Letters to the Clergy on the Lord's Prayer and the Church Part 20

ANNECY, SAVOY, _November 15th, 1882._

I have got your kind little note of the 11th yesterday, and am entirely glad to hear of your papers on the Duddon. I shall be very happy indeed if you find any pleasure in remembering our walk to the tarn.[38] I hope I know now better how to manage myself in all ways, and we may still have some pleasant talks, my health not failing me.

[38] Goat's Water, under the Old Man of Coniston.

49.

TALLOIRE, SWITZERLAND, _November 20th, 1882._

MY DEAR MALLESON,--I am sincerely grieved that you begin to feel the effect of overwork; but as this is the first warning you have had, and as you are wise enough to obey it, I trust that the three months' rest will restore you all your usual powers on the conditions of using them with discretion, and not rising to write at two in the morning.

I am very thankful to find in my own case that a quiet spring of energy filters back into the old well-heads--if one does not bucket it out as fast as it comes in.

But my last illnesses seriously impaired my walking powers, and I'm afraid if you came to Switzerland I should be very jealous of you.

Certainly it is not in this season a country for an invalid, and I believe you cannot be safer than by English firesides with no books to work at nor parishioners to visit.

Ever affectionately yours, J. RUSKIN.

50.

_January 22nd, 1883._

DEAR MALLESON,--I am heartily glad to hear that you are better, and that you are going to lead the Vicar of Wakefield's quiet life. I am not stronger myself, but think it right to keep hold of the Oxford Helm, as long as they care to trust it to me.

I've entirely given up reviewing, but if the Editor of the _Contemporary_ would send me Mr. Peek's Article, when set up, I might perhaps send a note or two on it, which the real reviewer might use or not at his pleasure. In the meantime it would greatly oblige me if the Editor could give me the reference to an old article of mine on Herbert Spencer, (or at least on a saying of his), which I cannot find where I thought it was in the _Nineteenth Century_, and suppose therefore to have been in the _Contemporary_ before the _Nineteenth Century_ Athena arose out of its cleft head.

The Article had a lot about Coniston in it, but I quite forget what else it was about. I think it must have been just before the separation.

Kindest regards and congratulations on your convalescence from all here.

Ever affectionately yours, J. RUSKIN.

51.

BRANTWOOD, _February 6th, 1883_.

MY DEAR MALLESON,--I'm nearly beside myself with a sudden rush of work on my return from abroad, and resumption of Oxford duties, and I simply _cannot_ yet think over the business of the letters, the rather that _I_ certainly never would re-publish most of those clergymen's letters at all.

My own were a gift to you, and I am quite ready to print _them_ if you like, and let you have half profits, the St. George's Guild having the other. But that could not be for some time yet.

Ever affectionately yours, J. RUSKIN.

EPILOGUE BY MR. RUSKIN

BRANTWOOD, CONISTON, _June 1880_.

MY DEAR MALLESON,--I have glanced at the proofs you send; and _can_ do no more than glance, even if it seemed to me desirable that I should do more,--which, after said glance, it does in no wise. Let me remind you of what it is absolutely necessary that the readers of the book should clearly understand--that I wrote these Letters at your request, to be read and discussed at the meeting of a private society of clergymen. I declined then to be present at the discussion, and I decline still. You afterwards asked leave to print the Letters, to which I replied that they were yours, for whatever use you saw good to make of them: afterwards your plans expanded, while my own notion remained precisely what it had been--that the discussion should have been private, and kept within the limits of the society, and that its conclusions, if any, should have been announced in a few pages of clear print, for the parishioners' exclusive reading.

I am, of course, flattered by the wider course you have obtained for the Letters, but am not in the slightest degree interested by the debate upon them, nor by any religious debates whatever, undertaken without serious conviction that there is a jot wrong in matters as they are, or serious resolution to make them a t.i.ttle better. Which, so far as I can read the minds of your correspondents, appears to me the substantial state of them.

One thing I cannot pa.s.s without protest--the quant.i.ty of talk about the writer of the Letters. What I am, or am not, is of no moment whatever to the matters in hand. I observe with comfort, or at least with complacency, that on the strength of a couple of hours' talk, at a time when I was thinking chiefly of the weatherings of slate you were good enough to show me above Goat's Water, you would have ventured to baptize me in the little lake--as not a goat, but a sheep. The best I can be sure of, myself, is that I am no wolf, and have never aspired to the dignity even of a Dog of the Lord.

You told me, if I remember rightly, that one of the members of the original meeting denounced me as an arch-heretic[39]--meaning, doubtless, an arch-pagan; for a heretic, or sect-maker, is of all terms of reproach the last that can be used of me. And I think he should have been answered that it was precisely as an arch-pagan that I ventured to request a more intelligible and more unanimous account of the Christian Gospel from its preachers.

[39] Only a heretic!--ED.

If anything in the Letters offended those of you who hold me a brother, surely it had been best to tell me between ourselves, or to tell it to the Church, or to let me be Anathema Maranatha in peace,--in any case, I must at present so abide, correcting only the mistakes about myself which have led to graver ones about the things I wanted to speak of.[40]

[40] I may perhaps be pardoned for vindicating at least my arithmetic, which, with Bishop Colenso, I rather pride myself upon.

