the keen flashes
of genius that accompany the insight of the literary artist. He has
pointed out to us with great eloquence that, while specific doctrines
take at various epochs very different degrees of importance, and aspects
of rite, ceremony, and all that, appeal with changing force to different
generations, the essence of religious feeling, without which dogma
becomes harsh and rite insipid, hardly varies at all; seeing that in the
musings of the great minds of all ages, we have oftenest the pure gold
of devotion, mingled, though it may sometimes be, with the adhesive
dross of superstition. He also warns us of the danger of mistaking
pugnacity for piety, and earnestly urges that, at every moment of our
lives, we should be trying to find out, not in what we differ from other
men, but in what we agree. Ruskin considers this to be the correct
spirit in which to approach ancient as well as modern religion,
believing that if a reader cannot understand a spiritual agency, or
thinks that the best of ancient men were not dominated by any such, the
understanding of the very alphabet of history will be endangered. It
would tend greatly to salvation from arid formalism, if ministers would
teach that Plato, Sophocles, Browning, Carlyle, are all apostles of
religion. A living word from an intuitionist like the last-named not
unfrequently vivifies with new force the dark sayings of a Hebrew seer,
in much more direct fashion than half-a-score of mutilated Pentateuchs
made in the delirium of the Higher Criticism.

In spite of his unsystematic procedure, Ruskin deserves to be numbered
among the men who have earned the gratitude of their fellows, by
translating some of the ever-vital aspects of religion into the
vocabulary of the hour. The language of religious discourse is liable to
a subtle kind of pedantry, requiring a vigorous intellect adequately to
dissolve. New illustrations, novel forms of definition, are often
helpful in expelling the dreariness of outworn and meaningless phrases.
Ruskin's task is facilitated by the nice balance of his intellectual and
imaginative endowments, by the fact that his words are not mere symbols
of definite connotation, but marvellous centres of emotional force.
Happily he did not seek to elaborate any system of religion: but now
here, now there, in his books, one comes upon the pure gold of religion,
enshrined in exquisite jewelries of diction, which glimmer on (if I may
say so) to the utmost ve