Mit. RUSKIN ON CHURCH DISCIPLINE.
MR. RUSKIN appears this month in the Contemporary Review as a guide and light to the Clergy ; and in many ways no one is more fitted to be a guide and light to the clergy, —first, because he is a man of genius, who interests himself chiefly in the sort of speculative subjects in which the more active-minded of our clergy also take a deep interest; secondly, because he never for a moment forgets the deeper moral in- terests of life, indeed thinks more passionately of these moral interests than of his own special department of thought ; and lastly, because he is, in some respects, as he shows himself in these letters,—written, by the way, for the benefit of the Furness Clerical Society,—so far as this, a clerical-minded layman, that he evidently believes profoundly in the power of the clergy to exercise a certain kind of effectual ecclesiastical discipline over the laity. All these qualities are, for the clergy, recommendations to Mr. Ruskin, as a lay preacher ;—to say nothing of that power of vivid poetic fire which is apt to touch up the dimmer aspects of thought, and make pallid minds glow again in the luminous atmosphere of a truly living word. When Mr. Ruskin speaks of the function of the clergy, for instance, as he does in the following passage, no doubt he vivifies the minds of the clergymen who read him by inspiring them with a hope of new meaning and a new power for their lives, if only they had the courage and the fidelity to follow his lead :— "The first exact question which it seems to mo such an assembly may be earnestly called upon by laymen to solve, is surely axiomatic : the definition of themselves as a body, and of their business as such. Namely : as clergyman of the Church of England, do they consider themselves to be so called merely as the attached servants of a par- tioular. State ? Do they, in their quality of guides, hold a position similar to that of the guides of Chamouni or Grindelwald, who, being a numbered body of examined and trustworthy persons belonging to those several villages, have nevertheless no Chamounist or Grindelwaldist opinions on the subject of Alpine geography or glacier-walking; but are prepared to put into practice a common and universal science of Locality and Athletics, founded on sure survey and successful prac- Coo ? Are the clergymen of the Eoclosia of England thus simply the attached and salaried guides of England and the English, in the way, known of all good men, that leadoth unto life ?—or are they, on the contrary, a body of men holding, or in any legal manner required, or compelled to hold, opinions on the subjeot—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 con- trary to, the tenets of the guides of the Church of France, the Church of Italy, and other Christian countries P" Mr. Ruskin, after pushing home the question, whether or not the Clergy really can make themselves good and successful guides to their people through the moral dangers and difficul- ties of life, goes on to take the Lord's Prayer as a summary of the elements of the Gospel, and to give, at least briefly, his own conception of its meaning. And after a fine, though slender exposition of what is implied in its first clause,—the love of a Divine Father,—he comes, curiously enough, in touching the petition that God's name should be kept holy in the heart, on the principle of Church discipline. Indeed, he treats this prayer as a prayer against all hypocrisy, and regards it as a matter affecting the very core and essence of our re- verence to God, that those who do not keep his laws shall be altogether banished from the Church, or at least, for we suppose this is what he means, that the Church should be made intolerable to them. These are his words :— " To my layman's mind, of practical needs in the present state of the Church, nothing is so immediate as that of explaining to the con- gregation the moaning of being gathered in His name, and having Him in the midst of them ; as, on the other hand, of being gathered in blasphemy of His name, and having the Devil in the midst of them —presiding over the prayers which have become an abomination. For the entire body of the texts in the Gospel against hypocrisy are one and all nothing but the expansion of the threatening that closes the Third Commandment. For as the name whereby He shall be called is the Lord our Righteousness,'—so the taking that name in vain is the sum of the deoeivableness of to:righteousness in them that perish.' Without dwelling on the possibility—which I do not myself, however, for a moment doubt—of an honest clergyman's being able actually to prevent the entrance among his congregation of persons leading openly wicked lives, could any subject be more vital to the purposes of your meetings than the difference between the present and the probable state of the Christian Church which would result, were it more the effort of zealous parish priests, instead of getting wicked poor people to come to church, to got wicked rich ones to stay out of it ? Lest, in any discussion of such question, it might be, as it too often is, alleged that 'the Lord lookoth upon the heart,' &o., let me be per- mitted to say—with as much positiveness as may express my deepest conviction—that, while indeed it is the Lord's business to look upon the heart, it is the pastor's to look upon the hands and the bps; and that the foulest oaths of the thief and the streot-walkor are, in the ears of God, sinless as the hawk's cry, or the gnat's murmur, compared to the responses, in the Church service, on the lips of the usurer and the adulterer, who have destroyed, not their own souls only, but those of the outcast ones whom they have made their victims. It is for the meeting of clergymen themselves—not for a layman addressing them —to ask further, how much the name of God may be taken in vain, and profaned instead of hallowed—in, the pulpit, as well as under it."
