Letters to the Clergy on the Lord's Prayer and the Church

by John Ruskin

Every one will feel what a crowd of perplexities start up here at every sentence. In what sense is a clergyman like a Chamouni guide? There is a resemblance, no doubt, but not of a kind on which it would be possible to build any argument. It is not the business of the Alpine guide to exercise any supervision over the morals of his employers, or to ask how they earned the money with which he is paid. Again, what is meant by the Gospel of Christ not according to anybody? It is easy to reject the authority of St. Paul or St. John, or of Luther or Augustine, but there is one commentator whose influence cannot be shaken off, and that is ourselves. And our experience of those who have professed to preach the Gospel pure and simple is not reassuring. Does Mr. Ruskin mean that we are to burn all our theology,—even apparently the Epistles of St. Paul,—and to forget all Church history since the day of the Crucifixion? Does he mean that we are each to set up a theology—a Church of his own? It would be but a poor gain to most of us to exchange the great lamps of famous doctors for the uncertain rushlights of our own imaginations.

Then again, what is this new and more than Genevan discipline that the clergyman is to enforce? He is to take more pains to get wicked rich men to stay out of the church than to persuade wicked poor ones to enter it. After putting his own interpretation upon the Gospel, he is to lay under an interdict all whom his own fire-new formula—for a formula he must still have—excludes. He is to force, by the method of Procrustes, the visible Church into co-extension with the invisible. No community of Christians has ever attempted such a task. Any zealous (surely over-zealous) parish priest who should so narrow the limits of his fold, who should exclude the "usurer" from the ordinary means of grace, for fear lest he should take God's name in vain by joining in the public prayers, would expose himself, may we not think? to the reproach of being less merciful than He who sends rain on the just and the unjust. Nor, as he looked round upon his carefully-selected congregation, could he easily flatter himself that he was preaching the Gospel "to every creature."

Again, what is the will of the Lord, and what does Mr. Ruskin mean by proclaiming it? That He loves righteousness and hates iniquity we know. The difficulty is in applying this general rule in detail. What is its bearing upon the policy of the Government, upon any particular trade strike, upon the tangled web of good and evil motives which makes up the moral consciousness of an average shopkeeper? I conceive Mr. Ruskin to be thinking of preachers like Bernard, Savonarola, or Latimer, of denunciations like those of Isaiah, or of our Lord. He seems to mean that the clergyman should stand on a clear mountain summit, looking down over the whole field of life, discerning with the eye of a prophet every movement of evil on a small scale or on a large. There have been such teachers in whose hands science, economy, politics, seemed all to become branches of theology, members of one great body of Divine truth. But not every man's lips are thus touched with the coal from the altar. Many an excellent and most useful preacher would make but wild work if he took to denouncing social movements or the spirit of the age. A singular illustration of the danger that besets these sweeping moral judgments is to be found in Mr. Ruskin's own denunciation of usury, that is, of taking interest for money. Few people will agree either with the particular opinion that every old lady who lives harmlessly on her railway dividends ought to be excommunicated, or with the general principle implied in this opinion, that every prohibition in the Old Testament is still as valid as ever under social circumstances altogether different.

People who need denouncing do not, as a rule, come to church to be denounced. And it would be a great error to conclude, from our Lord's language to the Pharisees and Sadducees, that the tone in which He addressed the individual sinner was harsh or scathing. The preacher must remember that he is a physician of souls, and the physician's touch is gentle. Think for a moment what worldliness is—how easy it is to say bitter things about it!—and then picture to yourselves a little tradesman with a wife and seven or eight children to keep on his scanty profits. What wonder if he sets too high a value on money? How difficult for him to understand the words which bid him take no thought for the morrow!

There is a time, no doubt, for fierce language, but it does not often come. The preacher is no more exempt than other people from the golden rule to put himself in his neighbour's place, and try to see things with his neighbour's eyes.

Another difficulty arises out of the manner in which Mr. Ruskin speaks of the relation of his Chamouni guides to dogmatic teaching. They ought not, he says, to be compelled to hold opinions on the subject, say, of the height of the Celestial Mountains, the crevasses which go down quickest to the pit, and other cognate points of science, differing from, or even contrary to, the tenets of the guides of the Church of France.

