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 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 tittle better. Which, so far as I can read the minds of your correspondents, One thing I cannot pass without protest—the quantity 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 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. The most singular one, perhaps, in all the Letters is that of Mr. ——, that I do not attach enough weight to 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 pass. 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 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 passionate 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 nobody could be offended by them. For a special instance: The prayer for 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 "Ut obsequium servitutis nostre rationabile facias."—"That thou wouldst make the obedience of our service reasonable" ("which is your reasonable service"). 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 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 "Almighty and everlasting God, who hast given to Thy servants, in confession of true faith to recognize the glory of the Eternal Trinity, and in the power of Majesty to pray to the Unity; we ask that by the firmness of that faith we may be always defended from all adverse things, who livest and reignest God through all ages. Amen." Turning to our Collect, we find we have first slipped in the word "us" before "Thy servants," and by that little insertion have slipped in the squire and his jockey, and the public-house landlord—and any one else who may "Grace." Not a word about grace in the original. You don't believe by having grace, but by having wit. "To acknowledge." "Agnosco" is to recognize, not to acknowledge. To see that there are three lights in a chandelier is a great deal more than to acknowledge that they are there. "To worship." "Adorare" is to pray to, not to worship. You may worship a mere magistrate; but you pray to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The last sentence in the English is too horribly mutilated to be dealt with in any patience. The meaning of the "Who livest and reignest." Right; but how many of any extant or instant congregations understand what the two words mean? That God is a living God, not a dead Law; and that He is a reigning God, putting wrong things to rights, and that, sooner or later, with a strong hand and a rod of iron; and not at all with a soft sponge and warm water, washing everybody as clean as a baby every Sunday morning, whatever dirty work they may have been about all the week. On which latter supposition your 1. Acknowledge and confess. 2. Sins and wickedness. 3. Dissemble nor cloke. 4. Goodness and mercy. 5. Assemble and meet. 6. Requisite and necessary. 7. Pray and beseech. There is, indeed, a shade of difference in some of these ideas for a good scholar, "The faultfullest," I said, "and the foolishest." After using fourteen words "That we should not dissemble nor cloke them." Can we then? Are these grown-up congregations of the enlightened English Church in the nineteenth century still so young in their nurseries that the "Thou, God, seest me" is still not believed by them if they get under the bed? Let us look up the sundry moving passages referred to. (I suppose myself a simple lamb of the flock, and only able to use my English Bible.) I find in my concordance (confess and confession together) forty-two occurrences of the word. Sixteen of these, including John's confession that he was not the Christ, and the confession of the faithful fathers that they were pilgrims on the earth, do indeed move us strongly to confess Christ before men. Have you ever taught your congregations what that confession means? They are ready enough to confess Him in church, that is to say, in their own private synagogue. Will they in Parliament? Will they in a ball-room? Will they in a shop? Sixteen of the texts are to enforce their doing that. The next most important one (1 Tim. The eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth (1 Kings viii. 33, 2 Chron. vi. 26, Heb. xiii. 15) speak of confessing thankfully that God is God (and not a putrid plasma nor a theory of development), and the twenty-first (Job xl. 14) speaks of God's own confession, that no doubt we are the people, and that wisdom shall die with us, and on what conditions He will make it. There remain twenty-one texts which do speak of the confession of our sins—very moving ones indeed—and Heaven grant that some day the British public may be moved by them. 1. The first is Lev. v. 5, "He shall 2. The second is indeed general—Lev. xvi. 21: the command that the whole nation should afflict its soul on the great day of atonement once a year. The Church of England, I believe, enjoins no such unpleasant ceremony. Her festivals are passed by her people often indeed in the extinction of their souls, but by no means in their intentional affliction. 3. The third, fourth, and fifth (Lev. xxvi. 40, Numb. v. 7, Nehem. i. 6) refer all to national humiliation for definite idolatry, accompanied with an entire abandonment of that idolatry, and of idolatrous persons. How soon that form of confession is likely to find a 6. The sixth is Psalm xxxii. 