"I am sorrowfully amused at your appeal to me, of all people in the world the precisely least likely to give you a farthing. My first word to all men and boys who care to hear me is, 'Don't get into debt. Starve, and go to heaven; but don't borrow. Try, first, begging. I don't mind, if it's really needful, stealing. But don't buy things you can't pay for.' And of all manner of debtors, pious people building churches they can't pay for are the most detestable nonsense to me. Can't you preach and pray behind the hedges, or in a sandpit, or in a coal-hole, first? And of all manner of churches thus idiotically built, iron churches are the damnablest to me. And of all the sects and believers in any ruling spirit—Hindoos, Turks, Feather Idolaters, and Mumbo Jumbo Log and Fire Worshippers—who want churches, your modern English Evangelical sect is the most absurd and objectionable and unendurable to me. All of which you might very easily have found out from my books. Any other sort of sect would, before bothering me to write it to them."
Ruskin is the poet and the high-priest of Nature. To him she reveals her mysteries, and he interprets them to a dull and commonplace world in language as glowing and impassioned as that of the prophets and priests of the olden time. No man, apparently, has seen the sea as Ruskin has seen it,—not even Byron, who wrote so majestic a hymn to it; no man has so seen the mountains, with his very soul transfixed in solemn awe; no one has felt as he the holy stillness of the forest aisles, or so described even the tiny wild flowers of the fields. And he has not only seen their outward glories, but he has interpreted their hidden meanings. He has carried the symbolism of Nature on into the moral world. There is no greater moralist than he. He is stern in his demands for right, and truth, and sincerity in life and in work. This has been the keynote of his teachings throughout life. He hates a falsehood or a sham as much as Browning or Carlyle. He has taught his countrymen many things. No people love Nature better than the English of the present day, and John Ruskin has opened the eyes of many of them to the beauties that lie everywhere about them. Then his long agitation for a better architecture has not been wholly in vain. Though the architects all laughed at him when his lectures were given, many of his ideas slowly made their way, and the new demand for strength and solidity and sincerity in building has been largely due to him.
But much greater than all his art influence has been the weight of his moral teachings. No preacher of the day has preached to such an audience as he, and he has always held men to the best that is in them. Long after his idiosyncrasies shall have been forgotten, and his faults and foibles given over to oblivion, his precepts will remain to influence the life and thought of the coming time.
