Mr. Ruskin's view as to the duty of basing all upon the Father's love is essentially sound and orthodox; and he is also right in bidding all men lead self-denying lives,—in this sense, that they should give up time and labour to the endeavour to help their brethren; but he fails utterly, hopelessly, to realize the Incarnation and its glorious consequences, how all human life and love,—how art, science, knowledge, enjoyment, are sanctified by God's becoming man; sharing this human life of ours,—not to trample upon it as an unholy thing, but to consecrate it to God's service. Such is our call. We must enjoy the beautiful to vindicate enjoyment. We do not please God by casting all His choicest gifts away. To give all we have to feed the poor is the way to make men poor, and is false charity. Use rather the mammon of this world to God's honour and glory, and when ye fail, the good works that you have done shall plead for your entrance into everlasting habitations; for the way to clothe the naked and feed the hungry, permanently, is to teach men and women to help themselves, and to find employment and reward for the exercise of their powers and energies.
From the Rev. J. H. A. Gibson, Brighton.
To Mr. Ruskin, then, asking us to define ourselves as a body, I reply, We are presbyters and deacons, deriving our authority from the episcopate, who themselves form links in that spiritual chain which binds both ourselves and them, by perpetual succession, in one communion and fellowship, with the Apostles, and to whom has been committed the office of consecrating and sending forth labourers to work in the Lord's vineyard.
But Mr. Ruskin proceeds, "And our business as such." Our business as such! Well, if we have in any satisfactory manner proved our first point—that is, the authority with which we act—we may fairly say to Mr. Ruskin, "Do you put this question, 'What is your business?' to your lawyer or doctor?" Does he ask the same question of the clergy of any other portion of the Catholic Church? We shall not wish to insult Mr. Ruskin by attempting to explain to him the duties of the priesthood, with which, doubtless, he is well acquainted.
But he asks, "Do we look upon ourselves as attached to any particular State, and bound to the promulgation of any particular tenets?" We are undoubtedly attached to the particular sphere to the which we are sent by those whose office is to provide the various parts of God's vineyard with labourers. The Anglican Church is the legitimate representative of the Catholic Church of Christ in England; and we, as clergy of this Church, minister for the most part to our countrymen at home, and only in other countries as the necessities of our colonists and others may require. And, as subscribers to the Prayer Book and priests of the Church of England, we are certainly bound to teach faithfully and honestly her doctrines, neither adding to them nor taking away from them according to our own individual idiosyncrasies.
From the Rev. Canon Gray.
Wolsingham, October 13th, 1879.
My dear Penrhyn,—Will you please to thank Mr. Malleson on my behalf for the Letters on the Lord's Prayer? I have ever admired Ruskin, and learn much even when I most differ from him. But if I had the good fortune to be with you to-morrow, I fear that I should constantly be demurring to his teaching,—e.g. ([Letter III.]) his supposition that the Thirty-nine Articles were meant to include a summary of the Gospel; ([Letter V.]) his belief that there is need now to warn men against being thankful not to the Father but only to the Son,—a remnant of the teaching of his youth; ([p. 20]) his hard way of speaking as to the Son of Man, Whose human soul, as that of perfect man, received its knowledge in steps according to His own will as perfect God; ([Letter VII.]) his confused distinction between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Christ (see Eph. v. 5 in the Greek, and remember "tradendo tenet" on 1 Cor. xv. 24); his belief that because no one knoweth the hour of Christ's coming, it cannot be hastened by prayer; ([Letter VIII.]) his seeming identification of claiming interest from a poor man who is in need and necessity, and from a railway company who borrow money to make more,—speaking, as far as I can see, of money as if it had no market value like other things; ([Letter X.]) the belief that we clergy are not awake to the guilt of sins of omission; ([Letter X.]) the inability to see that the nearer and nearer by God's grace we come, in answer to prayer, to purity and holiness, the more we realize our distance from them; and that his objection to our Liturgy might be adapted into one against the Lord's Prayer, in which we pray daily for forgiveness of sins, and deliverance from evil, showing that we never shall be so delivered as no longer to need forgiveness; ([Letter XI.]) the supposition that any one state of life is necessarily more full of temptations than another, as though the fruit of a tree were not to Eve what the glory of the world was to the Son of Man, at least in the eye of the Tempter.
I am ashamed to jot down thus obscurely the points on which I should have liked to speak, and I know that our brethren can fully deal with them. On the other hand ([Letter VIII.]) there is much to move us, and lead to searchings of heart. As to the timidity and coldness with which the Church is attacking the crying sins of our day, one often feels how we need some among us to speak as the prophets did to the men of their generation, and we may be thankful to have our shortcomings brought home to us by words like Ruskin's.
I wish I were not writing so hurriedly.