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nearly all, that is required to be known by Christians (Modern Painters, vol. iii. part iv. chap. 17), that we dare not follow him,

and are ourselves made to look up with " eyes full of fear."

We must be permitted to express our regret that Mr. Ruskin should not more carefully weigh the consequences that follow from his assertions, and not hastily advance opinions, or make comments, that will not bear examination. His rashness and dogmatism are his great faults. An overweening confidence in his own judgment on all subjects, is evidently his besetting infirmity. He frequently hazards decisions upon points and matters which he plainly seems never to have studied. While he confines his expression of opinion to paintings or to architecture, orin general to works of Art, he is entitled to be listened to with profound deference, for these are matters to which, as he himself says, he has given years of attention and deep study. He is not so much a sound reasoner as a splendid writer. Nothing can exceed the pomp and grandeur of his language, (at times it verges on bombast,) when he is dilating upon the unobserved beauties of Nature, the leafage of the trees, the changing rainbow hues of the waters, the cloud-robing of the skies, the deep shadows and towering sublimity of the everlasting mountains; but when he presumes to speak on points that require abstract thought, then he almost invariably fails, and commits some pitiable blunder. We might give several instances of this, if we had space. Where religious feeling only is concerned, there he is, almost without exception, right. And it is the profound religious feeling which pervades all his works, that gives to them a beauty and a glory which is not their own, and which will make them live-for it is religion alone that imparts immortality to whatever it attaches.

Little as we can rely upon Mr. Ruskin's judgment, out of and beyond his own proper department, we yet follow him with tranced delight when he is showing how man's work should always be the shadow and imitation of God's work, and that without this it has no true beauty. When, instead of interpreting, only to misinterpret, he is content to illustrate God's commandments, we can read him with no misgiving, and feel the full satisfaction of truth; as in the following passage:

"Observe, the function of ornament is to make you happy. Now, in what are you rightly happy? Not in thinking of what you have done yourself; not in your own pride; not in your own birth; not in your own being, or your own will; but in looking at God; watching what He does; what He is; and obeying His law, and yielding yourself to His will.

"You are to be made happy by ornaments; therefore they must be the expression of all this. Not copies of your own handiwork; not boastings of your own grandeur; not heraldries; not king's arms, nor any creature's arms; but God's arm, seen in His own work. Not

-manifestation of your delight in your own laws, or your own liberties, or your own inventions; but in divine laws, constant, daily, common laws;-not composite laws, not Doric laws, nor laws of the five orders, but of the ten commandments."-(Stones of Venice, vol. i. c. xx. § 15, 16.)

If Mr. Ruskin cannot be taken as an entirely safe religious guide when viewed as a religious writer, it may be asked, of what use, then, are his writings in a religious point of view ? Will it not be wiser for religious people not to read them at all, than to read them if there be a risk of being led by them into error? This would be a very narrow-minded mode of reasoning. Nothing human is perfect. God has appointed that we should be under the necessity of discriminating continually; and our duty is to choose the good, and eschew the evil. There are uses in books beyond learning religious doctrines. The prevailing atmosphere of Mr. Ruskin's works is beyond question healthful. They are remarkably free from all weak and mawkish religious sentimentalism. There is a decidedly tonic tone in them. In this respect, they are well suited to correct some of the tendencies of the age. The amount of good influence they must have diffused among artists and architects, and connoisseurs of Art in general, who are not apt to be given to religious reflections, must be very great. He has been called the "Luther of Art." He may truly be said to have baptized Art into Christianity.

It is, we cannot help thinking, one of the grand deficiencies in many good evangelical Christians, especially of the clergy in our day, that they confine their reading too exclusively to directly religious works, which have a stereotyped phraseology. Hence their own style becomes poverty-stricken, dry, jejune, and fails to excite, to interest, to impress. Only a short time since, in our reading of a lately published article, we came upon ten successive sentences, each of about the same length and construction, and all of which began with the definite article "the." This betrayed an utter want of expertness in composition on the part of the writer. It is constant variety that relieves, and keeps up interest. The reading of such works as Mr. Ruskin's must be of great utility, if it be only to enrich the mind with thought and expression. They become doubly useful, if they are read thoughtfully, and with discrimination, with the view of gathering treasures, and storing a common-place book with passages worthy of being had in perpetual remembrance. In this way, a person's mind may be continually growing richer, just as a miser does by the continual accumulation of money. Mr. Ruskin's writings are full of gems of thought-full of pithy and pointed sentences. To give a few instances:-" Speaking truth is like writing fair, and comes only by practice." "True taste clasps all that it loves so hard, that it crushes it, if it be

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hollow." "The finer the nature, the more flaws it will show through the clearness of it." Here is an admirable definition of wit:-"the power of playing with the lights on the many sides of truth." What a beautiful thought is the following:"The angels who rejoice over repentance, cannot but feel an uncomprehended pain, as they try, and try again in vain, whether they may not warm hard hearts with the brooding of their kind wings.'

