ally if I do not lay my head to the very ground." A little later he says, "I am still very unwell, and tormented between the longing for rest and lovely life and the sense of this terrific call of human crime for resistance and of human misery for help, though it seems to me as the voice of a river of blood, which can but sweep me down in the midst of its black clots, helpless." The sequel to this mental struggle is well known. The admired art critic became the heretic economist, who thundered against orthodoxy in religion, morals, politics, art, science, and social life, to find himself scouted as a fanatic dreamer. Thackeray had to tell him that his papers in Cornhill were so unanimously condemned and disliked that he could only admit one more. His father's displeasure was harder still to bear. It seemed to the old man as though his son was wantonly throwing away his reputation and earning for himself the name of fool. Yet amid all his heresies Ruskin's heart was right. However strongly we may dissent from his teachings, we admire him even more as the champion of the oppressed, with the burden of the world rousing him to indignation, than when we see him preaching his crusade against insincerity and falsehood in art. In 1867 he gave the Rede Lecture at Cambridge. In his impressive peroration he urged on the younger men "the infinite importance of a life of virtue and the fact that the hereafter must be spent in God's presence or in darkness." He reminded the heads of the university that their continued prosperity must rest on their obedience to the command of their divine Master, "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness." "All mere abstract knowledge, independent of its tendency to a holy life, was useless." He had drifted far from his old moorings; but the man who could utter such words was certain to be led into clearer light by and by. In 1868 he fell under the influence of St. Ursula, who became, as he visited Venice time after time for her sake, a spiritual presence and an inspiration. "What would St. Ursula say?" led him to cultivate patience and gentleness under many provocations. His mother died in 1871. A still heavier blow was impending. He had become attached to one of his pupils, a lady much younger than himself. His friends hoped that at fifty-three he was at last to drink the cup of domestic happiness. But the lady was an earnest Christian. She could not make up her mind to marry one who seemed to scoff at her faith. She therefore turned resolutely away from the happiness which she so much coveted. The sacrifice cost her her life. Three years later, when she lay dying, Ruskin begged to see her. "She sent to ask whether he could yet say that he loved God better than he loved her; and when he said 'No,' her door was closed upon him forever." She died on May 29, 1875. 6 Ruskin sought refuge in work from the greatest sorrow of his life. His writing in Fors Clavigera became more serious and earnest in tone. When an Aberdeen teacher asked for a New Year's message for his Bible class Ruskin replied: "The condemnation given from the judgment throne-most solemnly described—is all for the undones,' and not for the 'dones.' People are perpetually.afraid of doing wrong; but, unless they are doing its reverse energetically, they do it all day long, and the degree does not matter." He said plainly that he did not know there was another existence; he hoped there was. Gradually clearer vision came. On Christmas Day, 1876, he seemed to gain that assurance of another life for which he had been looking since his great bereavement. "His intense despondency changed for a while into a singular happiness; it seemed a renewed health and strength, and, instead of despair, he rejoiced in the conviction of guarding providences and helpful influences." His writings now showed traces of a profound mysticism. He renounced his skeptical judgments and searched the Bible more carefully than ever to find its hidden meanings. The following December he lectured to a crowded audience at Oxford, "this interest of theirs being granted to me, I doubt not, because for the first time in Oxford I have been able to speak to them boldly of immortal life." In 1879 he prepared a series of lectures on the Lord's Prayer for the Furness Clerical Society's meetings. He spoke about the need of living faith in God's fatherhood and of childlike obedience to the commands of old-fashioned religion and morality. "No man," he said, “more than I has ever loved the place where God's honor dwells or yielded truer allegiance to the teaching of his evident servants. No man, at this time, grieves more for the damage of the Church which supposes him her enemy, while she whispers procrastinating pax vobiscum in answer to the spurious kiss of those who would fain toll curfew over the last fires of English faith and watch the sparrow find a nest where she may lay her young around the altars of the Lord." He describes himself in a later letter as "only a Christian Catholic, in the wide and eternal sense. I have been that these five and twenty years, at least. Heaven keep me from being less as I grow older! But I am no more likely to become a Roman Catholic than a Quaker, Evangelical, or Turk.” Perhaps the most pleasant glimpse of Ruskin's religious feeling is found in his talk to the Coniston children after a dinner which he gave them in January, 1881. They had been singing "Jesu, here from sin deliver." "That is what we want," he said "to be delivered