Part 2

"Ye have wearied the Lord with your words," (yes, and some of His people, too, in your time): "yet ye say, Wherein have we wearied Him? When ye say, Every one that doeth evil is good in the sight of the Lord, and He delighteth in them; or, Where is the God of judgment?"

How many, again and again I wonder, of the lively young ecclesiastics supplied to the increasing demand of our west-ends of flourishing Cities of the Plain, ever consider what sort of sin it is for which God (unless they lay it to heart) will "curse their blessings, and spread dung upon their faces," or have understood, even in the dimmest manner, what part _they_ had taken, and were taking, in "corrupting the covenant of the Lord with Levi, and causing many to stumble at the Law."

Perhaps the most subtle and unconscious way in which the religious teachers upon whom the ends of the world are come, have done this, is in never telling their people the meaning of the clause in the Lord's Prayer, which, of all others, their most earnest hearers have oftenest on their lips: "Thy will be done." They allow their people to use it as if their Father's will were always to kill their babies, or do something unpleasant to them, instead of explaining to them that the first and intensest article of their Father's will was their own sanctification, and following comfort and wealth; and that the one only path to national prosperity and to domestic peace was to understand what the will of the Lord was, and to do all they could to get it done. Whereas one would think, by the tone of the eagerest preachers nowadays, that they held their blessed office to be that, not of showing men how to do their Father's will on earth, but how to get to heaven without doing any of it either here or there!

I say, especially, the most eager preachers; for nearly the whole Missionary body (with the hottest Evangelistic sect of the English Church) is at this moment composed of men who think the Gospel they are to carry to mend the world with, forsooth, is that, "If any man sin, he hath an Advocate with the Father;" while I have never yet, in my own experience, met either with a Missionary or a Town Bishop who so much as professed himself "to understand what the will of the Lord" was, far less to teach anybody else to do it; and for fifty preachers, yes, and fifty hundreds whom I have heard proclaiming the Mediator of the New Testament, that "they which were called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance," I have never yet heard so much as _one_ heartily proclaiming against all those "deceivers with vain words" (Eph. v. 6), that "no covetous person which is an idolator hath _any_ inheritance in the kingdom of Christ, or of God;" and on myself personally and publicly challenging the Bishops of England generally, and by name the Bishop of Manchester, to say whether usury was, or was not, according to the will of God, I have received no answer from any one of them.[1]

_13th August._

I have allowed myself, in the beginning of this letter, to dwell on the equivocal use of the word "Priest" in the English Church (see Christopher Harvey, Grosart's edition, p. 38), because the assumption of the mediatorial, in defect of the pastoral, office by the clergy fulfils itself, naturally and always, in their pretending to absolve the sinner from his punishment, instead of purging him from his sin; and practically, in their general patronage and encouragement of all the iniquity of the world, by steadily preaching away the penalties of it. So that the great cities of the earth, which ought to be the places set on its hills, with the Temple of the Lord in the midst of them, to which the tribes should go up,--centres to the Kingdoms and Provinces of Honour, Virtue, and the Knowledge of the law of God,--have become, instead, loathsome centres of fornication and covetousness--the smoke of their sin going up into the face of Heaven like the furnace of Sodom, and the pollution of it rotting and raging through the bones and the souls of the peasant people round them, as if they were each a volcano whose ashes broke out in blains upon man and upon beast.

And in the midst of them, their freshly-set-up steeples ring the crowd to a weekly prayer that the rest of their lives may be pure and holy, while they have not the slightest intention of purifying, sanctifying, or changing their lives in any the smallest particular; and their clergy gather, each into himself, the curious dual power, and Janus-faced majesty in mischief, of the prophet that prophesies falsely, and the priest that bears rule by his means.

And the people love to have it so.

BRANTWOOD, _12th August_.

I am very glad of your little note from Brighton. I thought it needless to send the two letters there, which you will find at home; and they pretty nearly end all _I_ want to say; for the remaining clauses of the prayer touch on things too high for me. But I will send you one concluding letter about them.

[Footnote 1: Fors Clavigera, Letter lxxxii., p. 323.]

IX.

BRANTWOOD, _19th August_.

