HAVING now stated our conviction that Ruskin was always essentially religious, we will trace the history of his beliefs.

He began life in 1819, under the strong influence of his mother, as a Calvinistic Protestant, of the narrow type then current. The Ruskins were properly Scottish Presbyterians, living in London. A Low Church or Spurgeon’s Tabernacle was equally acceptable. His mother made him read with her daily portions of the Bible, two or three chapters, undiluted and unselected. They accomplished the journey from Genesis to Revelation in about a year, and then began at Genesis again next day, “hard names, numbers, Levitical Law and all.” They went through it at least six times together.

She also taught him, “complete and sure,” twenty-six chapters of the Bible, including the 119th Psalm, and all the Scottish Paraphrases of the Psalms.[4]

This did not make him vitally religious; he was not “converted.” The Bible was, for the present, a rather tiresome task, and to chapel he and his father went submissively, feeling their sad inferiority to the mother in these matters. His mother’s creed he dutifully imbibed, without question or strong feeling of any kind. He had the proper antipathy to Rome, and the habit of outward prayer.[5] His real religion was born at Friar’s Crag, Derwentwater, at four years old, when he looked with awe into the dark lake over the mossy tree roots, and felt himself in the Presence.

He was, as an only child, a protected treasure, the pride of and a great responsibility to his wealthy parents. He never went to a Public School, and when he went to Oxford to be made into a Bishop his parents came with him, lived in the High, and his mother saw him every day. With them, far into mid-life, he went on all his foreign journeys but two, those of 1845 and 1858. The parental ideas remained potent with him to an extent hardly realizable by this generation, which often finds it so difficult to bring their parents up properly.

His earlier works are written with the questionless devoutness of the untried mind. They were narrow in theology, fiercely Protestant, earnest enough; and on their positive side, still sound and valuable. The first two volumes of Modern Painters, the whole of the Stones of Venice and the Seven Lamps of Architecture, and the Edinburgh Lectures on Architecture and Painting belong to this period. So, broadly, do the Manchester Lectures on the Political Economy of Art in 1857; but they are the herald of the next epoch.

He resisted the new Geology of Lyell, declared indignantly that God had created the Alpine valleys, and put the rivers to flow along them, denying that the rivers had worn their own valleys out. Somewhere in the later fifties we find him scandalized by the statement of Frederick Denison Maurice that Jael’s treacherous murder of Sisera was a wicked deed. The fact that Deborah the Prophetess sang a sacred song over it was enough to justify it to Ruskin, then over thirty-five.[6]

Just before this incident, however, his moral sense was beginning to revolt from certain parts of his creed. He was, he says, invited to a “fashionable sÉance of Evangelical doctrine, at the Earl of Ducie’s, presided over by Mr. Molyneux, then a divine of celebrity in that sect, who sat with one leg over his other knee, in the attitude always given to Herod at the Massacre of the Innocents in mediÆval sculpture, and discoursed in tones of consummate assurance and satisfaction, and to the entire comfort and consent of his Belgravian audience, on the beautiful parable of the Prodigal Son. Which, or how many, of his hearers he meant to describe as having personally lived on husks, and devoured their father’s property, did not of course appear; but that something of the sort was necessary to the completeness of the joy in heaven over them, now in Belgrave Square, at the feet, or one foot, of Mr. Molyneux, could not be questioned. Waiting my time, till the raptures of the converted company had begun to flag a little, I ventured, from a back seat, to enquire of Mr. Molyneux what we were to learn from the example of the other son, not prodigal, who was, his father said, ‘ever with me and all that I have, thine.’ A sudden horror and unanimous feeling of the serpent having somehow got over the wall into their Garden of Eden, fell on the whole company; and some of them, I thought, looked at the candles, as if they expected them to burn blue. After a pause of a minute, gathering himself into an expression of pity and indulgence, withholding latent thunder, Mr. Molyneux explained to me that the home-staying son was merely a picturesque figure introduced to fill the background of the parable agreeably, and contained no instruction or example for the well-disposed scriptural student, but on the contrary, rather, a snare for the unwary, and a temptation to self-righteousness—which was, of all sins, the most offensive to God. Under the fulmination of which answer, I retired from the sÉance in silence, nor ever attended another of the kind from that day to this.”[7]

It was just this lack of feeling for righteousness as such, the idea that you needed first to be a “most sinful sinner” if you wished to become a “most Christian Christian,” and a want of recognition that forgiveness was a spiritual and inward process, which caused the contemptuous references to his early form of doctrine which are scattered thickly throughout Ruskin’s later writings.