Now, on that we must say, first, that it seems to us surprisingly irrelevant to the petition which Mr. Ruskin wishes to illus-
trate. That you may not pray for the name of God to be the holiest of all names in your heart, to keep it indeed as the very name of life itself, so far as life is worth living and desiring, without first deciding who may or may not be taking • it in vain, and striving to get rid of all who are so taking it, as disturbers of your spirit, seems to us not only not the least in the temper of our Lord's prayer, but almost opposed to it. We are not now asserting that words of our Lord might not be found which seem to warrant something like ecclesiastical discipline.. The passage as to the mode of dealing with a brother who does you wrong (Matthew xviii.,15) has un- doubtedly often been interpreted in this sense, though nothing in it even hints that a man whom you have ceased to regard as a true member of the Christian body Hhould be repelled from the ser-
vices of the Christian Church ; and so far as we know, Christ's own practice was all the other way. But whatever may
be found bearing on the question of the demeanour of Christians to men whose life they condemn, surely no- thing can be imagined more curiously strained than the attempt to read into the prayer that God's name may be kept holy, the duty of repelling from worship either rich or poor who fail to keep it holy, or who in your estimation, so fail. If there is one thing more certain than another, it is that Christ allowed even Judas to share not only in all the life and work of
the body of the Disciples up to the last moment before he had completed his act of treachery, but even in the first Communion, after the design had been partly carried out, though before it was finished. Surely, if Mr. Ruskin attaches so much autho- rity to a very doubtful interpretation of words which have a
very plain and obvious meaning without any such interpre- tation, he would do well to attach authority to an act which cannot by possibility have any meaning but one attached to it. If our Lord did not do all in his power to drive Judas away from his company, when the evil was in his heart, it is hardly a fit thing for his Ministers to do, who have far less knowledge of the heart, and far less power to give that know- ledge its best effect.
There is another curious passage in Mr. Ruskin's sermon to the Clergy, bearing on the same narrow notion of Christian worship :—
"Finally, whatever the advantages and decenoies of a form of prayer, and how wide soever the scope given to its collected passages, it cannot be at one and the same time fitted for the use of a body of well-taught and experienced Christians, such as should join the services of a Church nineteen centuries old,—and adapted to the needs of the timid sinner who has that day first entered its porch, or of the remorseful publican who has only recently become sensible of his call to a pew. And surely our clergy need not be surprised at the daily increasing distrust in the public mind of the efficacy of Prayer, after having so long insisted on their offering supplication, at least every Sunday morning at eleven o'clock, that the rest of their lives hereafter might be pure and holy, leaving them conscious all the while that they would be similarly required to inform the Lord next week, at the same hour, that there was no health in them l' Among the much rebuked follies and abuses of so-oalled 'Ritualism,' none that I have heard of arc indeed so dangerously and darkly ' Ritual ' as this piece of authorised mockery of the most solemn act of human life, and only entrance of eternal life—Repentance."
This is a very striking indication of the tendency of Mr. Ruskin's religious belief towards what we might call a Church of the Elect, and as it seems to us, an equally striking misinterpretation of the true meaning of the Liturgy which he so harshly condemns. Nothing can be less inconsistent than to pray that the restof your life hereafter may b3 pure and holy, and yet to be well aware that whenever a prayer comes from the heart, the confession that there is "no health in s,"—for the real drift of the confession undoubtedly is, that whatever health we may have is of God's giving, not of our own making,—will come with it. If Mr. Ruskin ever heard the late Frederick Maurice read the Liturgy he so much despises, he must have felt how entirely and simply it expressed the deepest spiritual convictions of one who was at one and the same time one of the truest penitents, and one of the truest servants of Christ, in any Christian Church. We suspect that no change in the Church so dangerots, —so much a change for the worse,—could be made, as any in the direction of Mr. Ruskin's suggestion that those who really desire to be true Christians should keep aloof from all who, in their opinion, do not so desire; or that the former should constitute themselves into a spiritual clique of elect souls, treating their penitence for sin as a completed act of the past, unless, perchance, they should have some new and definite transgression to accuse themselves of and bewail before the Church.
There is much else that is curious in Mr. Ruskin's paper. He repeats Mr. Frotide's funny statement, to which we confess we attach no sort of meaning, that every one who does not earn his dinner, steals it,—steals it from the poor. This seems to us a very unfortunate exaggeration of what it is most desirable to preach,—that no man or woman should be content to live without contributing in some modest way, steadily, and as a recognised duty, to the good of the world they live in. But there is nothing but mischief to be derived from confounding to en- tirely different kinds of sin,—the positive sin of stealing, and those sins of omission which, as Mr. Ruskin very justly says, Christ, in his general description of those who were fit only for the devouring fire of the spiritual world, treats as the main charges against them. Is it not enough to urge this last considera- tion, without confounding all the gravest moral distinctions, by identifying even grave sins of omission with some of the gravest sins of commission ? Mr. Ruskin is, in one way, a dangerous preacher. He over-colours the blackness of guilt; and when people find out that their sins have been over-coloured, they are very apt to forgive themselves on much easier terms than if they had been told the truth.
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