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which besets less positive natures, and which causes them to ask if their neighbor's creed may not be as good as theirs. If he has grown more tolerant with advancing years, he has not grown less positive.

Browning is of closer kin to Ruskin in his religious attitude of mind than any other English author of the time. Ruskin believes through the moral nature, Browning through the intellectual. Browning finds in religion the grand consummation of his philosophy, Ruskin the unfailing confirmation of his ethics. Both alike accept the Christian faith with thorough conviction, not as a dogma and not as a tradition, but as a union of man's soul with the Infinite One in the sacrament of life. To them revelation is universal and unfailing, not exceptional and arbitrary. It is the never-ceasing activity of God, by which his nature consummates itself in the communion of rational beings. Ruskin has the more clearly penetrated the revelation made through nature; Browning, that made through the instincts and experiences of individual men. For Ruskin, the aim of religious development is the perfection of men in the common fellowship of love and right doing; for Browning, life flowers and fruits in the instincts

and insights of exceptional souls. The age and the country producing two such prophets of the higher faith can have suffered no real eclipse of religion.

And yet the religion of the nineteenth century has become too rationalistic, too introspective, and too anxious for demonstration. In its demand

for reasons, it has undermined the holy of holies; in its craving for proof satisfactory to science, it has smitten the soul with a withering blight. Beauty is not seen through the aid of a treatise on æsthetics; and faith does not live within the soul because we accept this demonstration or that. To all free and healthy natures religion comes surely and soundly, answering to an unfailing want, an imperative demand. Ruskin has done something to make us see it as a morning freshness and a noontide light, as health of heart and mind, and as right relations of man to man. We see God by living, and not by reasoning. We live by worship and righteousness, by rejoicing in all things which God has made to be, and by inward harmony with nature and man. All great living is praise. Religion is rightness of being; worship is wholeness of nature. To love God is to love all pure things and thoughts the world contains;

to serve him is to serve all his creatures great and small. To define God, the three words life, light, and love alone are needed.

Had Ruskin practised more of concentration, it would have been better for his works and for his reputation. He has written so much that but few. persons, in these days of many books, can afford to read him as a whole. His books must undergo a sifting, and a few only can live. Even now, the "Modern Painters," "Stones of Venice," and "Seven Lamps of Architecture" represent Ruskin to the reading world, though they do not contain his best or most matured thought.

The majority of readers will take Ruskin in bits. They will find here and there in his pages that which they can love, which appeals to them as do few other printed pages, and these paragraphs they will cherish fondly and read often. The general reader, even among persons of culture, knows little of art in that intimate way in which Ruskin has written of it, and cannot rightly enjoy his criticisms of this kind. His chapters on morals and on religion, and on the beauties of

nature, will be read with ever-increasing appreciation and delight. Could they be selected from the body of his works and brought together in a compact and systematic form, they would make a far deeper impression on the world than they do now. This it might not be best to do, for then the reader would fail to realize, as Ruskin has taught, the intimate relations, and constant sustaining power in mutual help, of art, morals, religion, nature, and man.

Like Coleridge and like Rousseau, Ruskin will have an influence on the course of thought and sentiment not at all to be measured by the number of his readers or by the general acceptance of his theories. He is an inspirer of thought rather than a great thinker, creating a tendency and an atmosphere which shall have infused themselves throughout human culture. Others will repeat his ideas in new forms, impress them on fresh lines of research, apply them to other subjects of pressing interest, until his thought about art shall have pervaded the growing life of the world. In reality this is the highest fame and the most enduring success, to have silently affected the deeper issues of thought and conduct.

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