The experiences which make epochs in men’s lives are indeed strangely various and unexpected. Three events stand out as the destroyers of his Protestantism and of much of his outward edifice of faith. Their year was 1858. One was the discovery that the Puritan Sabbath of his youth had no Scriptural authority, but based itself, without confessing it, on the Jewish Sabbath Day, by erroneous interpretation. “If they have deceived me in this, they have deceived me in everything,” he said. His faith in his mother’s religious guides was gone.[8] In 1858 for the first time he broke the Sabbath by drawing some flowers on Sunday. That act, in him, stood for emancipation.[9] He had been finding that Catholic Psalters were lovely things, that Catholic peasants in Tuscany led sweet and patient lives, and that “Presbyterian prayers against time by people who never expected to be any the better for them, were unlovely and wrong.”[10] The same year he turned in at Turin to hear a Waldensian pastor. This was the second event. “To an audience of about seventeen gray-haired women and a few men, the preacher, a somewhat stunted figure with a cracked voice, put his utmost zeal into a consolatory discourse on the wickedness of the wide world, more especially of the plain of Piedmont and the city of Turin, and on the exclusive favour with God enjoyed by the between nineteen and twenty-four elect members of his congregation, in the streets of Admah and Zeboim.” “Myself neither cheered nor greatly alarmed by this doctrine, I walked back into the condemned city, and up into the gallery where Paul Veronese’s ‘Solomon and the Queen of Sheba’ glowed in full afternoon light.” And in that hour’s meditation his “evangelical beliefs were put away, to be debated of no more.”[11]

But the solvent influences did not stop there. They seldom fail to proceed. Rebuilding rather than repair is generally necessary to a broken down system of thought. But that which left him in great darkness was an experience which could have so affected no one but Ruskin. This was the third event. It was the discovery at Venice that the best work was done by irreligious painters. He found that “Tintoret only occasionally forgot himself into religion,” and that Titian had no religion at all, and yet had to be given as the standard of perfection in painting. Ruskin concluded, first, and quite truly, that “human work must be done honourably and thoroughly, because we are now men; whether we expect to be angels, or ever were slugs, being practically no matter. That by the work we have done and not by our belief we shall be judged.”[12] He went on, by generalizing, to a further conclusion in that year, afterwards to be corrected. The conclusion and the correction divide the periods of Ruskin’s life. He concluded that the group of great worldly painters of various nations, Turner, Titian, Velasquez, Sir Joshua, Gainsborough, Tintoret, and Paul Veronese, did more perfect and stronger work than the sacred army of obedient Catholics headed by Cimabue, Giotto and Angelico, who worked under the guidance of a heavenly vision.

This seems a strange reason for losing faith. It can only be understood when we remember that Ruskin regarded art as the expression of the painter’s whole nature, especially the soul of him; and if the endowment from heaven were really potent, it should inspire the artist to do work that is clearly supreme. That it did not do so was Ruskin’s stumbling-block. I will not anticipate the ultimate solution; but only pause to mourn over the many stumbling-blocks which our theories put in our way. Because the lot decided unfairly, Silas Marner, the wronged of heaven, lost his faith. How many have been and are unable to see through pain and poverty to God. How many have bound their faith to the accuracy of a record or the fidelity of a frail fellow-creature.

Of the religious utterances of this first period, which ended in 1858, the second volume of Modern Painters is the most typical. To me, it was the door by which in 1882 I entered into my love of Ruskin the author, as Fors led me to love and reverence the man. The subject is an analysis of Beauty as a various expression of the mind of God. It is published separately; it is not a long book; and it might be read for a second time along with the Author’s notes of 1883. These give us the verdict of age upon the enthusiasm of its own youth, and are vastly entertaining. Even as Tennyson, in his “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After,” puts his quietus upon the ebullitions of the most rhythmic and moving utterance of his youth, so does Ruskin, with mocking self-blame, speak with fatherly candour to the Oxford Graduate of 1845.

To this period, too, belongs his avowedly theological pamphlet, Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds. It is of 1851, attacks ecclesiastical pretensions on Scriptural grounds, and in spite of its sectarian limitations was considered so sound in its main drift that the author reissued it in his mature period.

