On the Old Road Volume Ii Part 41

Forgive me for getting back to my sparrows; but truly, in the present state of England, the fowls of the air are the only creatures, tormented and murdered as they are, that yet have here and there nests, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost. And it would be well if many of us, in reading that text, "The kingdom of G.o.d is not meat and drink," had even got so far as to the understanding that it was at least _as much_, and that until we had fed the hungry, there was no power in us to inspire the unhappy.

Ever affectionately yours, J. RUSKIN.

I will write my feeling about the pieces of the Life of Christ you have sent me, in a private letter. I may say at once that I am sure it will do much good, and will be upright and intelligible, which how few religious writings are!

VIII.

[Greek: genetheto to thelema sou hos en ourano, ka ep ges.]

_Fiat voluntas tua sicut in caelo et in terra._

BRANTWOOD, _9th August, 1879._

234. I was reading the second chapter of Malachi this morning by chance, and wondering how many clergymen ever read it, and took to heart the "commandment for _them_."

For they are always ready enough to call themselves priests (though they know themselves to be nothing of the sort) whenever there is any dignity to be got out of the t.i.tle; but, whenever there is any good, hot scolding or unpleasant advice given them by the prophets, in that self-a.s.sumed character of theirs, they are as ready to quit it as ever Dionysus his lion-skin, when he finds the character of Herakles inconvenient. "Ye have wearied the Lord with your words" (yes, and some of His people, too, in your time): "yet ye say, Wherein have we wearied Him? When ye say, Everyone that doeth evil is good in the sight of the Lord, and He delighteth in them; or, Where is the G.o.d of judgment?"

How many, again and again I wonder, of the lively young ecclesiastics supplied to the increasing demand of our west-ends of flourishing Cities of the Plain, ever consider what sort of sin it is for which G.o.d (unless they lay it to heart) will "curse their blessings, and spread dung upon their faces," or have understood, even in the dimmest manner, what part _they_ had taken, and were taking, in "corrupting the covenant of the Lord with Levi, and causing many to stumble at the Law"?

235. Perhaps the most subtle and unconscious way which the religious teachers upon whom the ends of the world are come, have done this, is in never telling their people the meaning of the clause in the Lord's Prayer, which, of all others, their most earnest hearers have oftenest on their lips: "Thy will be done." They allow their people to use it as if their Father's will were always to kill their babies, or do something unpleasant to them, instead of explaining to them that the first and intensest article of their Father's will was their own sanctification, and following comfort and wealth; and that the one only path to national prosperity and to domestic peace was to understand what the will of the Lord was, and to do all they could to get it done.

Whereas one would think, by the tone of the eagerest preachers nowadays, that they held their blessed office to be that, not of showing men how to do their Father's will on earth, but how to get to heaven without doing any of it either here or there!

236. I say, especially, the most eager preachers; for nearly the whole Missionary body (with the hottest Evangelistic sect of the English Church) is at this moment composed of men who think the Gospel they are to carry to mend the world with, forsooth, is that, "If any man sin, he hath an Advocate with the Father;" while I have never yet, in my own experience, met either with a Missionary or a Town Bishop who so much as professed himself "to understand what the will of the Lord" was, far less to teach anybody else to do it; and for fifty preachers, yes, and fifty hundreds whom I have heard proclaiming the Mediator of the New Testament, that "they which were called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance," I have never yet heard so much as _one_ heartily proclaiming against all those "deceivers with vain words" (Eph. v. 6), that "no covetous person which is an idolater hath _any_ inheritance in the kingdom of Christ, or of G.o.d;" and on myself personally and publicly challenging the Bishops of England generally, and by name the Bishop of Manchester, to say whether usury was, or was not, according to the will of G.o.d, I have received no answer from any one of them.[162]

_13th August._

237. I have allowed myself, in the beginning of this letter, to dwell on the equivocal use of the word "Priest" in the English Church (see Christopher Harvey, Grosart's edition, p. 38), because the a.s.sumption of the mediatorial, in defect of the pastoral, office by the clergy fulfill itself, naturally and always, in their pretending to absolve the sinner from his punishment, instead of purging him from his sin; and practically, in their general patronage and encouragement of all the iniquity of the world, by steadily preaching away the penalties of it.

