ugh these scruples
and doubts no longer trouble us, we, in our nineteenth century, are yet
not entirely at peace in our hearts. For, just in proportion as the old
religious faith is dying out, we are feeling the necessity to create a
new; as the old vocations of belief are becoming fewer and further
between, the new vocations of duty are becoming commoner; as the old
restrictions of the written law are melting away, so there appears
the new restriction of the unwritten law, the law of our emancipated
conscience; and the less we go to our priests, the more do we go to our
own inner selves to know what we may do and what we should sacrifice:
with our daily growing liberty, grows and must grow, to all the nobler
among us, our responsibility. Nay, the more we realise that we have but
this one brief life wherein to act and to expiate, the more earnestly do
we ask ourselves to what use we should put the little that is vouchsafed
us. And thus it comes to pass that there exist among us many who, seeing
the evil around them, seeing the infinitude of falsehood which requires
to be dispelled and of pain which requires to be alleviated, and of
injustice which requires to be destroyed, must occasionally pause and
ask themselves what right they have to give all, or any, of their
limited time and thought and energy to the mere enjoyment of the
beautiful, when there exists on all sides evil which it seems to require
unlimited effort to quell. Many there must be, and every day more, who
are harried by their love of art and their sense of duty, who daily ask
themselves the question which first arose, nearly forty years ago, in
the mind of John Ruskin; and which, settled by false answers, has
recurred to him ever and anon, and has shaken and shattered the very
system which was intended to answer it for ever.

John Ruskin has been endowed as have been very few men as an artist, a
critic, and a moralist; in the immense chaotic mass, the constantly
altered and constantly propped up ruins of an impossible system, which
constitute the bulk of his writings, he has taught us more of the subtle
reasons of art, he has reproduced with his pen more of the beauty of
physical nature, and he has made us feel more profoundly the beauty of
moral nature, than has, perhaps, been done separately by any critic,
or artist, or moralist of his day. He has possessed within himself
two very perfect characters, has been fitted out for two very noble
missions:--the