I retained the foregoing letter by me till now, lest you should think it written in any haste or petulance; but it is every word of it deliberate, though expressing the bitterness of twenty years of vain sorrow and pleading concerning these things. Nor am I able to write, otherwise, anything of the next following clause of the prayer;--for no words could be burning enough to tell the evils which have come on the world from men's using it thoughtlessly and blasphemously, praying God to give them what they are deliberately resolved to steal. For all true Christianity is known--as its Master was--in breaking of bread, and all false Christianity in stealing it.

Let the clergyman only apply--with impartial and level sweep--to his congregation, the great pastoral order: "The man that will not work, neither should he eat;" and be resolute in requiring each member of his flock to tell him _what_--day by day--they do to earn their dinners;--and he will find an entirely new view of life and its sacraments open upon him and them.

For the man who is not--day by day--doing work which will earn his dinner, must be stealing his dinner; and the actual fact is that the great mass of men, calling themselves Christians, do actually live by robbing the poor of their bread, and by no other trade whatsoever: and the simple examination of the mode of the produce and consumption of European food--who digs for it, and who eats it--will prove that to any honest human soul.

Nor is it possible for any Christian Church to exist but in pollutions and hypocrisies beyond all words, until the virtues of a life moderate in its self-indulgence, and wide in its offices of temporal ministry to the poor, are insisted on as the normal conditions in which, only, the prayer to God for the harvest of the earth is other than blasphemy.

In the second place. Since in the parable in Luke, the bread asked for is shown to be also, and chiefly, the Holy Spirit (Luke xi. 13), and the prayer, "Give us each day our daily bread," is, in its fulness, the disciples', "Lord, evermore give us _this_ bread,"--the clergyman's question to his whole flock, primarily literal: "Children, have ye here any meat?" must ultimately be always the greater spiritual one: "Children, have ye here any Holy Spirit?" or, "Have ye not heard yet whether there _be_ any? and, instead of a Holy Ghost the Lord and Giver of Life, do you only believe in an unholy mammon, Lord and Giver of Death?"

The opposition between the two Lords has been, and will be as long as the world lasts, absolute, irreconcileable, mortal; and the clergyman's first message to his people of this day is--if he be faithful--"Choose ye this day whom ye will serve."

Ever faithfully yours,

J. RUSKIN.

X.

BRANTWOOD, _3rd September_.

DEAR MR. MALLESON,--I have been very long before trying to say so much as a word about the sixth clause of the Pater; for whenever I began thinking of it, I was stopped by the sorrowful sense of the hopeless task you poor clergymen had, nowadays, in recommending and teaching people to love their enemies, when their whole energies were already devoted to swindling their friends.

But, in any days, past or now, the clause is one of such difficulty, that, to understand it, means almost to know the love of God which passeth knowledge.

But, at all events, it is surely the pastor's duty to prevent his flock from _mis_understanding it; and above all things to keep them from supposing that God's forgiveness is to be had simply for the asking, by those who "wilfully sin after they have received the knowledge of the truth."

There is one very simple lesson also, needed especially by people in circumstances of happy life, which I have never heard fully enforced from the pulpit, and which is usually the more lost sight of, because the fine and inaccurate word "trespasses" is so often used instead of the simple and accurate one "debts." Among people well educated and happily circumstanced it may easily chance that long periods of their lives pass without any such conscious sin as could, on any discovery or memory of it, make them cry out, in truth and in pain,--"I have sinned against the Lord." But scarcely an hour of their happy days can pass over them without leaving--were their hearts open--some evidence written there that they have "left undone the things that they ought to have done," and giving them bitterer and heavier cause to cry, and cry again--for ever, in the pure words of their Master's prayer, "Dimitte nobis _debita_ nostra."

In connection with the more accurate translation of "debts" rather than "trespasses," it would surely be well to keep constantly in the mind of complacent and inoffensive congregations that in Christ's own prophecy of the manner of the last judgment, the condemnation is pronounced only on the sins of omission: "I was hungry, and ye gave me no meat."

But, whatever the manner of sin, by offence or defect, which the preacher fears in his people, surely he has of late been wholly remiss in compelling their definite recognition of it, in its several and personal particulars. Nothing in the various inconsistency of human nature is more grotesque than its willingness to be taxed with any quantity of sins in the gross, and its resentment at the insinuation of having committed the smallest parcel of them in detail. And the English Liturgy, evidently drawn up with the amiable intention of making religion as pleasant as possible, to a people desirous of saving their souls with no great degree of personal inconvenience, is perhaps in no point more unwholesomely lenient than in its concession to the popular conviction that we may obtain the present advantage, and escape the future punishment, of any sort of iniquity, by dexterously concealing the manner of it from man, and triumphantly confessing the quantity of it to God.