So that the great cities of the earth, which ought to be the places set on its hills, with the temple of the Lord in the midst of them, to which the tribes should go up,[163]--centers to the Kingdoms and Provinces of Honor, Virtue, and the Knowledge of the law of G.o.d,--have become, instead, loathsome centers of fornication and covetousness--the smoke of their sin going up into the face of Heaven like the furnace of Sodom, and the pollution of it rotting and raging through the bones and the souls of the peasant people round them, as if they were each a volcano whose ashes broke out in blains upon man and upon beast.[164]

And in the midst of them, their freshly-set-tip steeples ring the crowd to a weekly prayer that the rest of their lives may be pure and holy, while they have not the slightest intention of purifying, sanctifying, or changing their lives in any the smallest particular; and their clergy gather, each into himself, the curious dual power, and Ja.n.u.s-faced majesty in mischief, of the prophet that prophesies falsely, and the priest that bears rule by his means.

And the people love to have it so.

BRANTWOOD, _12th August._

I am very glad of your little note from Brighton. I thought it needless to send the two letters there, which you will find at home; and they pretty nearly end all _I_ want to say; for the remaining clauses of the prayer touch on things too high for me. But I will send you one concluding letter about them.

IX.

[Greek: ton arton emon ton epiousion dos hemin semeron.]

_Panem nostrum quotidianum da n.o.bis hodie._

BRANTWOOD, _19th August._

238. I retained the foregoing letter by me till now, lest you should think it written in any haste or petulance; but it is every word of it deliberate, though expressing the bitterness of twenty years of vain sorrow and pleading concerning these things. Nor am I able to write, otherwise, anything of the next following clause of the prayer;--for no words could be burning enough to tell the evils which have come on the world from men's using it thoughtlessly and blasphemously, praying G.o.d to give them what they are deliberately resolved to steal. For all true Christianity is known--as its Master was--in breaking of bread, and all false Christianity in stealing it.

Let the clergyman only apply--with impartial and level sweep--to his congregation the great pastoral order: "The man that will not work, neither should he eat;" and be resolute in requiring each member of his flock to tell him _what_--day by day--they do to earn their dinners;--and he will find an entirely new view of life and its sacraments open upon him and them.

239. For the man who is not--day by day--doing work which will earn his dinner, must be stealing his dinner;[165] and the actual fact is that the great ma.s.s of men, calling themselves Christians, do actually live by robbing the poor of their bread, and by no other trade whatsoever: and the simple examination of the mode of the produce and consumption of European food--who digs for it, and who eats it--will prove that to any honest human soul.

Nor is it possible for any Christian Church to exist but in pollutions and hypocrisies beyond all words, until the virtues of a life moderate in its self-indulgence, and wide in its offices of temporal ministry to the poor, are insisted on as the normal conditions in which, only, the prayer to G.o.d for the harvest of the earth is other than blasphemy.

In the second place. Since in the parable in Luke, the bread asked for is shown to be also, and chiefly, the Holy Spirit (Luke xi. 13), and the prayer, "Give us each day our daily bread," is, in its fullness, the disciples', "Lord, evermore give us _this_ bread,"--the clergyman's question to his whole flock, primarily literal: "Children, have ye here any meat?" must ultimately be always the greater spiritual one: "Children, have ye here any Holy Spirit?" or, "Have ye not heard yet whether there _be_ any? and, instead of a Holy Ghost the Lord and Giver of Life, do you only believe in an unholy mammon, Lord and Giver of Death?"

The opposition between the two Lords has been, and will be as long as the world lasts, absolute, irreconcilable, mortal; and the clergyman's first message to his people of this day is--if he be faithful--"Choose ye this day whom ye will serve."