He states that all his works up to 1853 are marred by his narrow Protestant dogmatism. Now 1858, as we have seen, was his year of freedom from it, and from much that was more precious. Between 1853 and 1858 came out volumes iii and iv of Modern Painters, the Lectures on Architecture and Painting at Edinburgh, and the lectures at Manchester on the Political Economy of Art. The last marks transition. It is the forerunner of the next period; it shows us how his way of treating Art led him on to Economics. But it is of great interest to study his position in these two volumes of Modern Painters. They are as religious as ever, and as devout; but between Catholic and Protestant, frequently brought into contrast, they hold the scales of judgment. The author casts the lantern of criticism impartially upon both, but his own faith in the great verities still holds. It is plain, however, that conduct was rising to the chief place in his mind. The Sermon on the Mount was becoming, what it ever afterwards remained to him, the central teaching of the Christian faith.

If we omit the Poems of his boyhood and youth, and his early minor scientific contributions to journals, and begin his career as a writer for the public with the year 1842, when he wrote the first volume of Modern Painters, published next year, we have sixteen years of authorship for the Early Period. We have also, oddly enough, sixteen years of authorship, 1858 to 1874, for his Middle Period, shortly to be described; and if we give sixteen years for the mature period also, that brings us to 1890, only a few months after the last number of PrÆterita struggled into the light from his failing pen. He wrote no more. We thus have three periods, Early, Middle, and Mature, each of sixteen years, not difficult to remember, 1842-1858, 1858-1874, and 1874-1890. It is a testimony to his utter frankness and undimmed candour that we are able thus to map out the growth of his convictions.

For a growth it was, all the time, though apparently 1858 was a year of wreck and ruin. We cannot put new wine into old wineskins. His middle period was the time for the analytical tendency of his mind to have its way. Mazzini had already said that Ruskin had the most analytic mind in Europe; and now that searching analysis which had discovered Luini and placed Tintoretto, and had penetrated, by a way of its own, far into the hidden secret of Beauty, could not be denied when it faced the stronghold of the Christian revelation, even though his own heart and every fibre of his sensitive nature was within the fortress attacked.

His economic crusade began in 1860; and on his spiritually desolated heart was piled the sorrow of the social system. Hermit and heretic he became, in religion and economics alike. Victorious in his championship of Turner and the Pre-raphaelites, whom single-handed he had placed on the pinnacle they have never lost, he had the literary and artistic world at his feet. This great position he cast aside to enter on a sterner battle. The recognized leader of taste, the arbiter of reputations, turned aside to abuse so good a man as John Stuart Mill, to say the most shocking things about the clergy and the clergy’s wives, to testify against rent and interest, to blaspheme that steam power by which England was conquering the world, and to utter strange hesitating sayings which showed that he was not sure of a life to come. Nor could he brave the storm with the self-confident dogmatism of youth. “I seldom now feel sure of anything,” he wrote in the first Christmas issue of Fors, “still seldomer, however, do I feel sure of the contrary of anything.”[13] When we add that this period was marked by the loss of his parents, who had been everything to him, and by a grievous disappointment in love—for the girl who loved him would not marry him because he was not orthodox, so far as reasons can ever be given for such decisions, but died of a decline instead—we shall see how heavy was the lonely task set before him to do. Nor had the veneration of disciples and the growing recognition of all good men come to him yet; it came afterwards, built the prophet’s shrine, in his lifetime certainly,[14] but only after the world’s neglect, and his failure even to carry his own friends with him, had helped to break the powers of his mind and set his brain reeling in recurring attacks of delirious inflammation. He was, in that madness, being offered upon the sacrifice and service of our faith.

During this middle period of prime mental power, he wrote nineteen volumes, and numerous catalogues and pamphlets. They are, in order of time: The Two Paths, Modern Painters, vol. v., Unto This Last, Munera Pulveris, Sesame and Lilies, The Ethics of the Dust, The Crown of Wild Olive, Time and Tide, The Queen of the Air, Lectures on Art at Oxford, the first half of Flors Clavigera, Aratra Pentelici, The Eagle’s Nest, Love’s Meinie, Ariadne Florentina, Val D’Arno, and most of the papers reprinted in On the Old Road. As an author he was in his full strength.

