour, or any other purpose out of their own immediate range of action. But to the Charity or Alms of men-to Love, and to the God of Love, all their substance is due and all their strength-and all their time. That is the first commandment: Thou shalt love the Lord with all thy strength and soul. Yea, says the false disciple-but not with all my money. And of these it is written, after that thirty-third verse of Luke xiv.: "Salt is good; but if the salt have lost his savour, it is * Isaiah xxviii. 17 and 18. 3 1 [Mark iv. 11, 12. The other Bible references in § 4 (in addition to that noted by Ruskin) are Revelation ii. 9, and Acts v. 1.] 2 ["Womankind. Ch. XII.-Charity" in the Monthly Packet for December 1874, N.S., vol. 18, p. 594: "It seems to be clear that almsgiving, up to the tithe of the means, is a duty. A tithe of the allowance is God's part." Ruskin himself had once been a contributor to the magazine: see in a later volume the letter of October 20, 1862, containing "Proverbs on Right Dress."] 3 [See Matthew xxii. 37, 38.] |