5—virtually the whole of that psalm, which does, indeed, entirely refer to the greater confession, once for all opening the heart to God, which can be by no means done fifty-two times a year, and which, once done, puts men into a state in which they will never again say there is no health in them; nor that their hearts are desperately wicked; but will obey for ever the instantly following order, "Rejoice in the Lord, ye righteous, and shout for joy, all ye that are true of heart." 7. The seventh is the one confession in which I can myself share:—"After the way which they call heresy, 8. The eighth, James v. 16, tells us to confess our faults—not to God, but "one to another"—a practice not favoured by English catechumens—(by the way, what do you all mean by "auricular" confession—confession that can be heard? and is the Protestant pleasanter form one that can't be?) 9. The ninth is that passage of St. John (i. 9), the favourite evangelical text, which is read and preached by thousands of false preachers every day, without once going on to read its great companion, "Beloved, if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things; but if our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence toward God." Make your people understand the second text, and they will understand the first. At And the entire body of the remaining texts is summed in Joshua vii. 19 and Ezra x. 11, in which, whether it be Achan, with his Babylonish garment, or the people of Israel, with their Babylonish lusts, the meaning of confession is simply what it is to every brave boy, girl, man, and woman, who knows the meaning of the word "honour" before God or man—namely, to say what they have done wrong, and to take the punishment of it (not to get it blanched over by any means), and to do it no more—which is so far from being a tone of mind generally enforced either by the English, or any other extant Liturgy, that, though all my maids are exceedingly pious, and insist on the privilege of going to church as a quite inviolable one, I think it a scarcely to be hoped "Without courage," said Sir Walter Scott, "there is no truth; and without truth there is no virtue." The sentence would have been itself more true if Sir Walter had written "candour" for "truth," for it is possible to be true in insolence, or true in cruelty. But in looking back from the ridges of the Hill Difficulty in my own past life, and in all the vision that has been given me of the wanderings in the ways of others—this, of all principles, has become to me surest—that the first virtue to be required of man is frankness of heart and lip: and I believe that every That a clergyman should ever be so truly the friend of his parishioners as to deserve their confidence from childhood upwards, may be flouted as a sentimental ideal; but he is assuredly only their enemy in showing his Lutheran detestation of the sale of indulgences by broadcasting these gratis from his pulpit. The inconvenience and unpleasantness of a catechism concerning itself with the personal practice as well as the general theory of duty, are indeed perfectly conceivable by me; yet I am not convinced that such manner of catechism would therefore be less medicinal; and during the past ten years it has often been matter of amazed thought with me, while our President I observe with extreme surprise in the preceding letters the unconsciousness of some of your correspondents, that there ever was such a thing as discipline in the Christian Church. Indeed, the last wholesome instance of it I can remember was when my own great-great uncle Maitland lifted Lady —— from his altar rails, and led her back to her seat before the Such an instruction, coupled with due explanation of the nature of righteousness and iniquity, directed mainly to those who have the power of both in their own hands, being makers of law, and holders of property, would, without any further debate, bring about a very singular change in the position and respectability of English clergymen. How far they may at present be considered as merely the Squire's left hand, bound to know nothing of what he is doing with his right, it is for their own consciences to determine. For instance, a friend wrote to me the other day, "Will you not come here? You will see a noble duke destroying a village as old as the Conquest, and driving out dozens of families whose names are in Domesday Book, because, owing to the neglect of his ancestors and rackrenting for a hundred years, the place has fallen out of repair, and the people are poor, and may become paupers. A local paper ventured to tell the truth. The duke's agent called on the editor, and threatened him with destruction if he did not hold his tongue." The noble duke, doubtless, has proper Protestant horror of auricular confession. But suppose, instead of Lastly. Several of your contributors, I observe, have rashly dipped their feet in the brim of the water of that raging question of Usury; and I cannot but express my extreme regret that you should yourself have yielded to the temptation of expressing opinions which Ever affectionately yours, J. Ruskin. At the Scottish half-yearly Communion the ceremony of "fencing the tables" used to be observed; that is, turning away all those whose lives were supposed to have made them unfit to receive the Sacrament. |