The significance of the period is that under the most painful uncertainties of doctrine, true religion shone still, blazed beaconlike, in fact: blazed as a beacon blazes when blown by tempest. But few readers ever thought of the writer as a heretic. He preached all the time the simple eternal sanction for right conduct which the nature of man, akin to the Divine, provides. He recognized the ineradicable claim which the teaching of the New Testament has upon our obedience. He attacked the Churches, not for being too Christian, but for not being anything like Christian enough. Referring to his mother’s gift of twenty-six chapters learnt by heart, he says in 1874:—

“The chapters became, indeed, strictly conclusive and protective 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.’ 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.”[15]

The classical passage, as I should esteem it, for this period is in The Eagle’s Nest,[16] the Oxford Lectures of 1872; which contain some of his most careful religious writing:

“All of you who have ever read your Gospels carefully must have wondered sometimes, what could be the meaning of those words, ‘If any speak against the Son of Man it shall be forgiven; but if against the Holy Spirit it shall not be forgiven, neither in this world nor in the next.’ The passage may have many meanings which I do not know; but one meaning I know positively, and I tell you so just as frankly as I would that I knew the meaning of a verse in Homer. Those of you who still go to Chapel say every day your creed; and, I suppose, too often, less and less every day believing it. Now, you may cease to believe two articles of it, and—admitting Christianity to be true—still be forgiven. But I can tell you, you must not cease to believe the third!

“You begin by saying that you believe in an Almighty Father. Well, you may entirely lose the sense of that Fatherhood and yet be forgiven.

“You go on to say that you believe in a Saviour Son. You may entirely lose the sense of that Sonship and yet be forgiven.

“But the third article—disbelieve if you dare! ‘I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life.’ Disbelieve that! and your own being is degraded into the state of dust driven by the wind; and the elements of dissolution have entered your very heart and soul.

“All Nature, with one voice—with one glory—is set to teach you reverence for the life communicated to you from the Father of Spirits. The song of birds, and their plumage, the scent of flowers, their colour, their very existence, are in direct connection with the mystery of that communicated life: and all the strength, and all the arts of men, are measured by and founded upon their reverence for the passion, and their guardianship of the purity, of Love.”

Such is the utmost asceticism of the soul; the most careful and determined assimilation of the least quantity of the bread of life. We may sum his creed in the words: Happy are the pure in heart, for they yet in their flesh shall see the light of Heaven and know the will of God.

Perhaps the question of Divine Personality may be felt even in our most audacious moments to be beyond our analysis. I do not count the word Personality a very helpful one, one way or the other. It is clearly on the human plane, must be imperfect, and may seriously limit our thought of God. Tennyson’s favourite prayer was “O Thou Infinite, Amen.” And with this much of personal address or aspiration our souls may surely rest. Take this as a satisfying account of the Creative Logos of the Greeks, written in the light of evolution, in 1869 (Queen of the Air, pp. 124-6):

“With respect to all these divisions and powers of plants—it does not matter in the least by what concurrences of circumstance or necessity they may gradually have been developed: the concurrence of circumstance is itself the supreme and inexplicable fact. We always come at last to a formative cause, which directs the circumstance, and mode of meeting it. If you ask an ordinary botanist the reason of the form of a leaf, he will tell you it is ‘a developed tubercle,’ and that ‘its ultimate form is owing to the directions of its vascular threads.’ But what directs its vascular threads? ‘They are seeking for something they want’ he will probably answer. What makes them want that? What made them seek for it thus? Seek for it, in five fibres or in three? Seek for it, in serration, or in sweeping curves? Seek for it, in servile tendrils, or impetuous spray? Seek for it, in woollen wrinkles rough with stings, or in glossy surfaces, green with pure strength, and winterless delight?

“There is no answer. But, the sum of all is, that over the entire surface of the earth and its waters, as influenced by the power of the air under solar light, there is developed a series of changing forms, in clouds, plants and animals, all of which have reference in their action or nature, to the human intelligence that perceives them; and on which, in their aspects of horror and beauty, and their qualities of good and evil, there is engraved a series of myths or words of the forming power, which, according to the true passion and energy of the human race, they have been enabled to read into religion. And this forming power has been by all nations partly confused with the breath of air through which it acts, and partly understood as a creative wisdom, proceeding from the Supreme Deity; but entering into and inspiring all intelligences that work in harmony with Him. And whatever intellectual results may be in modern days obtained by regarding this effluence only as a motion or vibration, every formative human art hitherto, and the best states of human happiness and order, have depended on the apprehension of its mystery (which is certain), and of its personality (which is probable).”

