This seems a strange reason for losing faith. It can only be understood when we remember that Ruskin regarded art as the expression of the painter’s whole nature, especially the soul of him; and if the endowment from heaven were really potent, it should inspire the artist to do work that is clearly supreme. That it did not do so was Ruskin’s stumbling-block. I will not anticipate the ultimate solution; but only pause to mourn over the many stumbling-blocks which our theories put in our way. Because the lot decided unfairly, Silas Marner, the wronged of heaven, lost his faith. How many have been and are unable to see through pain and poverty to God. How many have bound their faith to the accuracy of a record or the fidelity of a frail fellow-creature.
Of the religious utterances of this first period, which ended in 1858, the second volume of _Modern Painters_ is the most typical. To me, it was the door by which in 1882 I entered into my love of Ruskin the author, as _Fors_ led me to love and reverence the man. The subject is an analysis of Beauty as a various expression of the mind of God. It is published separately; it is not a long book; and it might be read for a second time along with the Author’s notes of 1883. These give us the verdict of age upon the enthusiasm of its own youth, and are vastly entertaining. Even as Tennyson, in his “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After,” puts his quietus upon the ebullitions of the most rhythmic and moving utterance of his youth, so does Ruskin, with mocking self-blame, speak with fatherly candour to the Oxford Graduate of 1845.
To this period, too, belongs his avowedly theological pamphlet, _Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds_. It is of 1851, attacks ecclesiastical pretensions on Scriptural grounds, and in spite of its sectarian limitations was considered so sound in its main drift that the author reissued it in his mature period.
He states that all his works up to 1853 are marred by his narrow Protestant dogmatism. Now 1858, as we have seen, was his year of freedom from it, and from much that was more precious. Between 1853 and 1858 came out volumes iii and iv of _Modern Painters_, the _Lectures on Architecture and Painting_ at Edinburgh, and the lectures at Manchester on the _Political Economy of Art_. The last marks transition. It is the forerunner of the next period; it shows us how his way of treating Art led him on to Economics. But it is of great interest to study his position in these two volumes of _Modern Painters_. They are as religious as ever, and as devout; but between Catholic and Protestant, frequently brought into contrast, they hold the scales of judgment. The author casts the lantern of criticism impartially upon both, but his own faith in the great verities still holds. It is plain, however, that conduct was rising to the chief place in his mind. The Sermon on the Mount was becoming, what it ever afterwards remained to him, the central teaching of the Christian faith.