It is difficult in the extreme to know exactly what is here meant. No doubt it is needless for a guide to drop a plumb-line down every crevasse that he has to cross. It would be great waste of time to lecture his travellers on the laws that regulate the motion of glaciers or the dip of the mountain strata. But what are the doctrines that stand in this relation, or this no-relation, to the spiritual life? Is it meant that all theology should be swept away like a dusty old cobweb?

I would go myself as far as this, that the fewer and simpler the doctrines that a clergyman preaches, the better; that all doctrines should be required to pass the test of reason and conscience, which are also in their degrees Divine revelations, so far, at least, as this, that no doctrine can be admitted which is demonstrably repugnant to either one or the other. And in the third place, the greatest care should be taken to discriminate matters of faith, real axioms of religion, from pious opinions or venerable practices which have no vital connection with the Christian faith; which, to use Burke's phrase, all understandings do not ratify, and all hearts do not approve. A grave responsibility rests upon those who neglect this discrimination. It is also a point of the highest importance that when most doctrinal a clergyman should be least dogmatic; that he should remember that all doctrine, by the necessity of the case, is cast into an antithetical, more or less paradoxical shape; that he should never lose sight of the harmony and balance between intersecting truths, or of that unfortunate tendency of the human mind to seize upon and appropriate points of difference in their crudest and most antagonistic form, to the exclusion of points of agreement; that he should always do his best to show the reasonableness of the Christian teaching, its analogy and harmony with all the works of God; that where his knowledge fails, he should frankly confess that it does fail, and not try to eke it out by guesses, or to disguise its insufficiency by rhetoric.

But after all these allowances it remains a fact that the clergyman is not a guide only, but a teacher, an ambassador. He is to teach his people all that he knows about God and His relation to the soul of man. He is to study and meditate himself, and to set forth the conclusion he has reached fully and fearlessly. And if he discharges this duty reasonably and zealously, he need not be afraid of finding that there is a gulf fixed between doctrine and practice. These two must go together. There can be no conduct deserving the name without a philosophy of conduct, and that philosophy is a sound divinity. Even the loftiest and most abstruse doctrines must have an influence upon life. It is a common remark that scientific truth should be pursued for its own sake, and that the most valuable practical results have often followed from investigations carried out with a single eye to the truth. It is an equally common remark that those teach the simplest things best whose range of knowledge and belief is widest. We might point to Mr. Ruskin himself as a striking illustration of this. What is simpler than beauty? what more universally apprehended? what at first sight more incapable of analysis? Yet as we listen to the great critic, what wonderful laws does he point out—what a wealth of knowledge does he bring to bear—how clear he makes it to us that the power of feeling (still more the power of creating) beauty is the hard-won fruit of labour, study, and devotion. So it is with life: those who would create a beautiful life must know the laws of spiritual beauty,—and those laws are theology.

But criticism is a thankless task. It is a more gracious and, towards a great man, a more respectful office to note those points on which our debt to Mr. Ruskin is acknowledged, and our sympathy with him unalloyed. These letters are, in spirit at any rate, not unworthy of the man who has exercised a deeper and wider influence upon the morality of our time than any other, except perhaps Thomas Carlyle. And the great lesson of each of these eloquent teachers is the duty of Reality. There are many points in which we do not agree with them: let us be all the readier to acknowledge the debt that we owe. Both laymen,—like Amos, neither prophets nor sons of prophets,—they have done a work which, perhaps, under the altered circumstances of society, no professional preacher could have achieved. Any one who considers the earnestness and reverence of modern intellectual literature; the anxious desire even of the Agnostic to lay the foundations of his moral life as deep as possible; the manifold efforts, while denying all religion, yet to maintain the union of imagination and reason, without which there can be no loftiness of character, no nobility of aspiration, yet which nothing but religion can consecrate and fructify,—and compares all this with the sneering, self-satisfied flippancy of Gibbon and Voltaire, will feel how vast is the change for the better; and these two writers have been the chief instruments in bringing that change about.