He concludes that lecture, the second in The Queen of the Air, with these words:

“This only we may discern assuredly; this, every true light of science, every mercifully granted power, every wisely restricted thought, teach us more clearly day by day, that in the heaven above, and the earth beneath, there is one continual and omnipotent presence of help, and of peace, for all men who know that they Live, and remember that they Die.”

To quote from the religious teaching of these fruitful years would be an endless task; I must only refer, I fear, without quoting any of it, to The Mystery of Life and its Arts, printed in the complete edition of Sesame and Lilies; a characteristic and pathetic exhortation, and chiefly perhaps, to §10-16 of the Introduction to The Crown of Wild Olive.

So much for his constructive teaching. But he was a destroyer too. The peculiarity of his position and the cause of his loneliness was that he was always throwing his darts not only into the camp of the business men and their allies the economists, but also into the two religious camps, generally opposed to one another, held, one by the clergy, the other by the materialistic men of science. He rebuked both parties for their assumptions, and he smote them with all the artillery of sarcasm, wit and indignation. “You have to guard against the fatalest darkness of the two opposite Prides: the Pride of Faith, which imagines that the nature of the Deity can be defined by its convictions; and the Pride of Science, which imagines that the energy of Deity can be explained by its analysis.”[17] As sword-play it is fine. He gives what purports to be a scientific account of Shakespeare: so much water, so much carbo-hydrate and phosphorus, and thus you build up your organism called William Shakespeare—with, of course, something left out. He was ever dwelling on the realities of the spirit which chemistry omits. The fashionable scientific materialism of the seventies he utterly abhorred: he behaved to it as St. George to the Dragon. He loathed anatomy, mocked at the idea that you understood a creature by cutting up its remains; and when the men of science at Oxford proceeded to vivisection he threw up his professorship in flaming wrath, sick at heart; every sentiment of mercy, every safe doctrine of science violated in unholy cruelty and impatience.

He describes the limitations of “some scientific minds, which in their judgment of the Universe can be compared to nothing so accurately as to the woodworms in the panel of a picture by some great painter, if we may conceive them as tasting with discrimination of the wood, and with repugnance of the colour, and declaring that even this unlooked for and undesirable combination is a normal result of the action of molecular Forces.”[18]

We pass on to the third period of sixteen years, the Mature Period as I call it, from 1874 to 1890, when his productive life ended. He now came to know more fully the fullness of faith. Here he entered into his reward, I say. The revelation of God to him became clearer, sweeter, mightier. As in 1858, the time of crisis was marked by two events which occurred that year, one in things spiritual and one in things artistic.[19]

The artistic event of 1874 was a reversal of the puzzling judgment of 1858 to the effect that the worldly painters excelled the devout ones. It came about through his copying one of Giotto’s frescoes on the roof of the Lower Church at Assisi. He was allowed to erect a platform in that dark church over the High Altar, that he might see the picture. There he discovered that Giotto was only beaten by Tintoret in mere science, technique, laws of perspective, composition and light and shade, and that religion had solemnized and developed every faculty of Giotto’s heart and hand. The Franciscan monastery at Assisi is one of the most sacred places on earth anyhow, but 1874 saw one more gift of light there vouchsafed, and a haunting problem solved. Art was to Ruskin a visible manifestation of life’s full faculties, in a department he specially understood; and religion, which is the source of strength and the support of character, he thought should be judged by its output.

