On Letter V
The next paragraph to the last in this letter, contains a statement which at first might seem to be rashly expressed. But I was not long in apprehending that when Mr. Ruskin alludes to a scheme of pardon "for which we are supposed to be thankful, not to the Father, but to the Son," he was far from impugning that doctrine of the Atonement in which, as it is generally understood among Christian people, the whole plan of salvation centres.
But there seems to have been a fatality about this sentence. Numbers have read it and commented upon it, myself amongst the number, as if Mr. Ruskin were here expressing his own view; instead of which, he is here quoting other men's opinions, to condemn them with severity. The Record called it some of Mr. Ruskin's dross; but it is other people's dross, for which he would offer us pure gold.
I happened, a very short time previous to receiving this letter, to have had my attention attracted by the following passage of Mr. Ruskin's own:—"When, in the desert, He was girding Himself for the work of life, angels of life came and ministered to Him; now, in the fair world, when He is girding Himself for the work of death [at the Transfiguration], the ministrants came to Him from the grave. But from the grave conquered. One from that tomb under Abarim, which His own hand had sealed long ago; the other from the rest which He had entered without seeing corruption."
Pleased with the truthful eloquence of this passage, I placed it at the head of the chapter on the Transfiguration in my book on the Life and Work of Christ (still in the press). Having done so, it struck me that Mr. Ruskin, whether intentionally or undesignedly, had made the pronoun "His" to apply either to God the Father, or to God the Son. It may grammatically refer to either. From this I drew the conclusion which I expressed in a short letter to my friend, that, discarding the strictly human uses of language, which, from its unavoidable poverty, lacks the power of marking the true nature of the difference between the Divine Persons of the Holy Trinity, he had spoken of the Father and of the Son indiscriminately or indifferently, i.e., without a difference.
And so it really is. How shall a man, though at the highest he be "but a little lower than the angels," know and comprehend the Godhead in its true and exact nature? The names father and son express an earthly relation perfectly well understood when belonging to ourselves, but when applied to the Supreme Divine Being, they must of necessity fall far short of expressing their true connexion with one another. They are, when applied to Heavenly beings, merely anthropomorphic terms used in compassion to our infirmities, and conveying to us only an approximation to the ideas intended. We say the Father sent the Son; the Son suffered for our sins. But since Father and Son are One, we are plainly expressing something short of the exact state of the case when we speak of our thankfulness to the Son as if we had no reason to be equally thankful to the Father.
The Athanasian Creed makes no great demand upon our mental powers when it requires of us, in speaking of the Trinity, neither to confound the Persons nor to divide the Substance; for, in truth, I suppose we are equally incapable of doing either.
These are Divine matters, of which, while the simplest may know enough, the wisest can never fathom the whole depth. For the Divine power and love, knowledge and compassion, will never be fully comprehended until we know even as we are known.
But, as I am abstaining from questioning Mr. Ruskin as to his meaning in any passage, if it happens to be slightly obscure, awaiting his reply at the close of the book, I may here say that I believe that this sentence refers to a wild and unscriptural kind of preaching, happily becoming less common, in which undue stress is laid upon the wrathfulness of God, as contrasted with the mercy of the Saviour, as if we had only the Son to thank, and not our loving Father in Heaven, for the blessed hope of eternal life. Some there are, and always will be, who habitually err in not rightly dividing the Word of God, and giving undue prominence to a dark portion of doctrine, which is true enough in itself, but would be relieved of much of its gloom, if due prominence were given to other parts of the truth of God.