One of your correspondents greatly doubts my having heard five thousand a.s.sertors of evangelical principles (Catholic-absolvent or Protestant-detergent are virtually the same). I am now sixty years old, and for forty-five of them was in church at least once on the Sunday,--say once a month also in afternoons,--and you have above three thousand church services. When I am abroad I am often in half-a-dozen churches in the course of a single day, and never lose a chance of listening to anything that is going on. Add the conversations pursued, not unearnestly, with every sort of reverend person I can get to talk to me--from the Bishop of Strasburg (as good a specimen of a town bishop as I have known), with whom I was studying ecstatic paintings in the year 1850--down to the simplest travelling tinker inclined Gospelwards, whom I perceive to be sincere, and your correspondent will perceive that my rapid numerical expression must be far beneath the truth. He subjoins his more rational doubt of my acquaintance with many town missionaries; to which I can only answer, that as I do not live in town, nor set up for a missionary myself, my spiritual advantages have certainly not been great in that direction. I simply a.s.sert that of the few I have known,--beginning with Mr. Spurgeon, under whom I sat with much edification for a year or two,--I have not known any such teaching as I speak of.

The most singular one, perhaps, in all the Letters is that of Mr. ----, that I do not attach enough weight to antiquity. My reply to it is partly written already, with reference to the wishes of some other of your correspondents to know more of my reasons for finding fault with the English Liturgy.

If people are taught to use the Liturgy rightly and reverently, it will bring them all good; and for some thirty years of my life I used to read it always through to my servant and myself, if we had no Protestant church to go to, in Alpine or Italian villages. One can always tacitly pray of it what one wants, and let the rest pa.s.s. But, as I have grown older, and watched the decline in the Christian faith of all nations, I have got more and more suspicious of the effect of this particular form of words on the truthfulness of the English mind (now fast becoming a salt which has lost his savour, and is fit only to be trodden under foot of men). And during the last ten years, in which my position at Oxford has compelled me to examine what authority there was for the code of prayer, of which the University is now so ashamed that it no more dares compel its youths so much as to hear, much less to utter it, I got necessarily into the habit of always looking to the original forms of the prayers of the fully developed Christian Church. Nor did I think it a mere chance which placed in my own possession a ma.n.u.script of the perfect Church service of the thirteenth century,[41] written by the monks of the Sainte Chapelle for St. Louis; together with one of the same date, written in England, probably for the Diocese of Lincoln; adding some of the Collects, in which it corresponds with St. Louis's, and the Latin hymns so much beloved by Dante, with the appointed music for them.

[41] See Appendix.

And my wonder has been greater every hour, since I examined closely the text of these and other early books, that in any state of declining, or captive, energy, the Church of England should have contented itself with a service which cast out, from beginning to end, all these intensely spiritual and pa.s.sionate utterances of chanted prayer (the whole body, that is to say, of the authentic _Christian_ Psalms), and in adopting what it timidly preserved of the Collects, mangled or blunted them down to the exact degree which would make them either unintelligible or inoffensive--so vague that everybody might use them, or so pointless that n.o.body could be offended by them. For a special instance: The prayer for "our bishops and curates, and all congregations committed to their charge," is, in the Lincoln Service-book, "for our bishop, and all congregations committed to _his_ charge." The change from singular to plural seems a slight one. But it suffices to take the eyes of the people off their own bishop into infinite s.p.a.ce; to change a prayer which was intended to be uttered in personal anxiety and affection, into one for the general good of the Church, of which n.o.body could judge, and for which n.o.body would particularly care; and, finally, to change a prayer to which the answer, if given, would be visible, into one of which n.o.body could tell whether it were answered or not.

In the Collects, the change, though verbally slight, is thus tremendous in issue. But in the Litany--word and thought go all wild together. The first prayer of the Litany in the Lincoln Service-book is for the Pope and all ranks beneath him, implying a very noteworthy piece of theology--that the Pope might err in religious matters, and that the prayer of the humblest servant of G.o.d would be useful to him:--"Ut Dompnum Apostolic.u.m, et omnes gradus ecclesie in sancta religione conservare digneris." Meaning that whatever errors particular persons might, and must, fall into, they prayed G.o.d to keep the Pope right, and the collective testimony and conduct of the ranks below him. Then follows the prayer for their own bishop and _his_ flock--then for the king and the princes (chief lords), that they (not all nations) might be kept in concord--and then for _our_ bishops and abbots,--the Church of England proper; every one of these pet.i.tions being direct, limited, and personally heartfelt;--and then this lovely one for themselves:--

"Ut obsequium servitutis nostre rationabile facias."--"That thou wouldst make the obedience of our service reasonable" ("which is your reasonable service").[42]

[42] See in the Appendix for more of these beautiful prayers.--ED.

This glorious prayer is, I believe, accurately an "early English" one.

It is not in the St. Louis Litany, nor in a later elaborate French fourteenth century one; but I find it softened in an Italian MS. of the fifteenth century into "ut nosmet ipsos in tuo sancto servitio confortare et conservare digneris,"--"that thou wouldst deign to keep and comfort us ourselves in thy sacred service" (the comfort, observe, being here asked for whether reasonable or not!); and in the best and fullest French service-book I have, printed at Rouen in 1520, it becomes, "ut congregationes omnium sanctorum in tuo sancto servitio conservare digneris;" while victory as well as concord is asked for the king and the princes,--thus leading the way to that for our own Queen's victory over all her enemies, a prayer which might now be advisedly altered into one that she--and in her, the monarchy of England--might find more fidelity in their friends.

I give one more example of the corruption of our Prayer-Book, with reference to the objections taken by some of your correspondents to the distinction implied in my Letters between the Persons of the Father and the Christ.

The "Memoria de Sancta Trinitate," in the St. Louis service-book, runs thus:

"Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, qui dedisti famulis tuis in confessione vere fidei eterne Trinitatis gloriam agnoscere, et in potentia majestatis adorare unitatem, quesumus ut ejus fidei firmitate ab omnibus semper muniemur adversis. Qui vivis et regnas Deus, per omnia secula seculorum. Amen."