Ever faithfully yours, J. RUSKIN.

X.

[Greek: kai aphes hemin ta opheilemata hemon, os kai hemeis aphiemen tois opheiletais hemon.]

_Et dimitte n.o.bis debita nostra, sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris._

BRANTWOOD, _3rd September._

240. DEAR MR. MALLESON,--I have been very long before trying to say so much as a word about the sixth clause of the Pater; for whenever I began thinking of it, I was stopped by the sorrowful sense of the hopeless task you poor clergymen had, nowadays, in recommending and teaching people to love their enemies, when their whole energies were already devoted to swindling their friends.

But, in any days, past or now, the clause is one of such difficulty, that, to understand it, means almost to know the love of G.o.d which pa.s.seth knowledge.

But, at all events, it is surely the pastor's duty to prevent his flock from _mis_understanding it; and above all things to keep them from supposing that G.o.d's forgiveness is to be had simply for the asking, by those who "willfully sin after they have received the knowledge of the truth."

241. There is one very simple lesson also, needed especially by people in circ.u.mstances of happy life, which I have never heard fully enforced from the pulpit, and which is usually the more lost sight of, because the fine and inaccurate word "trespa.s.ses" is so often used instead of the single and accurate one "debts." Among people well educated and happily circ.u.mstanced it may easily chance that long periods of their lives pa.s.s without any such conscious sin as could, on any discovery or memory of it, make them cry out, in truth and in pain,--"I have sinned against the Lord." But scarcely an hour of their happy days can pa.s.s over them without leaving--were their hearts open--some evidence written there that they have "left undone the things that they ought to have done," and giving them bitterer and heavier cause to cry, and cry again--forever, in the pure words of their Master's prayer, "Dimitte n.o.bis _debita_ nostra."

In connection with the more accurate translation of "debts" rather than "trespa.s.ses,"[166] it would surely be well to keep constantly in the mind of complacent and inoffensive congregations that in Christ's own prophecy of the manner of the last judgment, the condemnation is p.r.o.nounced only on the sins of omission: "I was hungry, and ye gave Me no meat."

242. But, whatever the manner of sin, by offense or defect, which the preacher fears in his people, surely he has of late been wholly remiss in compelling their definite recognition of it, in its several and personal particulars. Nothing in the various inconsistency of human nature is more grotesque than its willingness to be taxed with any quant.i.ty of sins in the gross, and its resentment at the insinuation of having committed the smallest parcel of them in detail. And the English Liturgy, evidently drawn up with the amiable intention of making religion as pleasant as possible, to a people desirous of saving their souls with no great degree of personal inconvenience, is perhaps in no point more unwholesomely lenient than in its concession to the popular conviction that we may obtain the present advantage, and escape the future punishment, of any sort of iniquity, by dexterously concealing the manner of it from man, and triumphantly confessing the quant.i.ty of it to G.o.d.

243. Finally, whatever the advantages and decencies of a form of prayer, and how wide soever the scope given to its collected pa.s.sages, it cannot be at one and the same time fitted for the use of a body of well-taught and experienced Christians, such as should join the services of a Church nineteen centuries old,--and adapted to the needs of the timid sinner who has that day first entered its porch, or of the remorseful publican who has only recently become sensible of his call to a pew.

And surely our clergy need not be surprised at the daily increasing distrust in the public mind of the efficacy of Prayer, after having so long insisted on their offering supplication, _at least_ every Sunday morning at eleven o'clock, that the rest of their lives hereafter might be pure and holy, leaving them conscious all the while that they would be similarly required to inform the Lord next week, at the same hour, that "there was no health in them!"

Among, the much-rebuked follies and abuses of so-called "Ritualism,"

none that I have heard of are indeed so dangerously and darkly "Ritual"

as this piece of authorized mockery of the most solemn act of human life, and only entrance of eternal life--Repentance.

Believe me, dear Mr. Malleson,

Ever faithfully and respectfully yours, J. RUSKIN.

XI.