Now we turn to the second event. His hopes of the reality of a Spirit world received unexpected and potent confirmation from the fact that in December, 1875, he had, at the house of Lord Mount Temple, at Broadlands, Romsey, some psychic experience so definite that he was convinced that he had true communication with her whom he had lately lost, the “Rosie” of PrÆterita, No. XXVII.[20] It was a confirmation to his faith. He became an Honorary Member of the Society for Psychical Research the year after its formation in 1882, joining in that well-grounded hope that a true science of human Personality might be built up by its patient experimental methods. To Lady Mount Temple, nÉe Tollemache, the Egeria of the winter of 1840 in Rome, we owe much for the help she was to Ruskin all through life; and much also that from her came the stimulus to Frederick W. H. Myers and Edmund Gurney to begin the Society for Psychical Research. Two of Ruskin’s stories of Death wraiths may be found in Fors,[21] also a dream in Letter LXV. He never took to ordinary spiritualism; it is indeed from an attack upon it that he turns to a note describing the happiness of his own experience. “I leave this passage as it was written; though as it passes through the press, it is ordered by Atropos that I should hear a piece of evidence on this matter no less clear as to the present ministry of such powers as that which led Peter out of prison, than all the former, or nearly all the former, evidence examined by me was of the presence of the legion which ruled among the tombs of Gennesaret.”[22] He allows the contradiction to stand; indeed, in this puzzling and partially known subject, a consistent position is beyond the knowledge of most. He returns to the attack on Spiritualism, however, in his 1883 note to the second volume of Modern Painters, p. 244.

In the following year, 1876, at Venice at Christmas, he had vouchsafed to himself the inward assurance of an immortal life; he entered into a singular happiness; Fors became the organ of a mysticism truly Johannine; he loved to expound universal Christian truth, so catholic indeed in the true sense that Cardinal Manning aspired to turn him to Rome. That was a vain hope. He still retained his analytical faculty. He says that he would “give up Moses” if criticism demanded it.[23] Concerning his lectures of 1877 at Oxford he writes to Miss Beever in the “hortus inclusus” at Coniston that he has been able for the first time to speak boldly to the students of immortal life. The concluding passage of the last lecture is this:[24]

“But obey the word in its simplicity, in wholeness of purpose and with severity of sacrifice, like this of the Venetian Maids’, and truly you shall receive sevenfold into your bosom in this present life, as in the world to come, life everlasting.” “He shall give his angels charge over you, to keep you in all your ways; and the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” It came to be true of himself that “if life be led under heaven’s law, the sense of heaven’s nearness only deepens with advancing years, and is assured in death.”[25]

“The faith of the saints and prophets rising into serenity of knowledge, ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’ is a state of mind of which ordinary men cannot reason; but which, in the practical power of it, has always governed the world, and must for ever. No dynamite will ever be invented that can rule—it can but dissolve and destroy. Only the Word of God and the heart of man can govern.”[26]

We cannot conclude this analysis better than by quoting from the last number of Fors in 1884:

“Looking back upon my efforts for the last twenty years, I believe that their failure has been in great part owing to my compromise with the infidelity of this outer world, and my endeavours to base my pleading upon motives of ordinary prudence and kindness, instead of on the primary duty of loving God; foundation other than which no man can lay. I thought myself speaking to a crowd which could only be influenced by visible utility; nor was I the least aware how many entirely good and holy persons were living in the faith and love of God as vividly and practically now as ever in the early enthusiasm of Christendom. These have shown me, with lovely initiation, in how many secret places the prayer was made which I had foolishly listened for at the corners of the streets, and on how many hills which I had thought left desolate, the hosts of heaven still moved in chariots of fire.”[27] These passages show that F. W. H. Myers, in the beautiful obituary which I am permitted to print as an Epilogue, was not correct in describing the experience with the medium at Broadlands, as Ruskin’s one brief season of blissful trust in the Unseen. It is true of his temporary belief in spiritualism.

I trust it will have become clear that Ruskin’s spiritual history is not a story of arbitrary and fanciful changes without connected significance. It is the orderly development of a research, by a man singularly qualified to hold a religious Research Fellowship.

He may be said to have matriculated in religion at his mother’s knee. There he learnt his Bible. He took a degree with the second volume of Modern Painters and the works allied to it in spirit. He then became a Master of Arts, qualified to teach, a recognized religious authority among many authorities. Had he never gone to Venice and seen Tintoret he might have built, so he says, a Catholic archiepiscopal palace at York instead of a museum at Sheffield; or he might have been such a man as Dean Church or John Henry Newman, on Calvinistic Protestant lines. But Ruskin proceeded to a higher status. He must needs penetrate deeper; and in the crisis of 1858 he took his Fellowship by a thesis on the Irreducible Minimum of the Religious Outfit. Thenceforth he carried on a research, he was a “seeker after God,” often wrote “in much darkness and sorrow of heart”; and in sixteen years the conclusions were ready, the convictions matured, the saint perfected.