Finally, whatever the advantages and decencies of a form of prayer, and how wide soever the scope given to its collected passages, it cannot be at one and the same time fitted for the use of a body of well-taught and experienced Christians, such as should join the services of a Church nineteen centuries old,--and adapted to the needs of the timid sinner who has that day first entered its porch, or of the remorseful publican who has only recently become sensible of his call to a pew.

And surely our clergy need not be surprised at the daily increasing distrust in the public mind of the efficacy of Prayer, after having so long insisted on their offering supplication, _at least_ every Sunday morning at eleven o'clock, that the rest of their lives hereafter might be pure and holy, leaving them conscious all the while that they would be similarly required to inform the Lord next week, at the same hour, that "there was no health in them!"

Among the much rebuked follies and abuses of so-called "Ritualism," none that I have heard of are indeed so dangerously and darkly "Ritual" as this piece of authorized mockery of the most solemn act of human life, and only entrance of eternal life--Repentance.

Believe me, dear Mr. Malleson,

Ever faithfully and respectfully yours,

J. RUSKIN.

XI.

BRANTWOOD, _14th September, 1879_.

DEAR MR. MALLESON,--The gentle words in your last letter referring to the difference between yourself and me in the degree of hope with which you could regard what could not but appear to the general mind Utopian in designs for the action of the Christian Church, surely might best be answered by appeal to the consistent tone of the prayer we have been examining.

Is not every one of its petitions for a perfect state? and is not this last clause of it, of which we are to think to-day--if fully understood--a petition not only for the restoration of Paradise, but of Paradise in which there shall be no deadly fruit, or, at least, no tempter to praise it? And may we not admit that it is probably only for want of the earnest use of this last petition that not only the preceding ones have become formal with us, but that the private and simply restricted prayer for the little things we each severally desire, has become by some Christians dreaded and unused, and by others used faithlessly, and therefore with disappointment?

And is it not for want of this special directness and simplicity of petition, and of the sense of its acceptance, that the whole nature of prayer has been doubted in our hearts, and disgraced by our lips; that we are afraid to ask God's blessing on the earth, when the scientific people tell us He has made previous arrangements to curse it; and that, instead of obeying, without fear or debate, the plain order, "Ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full," we sorrowfully sink back into the apology for prayer, that "it is a wholesome exercise, even when fruitless," and that we ought piously always to suppose that the text really means no more than "Ask, and ye shall _not_ receive, that your joy may be _empty_?"

Supposing we were first all of us quite sure that we _had_ prayed, honestly, the prayer against temptation, and that we would thankfully be refused anything we had set our hearts upon, if indeed God saw that it would lead us into evil, might we not have confidence afterwards that He in whose hand the King's heart is, as the rivers of water, would turn our tiny little hearts also in the way that they should go, and that _then_ the special prayer for the joys He taught them to seek would be answered to the last syllable, and to overflowing?

It is surely scarcely necessary to say, farther, what the holy teachers of all nations have invariably concurred in showing,--that faithful prayer implies always correlative exertion; and that no man can ask honestly or hopefully to be delivered from temptation, unless he has himself honestly and firmly determined to do the best he can to keep out of it. But, in modern days, the first aim of all Christian parents is to place their children in circumstances where the temptations (which they are apt to call "opportunities") may be as great and as many as possible; where the sight and promise of "all these things" in Satan's gift may be brilliantly near; and where the act of "falling down to worship me" may be partly concealed by the shelter, and partly excused, as involuntary, by the pressure, of the concurrent crowd.

In what respect the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of _them_, differ from the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, which are God's for ever, is seldom, as far as I have heard, intelligibly explained from the pulpit; and still less the irreconcileable hostility between the two royalties and realms asserted in its sternness of decision.