from our sins. We must look to the Saviour to deliver us from our sin. It is right we should be punished for the sins which we have done; but God loves us and wishes to be kind to us and to help us that we may not willfully sin." Family prayers at Brantwood were in these days. conducted by Ruskin himself, whose carefully prepared Bible reading sometimes lasted longer than the household found quite convenient. He wrote collects, which still exist, "deeply interesting as the prayers of a man who had passed through so many wildernesses of thought and doubt, and had returned at last, not to the fold of the Church, but to the footstool of the Father." With that touching scene the curtain may fittingly fall on this record of the inner life of one whom all earnest men honor as a preacher of sincerity and truth. For John Ruskin there has been "but one reality-the great fact, as he knew it, of God above, and man either obeying or withstanding him.” ART. III.-THE HUMANE SPIRIT IN HEBREW LEGISLATION, ANYONE who has studied the code of laws, and the comments and exhortations of the prophets on them, contained in the Old Testament must be convinced that this legislation was designed to be exceptionally humane and beneficent. Its fundamental principle is the inestimable value of human life, even in a merely physical existence. This is the gift of God and cannot be despised or maltreated, because man is made in the divine image and the creature owes to the Creator a responsibility and trust that cannot under any circumstances be bartered away or forfeited. The relation extends to all the conditions of human subsistence, and must be carefully preserved in all the ramifications of society, comprehending its humblest member. Mosaism, in its exhibition of tender concern for the decaying body, is the natural precursor of the evangelical doctrine that places a priceless estimate on the worth of the immortal soul. Here was a system that contained the germ out of which was developed the most enlarged Christian philanthropy. It was the purpose of the Israelitish order to preserve the equality of all citizens in the eyes of the law, and to maintain, as far as practicable, the equilibrium of wealth among them. Extreme poverty was regarded as an evil to be prevented and palliated as far as possible; but the penniless were not to be annihilated because they were unable to contribute to the general stock. A spirit of sympathy was enjoined because the sons of Jacob were brethren, and they were to remember that they had been bondmen in the land of Egypt. Isaac M. Wise* asserts that, "as regards the laws of charity [benevolence] and tolerance especially, the most enlightened modern nations have not yet reached the eminence of the Mosaic law." Illustrations of the kindly provision for the poor are numerous and scattered throughout the Torah. Let a few suffice. On general principles the Hebrew was thus instructed: "Thou shalt not harden thine heart, nor shut thine hand from thy poor brother: but thou shalt open thine hand wide unto him, and * History of the Israelitish Nation, vol. 1, pp. 151, 152. shalt surely lend him sufficient for his need" (Deut. xv, 7, 8). In regard to such a one it was commanded, "Take thou no usury of him, or increase" (Lev. xxv, 36). For particular acts, the more prosperous were directed to aid the poor in the second tithe taken on the increase of the third year (Deut. xiv, 28, 29). At harvest "thou shalt not wholly reap the corners of thy field, neither shalt thou gather the gleanings of thy harvest. And thou shalt not glean thy vineyard, neither shalt thou gather every grape of thy vineyard; thou shalt leave them for the poor and the stranger: I am the Lord your God" (Lev. xix, 9, 10). Observe here the authority for the injunetion. Likewise the forgotten sheaf was to remain "for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow" (Deut. xxiv, 19). When a pledge for a loan was exacted it was commanded with a fine sense of delicacy: "Thou shalt not go into his house to fetch his pledge. Thou shalt stand abroad, and the man to whom thou dost lend shall bring out the pledge abroad unto thee" (Deut. xxiv, 10, 11). How grateful some poor seamstresses and washerwomen would be nowadays if this injunction were observed: "The wages of him that is hired shall not abide with thee all night until the morning (Lev. xix, 13). In legal procedures the poor were to be protected: "Thou shalt not pervert the judgment of the stranger, nor of the fatherless; nor take a widow's raiment to pledge" (Deut. xxiv, 17). For similar instructions read Exod. xxii, 22-27; xxiii, 9. The enforcement of these humane provisions seems to have been an important part of the later prophets' mission. An indignant spirit is aroused in Amos because, during the prosperous and luxurious reign of Jeroboam II over the northern kingdom, "they sold the righteous for silver, and the poor for a pair of shoes," and because they panted "after the dust of the earth on the head of the poor" and turned aside "the way of the meek" (Amos ii, 6, 7). Was there ever a keener and more vigorous metaphor greedy land-grabbers begrudging the little earth used by the stricken as a sign of their distress? Micah appeals to the mountains as witnesses of the Lord's controversy with Judah, because the people thought to gain favor by the multitude of sacrifices, rather than in doing justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly with their God. There could be no reconcilia -- |