The clergy have a special duty incumbent upon them to relieve their own compositions with variety, as well as to enrich them with beauty. They are to seek out "acceptable words" (Eccles. xii. 10)—" words of delight," literally. In the present excitable age, people will not listen to what is dry and dull, however sound and good. The sky was not beautified with everchanging clouds, nor the earth broken into mountain forms, nor the valleys decked with flowers, for no purpose. What is the character of much of the prose composition of our soundest religious writers of the present day? Might it not be justly compared to the grass of a mown lawn,-nothing but grass, and all the blades of about the same height? This is not Nature, but the very worst form of Art. What we want is, to be more Gothic in our style of writing; for the Gothic is the best style here, as well as in architecture. It is what stands out that strikes. In the place, then, of our studied formalisms, our primnesses and precisions, let us have more of the sweeping freedom, and prickly independence, and bossy boldness in our compositions, of which Mr. Ruskin has himself given us such fine examples. His style writhes into every form of nervous entanglement, but even when most graceful is never languid. What a contrast are some of the passages we have quoted (and these are by no means the grandest) to our petty neatness, and formalized deformity, and shrivelled precision! He mixes sarcasm the most powerful with descriptions the most graphic, sentences the most condensed with others the most sustained, and sometimes rises to a force and a grandeur which throws into the shade the splendid declamations of Burke, and makes even the prose of Milton look tame, swelling into "a sevenfold chorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies.'

But to return to the point of Mr. Ruskin's religious opinions. It will have been seen, by the quotations we have given from his writings, that his tone is both Evangelical and Protestant on the whole. Direct doctrinal statements we could not expect to meet with in works such as his. We have reason to be thankful that a writer of such influence in quarters which we could never hope to reach, should have thrown so much of the rich azure of Christianity over regions usually relegated only to the barrenness of technical discussion and dry details of Art. Neither Hazlitt, in his "Picture Galleries of England," nor

Charles Lamb, on "The Productions of Modern Art," nor Wilkie, in his "Letters," nor Barry, nor Opie, nor even Sir Joshua Reynolds, in his "Lectures," has thought of illuminating Art by Religion. They have not even freed it, as John Ruskin has, from the repulsiveness of technical phraseology. He has taken it out of the narrow circle of the professional, and made it a subject of common interest. In giving to it, moreover, the stamp of religion, he has necessarily given to it the stamp of his own religion. This it is that makes his views upon that subject of such importance; for those who have begun to follow him here may be expected to follow him on wherever he leads. Whither, then, is Mr. Ruskin tending? His intense dissatisfaction with all that he sees around him, a dissatisfaction which is evidently growing, may lead him, and, we very much fear, will lead him, into the train of those who are proposing to give us a wholly new creed, or rather a faith that is without a creed, and that will evaporate in a vague humanitarian feeling of general good-doing. It is one of the penalties of Genius that, seeing so much further, and so much more deeply, than others, it should engender something like disgust at all the ordinary conditions of Humanity, and be driven by its own internal force into some eccentric opinion or course of action. In Mr. Ruskin's disgust at our own debasing architecture we heartily go with him. Our long rows of flat, square, loop-holed houses, without one feature to distinguish them; our miserable brick-and-mortar assembly-rooms of the last century for churches, stuccoed over to hide their poverty, and tell a lie at the same time; our want of all aesthetic taste in the forms and disposition of our edifices, are certainly as vulgarizing as anything could possibly be. In shocked feeling at the multiform social evils that are rife among us, we can also sympathize with Mr. Ruskin. We honour him for the boldness with which he has spoken out against these, and also against the various forms of corruption and abuse that disfigure the Church, and sap the vigour of the State. These, probably, strike him more forcibly than they do the minds of other men, because he looks at them with an eye undimmed by any contingent personal interest in the rewards of ambition in the place of merit, or of subserviency in the place of service. But we cannot, for ourselves, forget that the world has always been, in these matters, very much what it now is, and, while human nature remains the same, always will be. It would be folly, therefore, in us to make our religious belief to depend in any measure upon circumstances of this kind. We will be content rather, with our fathers, to believe that human nature is a noble thing in its essence, though a vulgar thing in its accidents, and that evangelical Christianity is the true remedy for its debasement.

When we see men "carried about with divers and strange doctrines," the explanation is, to our minds, very simple: they never had "the root of the matter in them." If Mr. Ruskin be, as we would fain hope he is, a true child of God, born from above, he will not be suffered to depart far from the right path. It can be no matter of surprise that men should change about from one opinion to another on the subject of religious truth, when their religion never was anything more than a matter of opinion. The only religion that will have fixity in it with growth, is that which developes itself from a germ planted within the heart by the Spirit of God. That which is assumed from without, and put on like one's clothes (and this we fear is the case with some of the evangelical profession of the present day, which accounts for its want of life and consistency), will change with fashion, being evangelical to-day and neologian to-morrow. It is heart religion that lives and grows; and if it changes at all, changes like the trees, only to gain greater strength and to put forth new greenness year by year, remaining ever essentially the same, until, having attained its full stature, it is transplanted to the soil of immortality, there to flourish, a thing of beauty for ever, in the Paradise of God. May all see to it, then, and Mr. Ruskin among the number, that such is their religion.

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SPENCE'S AMERICAN UNION.

The American Union; its Effect on National Character and Policy with an Enquiry into Secession as a Constitutional Right, and the Causes of the Disruption. By James Spence. Third Edition. London. 1862.

"SHALL the Sword devour for ever?" is the hourly cry of our countrymen when new tidings reach them of this bloody war which is desolating the American States. The deep interest we have felt in it from the first, for the sake of our American kinsmen, and on grounds of Christian humanity, is now increased by the sense of a grave calamity which it has brought upon ourselves. But mere appeals to the feelings, in cases like these, are of little avail. Perverted conscience is the main source of this gigantic evil, which grows in its dimensions daily, and seems to defy every attempt at a cure. Wise advice, tendered long ago by the great majority of thoughtful and observing Christians on this side of the ocean, has been indignantly rejected by the Northern States, and resented as an intolerable wrong. Confident and boastful of their own irresistible strength to crush what they term a monstrous and

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