against national freedom, which is but the expression of a people's life. If it is a crime to slay a man, what must it be to strike against a nation, to kill a man in his organic life? . . . To break faith with a nation is to break a deeper trust, to blight a fuller hope than can be involved in any treachery towards the individual. Who is this, the true Antichrist, he that denieth the Father and the Son, but the absolutist and the tyrant? We are surely not sufficiently sensible of the atheism involved in the deep iniquity of oppression. It is the denial of God through the denial of Man."

This is Mazzini's own religion and philosophy; only he goes still farther. For he goes beyond national frontiers and believes that the time will come when "the lips of patriots will cease to utter the word foreigner as a term of reproach, which, in men calling themselves brothers, is a blasphemy against the Cross of Christ." On Calvary Mazzini saw the pledge and promise of human solidarity, because there he saw the representative man in perfect union with God. The Cross of Christ is the seal of human brotherhood, the triumph of the Cross the earnest of that coming synthesis, that "perfect man," in whom "there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman: but Christ is all, and in all."

SUGGESTIONS FOR THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION

Is patriotism consistent with Christianity? Can you find any evidence to justify us in saying that Jesus was a patriot?

Do you think Jesus would have believed in a "league of nations"? If so, what are the grounds on which you

think so?

Mazzini's great idea was that liberty and association must always go together. Can you recall any sayings of Jesus which suggest that He also believed this?

CHAPTER XI

The Prophet of Service-John Ruskin

(1819-1900)

Ruskin, like Browning and Tennyson, is one of the peaks of nineteenth century Britain. But the intellectual storms which fell upon the poets seem on the whole to have passed the prophet by. This is, no doubt, due to the circumstance that Ruskin's chief interest lay in the province of Art; and though this province was visited by tempest, it was from another source and of another kind. It was in a sense a domestic controversy concerning principles and methods in Art. Roughly it may be said that, apart from questions of technique, Ruskin's great mission was to proclaim the sovereignty of truth and righteousness in Art as it had been Savonarola's mission in the State. It must, however, be remembered in this connection-so fundamentally one is life-that Ruskin's interest in Art led him to become a preacher of economic change. Like his great contemporary, William Morris, he saw that the banishment of beauty from life was the result of the prevailing commercial and industrial order; and he came to believe in the need of drastic economic reformation as a condition of restoring beauty to life. His economic philosophy he stated in a little volume, “Unto This Last," which was much derided by the orthodox economists when it appeared, but which has since exercised a profound influence upon economic

thought. It is no exaggeration to say that the humanizing of economic science in our time owes its chief impetus to Ruskin's work.

Ruskin's most important works are treatises on the fine arts, the chief being "Modern Painters," "The Seven Lamps of Architecture," "The Stones of Venice," and they owe their power not less to the beauty of their literary composition than to their subject-matter and the treatment of it. It is worth noticing that Ruskin attributed the acknowledged beauty of his English to his familiarity with the Authorized Version of the Bible.

"When people read," wrote Ruskin in "Modern Painters," ," "the law came by Moses but grace and truth through Jesus Christ,' do they suppose it means that the law was ungracious or untrue? The law was given for a foundation, the grace (or mercy) and truth for fulfilment; the whole forming one glorious trinity of judgment, mercy, and truth." Years later Ruskin reproduced this passage in "Frondes Agrestes," and added a footnote: "A great deal of the presumption and narrowness caused by my having been bred in the evangelical schools, and which now fill me with shame and distress in re-reading 'Modern Painters,' is, to my present mind, atoned for by the accurate thinking by which I broke my way through to the great truth expressed in this passage, which all my later works, without exception, have been directed to maintain and illustrate." We may question even now whether Ruskin correctly expounds the Scripture passage which he quotes; but there can be no question that we have here the real clue to Ruskin's philosophy of life.

To think justly, to love mercy, to speak and act truth -without these there can be neither goodness nor greatness, in Art or in Literature, in the State or in individual life. Neglect these things, and degeneracy sets in. In "The Stones of Venice" Ruskin has shown how the period of Venetian prosperity and the golden age of its

art was also the time of its devotion to high moral ideals; but when the moral standards became obscure, and "in the ingenuity of indulgence, in the varieties of vanity, Venice surpassed the cities of Christendom as of old she had surpassed them in fortitude and devotion," her art declined, and "by the inner burning of her own passions, as fatal as the fiery rain of Gomorrah, she was consumed from her place among the nations; and her ashes are choking the channels of the dead salt sea." This is a true philosophy of life and history.

[Most of Ruskin's works are now available in a cheap form in Everyman's Library.]

DAILY READINGS

Eleventh Week, First Day

Lord, who shall sojourn in thy tabernacle?

Who shall dwell in thy holy hill?

He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, And speaketh truth in his heart.

He that slandereth not with his tongue,

Nor doeth evil to his friend,

Nor taketh up a reproach against his neighbour.

In whose eyes a reprobate is despised;

But he honoureth them that fear the Lord.

He that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not.
He that putteth not out his money to usury,

Nor taketh reward against the innocent.

He that doeth these things shall never be moved.

-Psalm 15.

John Ruskin was essentially a religious soul, and to him the essence of religion was communion with God. But communion with God requires two conditions. The first is that man shall possess moral qualities corresponding to those of the divine nature. "It is only," says Ruskin, "to a nature capable of truth, desirous of it, distinguishing it, feeding upon it, that revelation is

possible. There can be none to a brute or to a fiend. In so far, therefore, as you love truth and live therein, in so far revelation can exist for you; and in so far, your mind is the image of God." This is simply an expansion of an older word-"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." It is in the measure that truth and justice and love are our own personal qualities that we shall be able to receive and apprehend the word in which God reveals Himself. The image of God within is "defiled, if you will; broken, if you will; all but effaced, if you will, by death and the shadow of it." For all that it is "a mirror wherein may be seen darkly the image of the mind of God."

The second condition of communion with God is that God's mind should be expressed in terms that our finite minds can grasp. "In order to make this communion possible, the Deity has stooped from His throne and has not only in the person of the Son taken upon Him the veil of our human flesh, but in the person of the Father taken upon Him the veil of our human thoughts and permitted us to conceive Him simply and clearly as a loving Father and Friend, a Being to be walked with and reasoned with, to be moved by our entreaties, to be angered by our rebellion, alienated by our coldness, pleased by our love, and glorified by our labour, and finally to be beheld in immediate and active presence in all the powers and changes of creation. This conception of God, which is the child's, is evidently the only one which can be universal, and therefore the only one which for us can be true."

It is clear that Ruskin accepted the truth of the Incarnation fully; and again and again he insists upon it as the central fact of the Gospel. Sometimes he discovers a meaning in it which may not commend itself to us; but, taking it altogether, there is a wealth and variety in Ruskin's interpretation of Jesus which may not easily be fully expressed in a small compass.