Whether it be, indeed, Utopian to believe that the kingdom we are taught to pray for _may_ come--verily come--for the asking, it is surely not for man to judge; but it is at least at his choice to resolve that he will no longer render obedience, nor ascribe glory and power, to the Devil. If he cannot find strength in himself to advance towards Heaven, he may at least say to the power of Hell, "Get thee behind me;" and staying himself on the testimony of Him who saith, "Surely I come quickly," ratify his happy prayer with the faithful "Amen, even so, come, Lord Jesus."

Ever, my dear friend,

Believe me affectionately and gratefully yours,

J. RUSKIN.

INDIA UNDER LORD LYTTON.

Lord Lytton is fond of public speaking, and his more solemn speeches are remarkable for the stream of abundant piety which runs through them. Not unfrequently they have taken the form of addresses to some unknown power, rather than discourses delivered to a mundane audience. He signalized his accession to office by one of these semi-theological orations to the members of Council assembled to meet him at Government House, Calcutta. He said:--

"Gentlemen, it is my fervent prayer, that a Power higher than that of any earthly Government may inspire and bless the progress of our counsels; granting me, with your valued assistance, to direct them to such issues as may prove conducive to the honour of our country, to the authority and prestige of its august Sovereign, to the progressive well-being of the millions committed to our fostering care, and to the security of the chiefs and princes of India, as well as of our allies beyond the frontier, in the undisturbed enjoyment of their just rights and hereditary possessions."

The sequel renders it probable that by a "power higher than any earthly Government," Lord Lytton understood nothing more remote from human ken than the will of Lord Beaconsfield. At any rate, the prayer was rejected; and under the influence of a perverse destiny, the Viceroy has been singled out to accomplish precisely those acts from which he entreated to be delivered. The "valued assistance" of his colleagues in council he has systematically set at nought and rejected; the "millions committed to his fostering care" he has (as I shall show) permitted to perish of hunger under circumstances of peculiar cruelty; and I need not say that he has entirely failed in his endeavours to preserve "our allies beyond the frontier in the undisturbed enjoyment of their just rights and hereditary possessions."

It is the story of these inconsistencies which I propose to tell in the following pages. In the reading they can hardly fail to awaken a smile; but in the acting they have brought suffering, poverty, and death upon thousands of innocent people. Throughout India they have shaken the confidence of the people in the humanity, justice, and truthfulness of the British character; and have, as I believe, brought our Indian Empire to the verge of a catastrophe, from which nothing but a complete and immediate reversal of policy will avail to save it.

The rule that we have set up in India is so hard and mechanical in its character--it has so entirely failed to strike root in the affections of the natives--that a very brief period of misgovernment suffices to provoke an insurrection. This is occasioned mainly by two causes--the exclusive system on which India is administered, and the absence of all intercommunion (in any true sense of the word) between the ruling and the subject races. It is not too much to say that under the present system every native of ambition, ability, or education, is of necessity a centre of disaffection towards British rule. For within the area of British rule the ascendency of strangers makes him an alien in his native land without scope for his power or hopes for his ambition; and beyond that area the possession of ability awakens the distrust and unconcealed dislike of English officialism. On the other hand, to the great mass of the people, the English official is simply an enigma. Their relations with him are almost exclusively official. The magistrate of a district is little more to them than a piece of machinery possessing powers to kill and tax and imprison. Such pieces of machinery they behold, as Carlyle would say, in endless succession "emerging from the inane," killing and taxing for a time, and then "vanishing again into the inane." But the people know not whence they come, or whither they go; their voices go for nothing in the selection of this human machinery which hold their fortunes in its power. The great administrative mill goes grinding on, impelled by forces of which they have no knowledge; and the people are merely the passive, unresisting grist which is ground up year after year. A truly frightful and unnatural state of things!

It is impossible that a dominion thus constituted should be otherwise than transitory. But even for a brief space its peaceful continuance is possible only under certain conditions. The absence of either loyalty or thorough understanding in those who are ruled, must be made good by the plainest rectitude of purpose on the part of the Government, and thoroughly genuine and successful administration. If such a Government as we have set up in India does not adhere strictly to the letter and the spirit of its engagements--if it cannot insure the physical well-being of its subjects--it is simply good for nothing; because, from its very nature, it cannot achieve anything more than this. It was the first of these conditions that Lord Dalhousie thought he might safely set at nought; and in five years he brought down upon us the terrible retribution of 1857. But Lord Dalhousie was, at least, sincerely anxious to secure the "physical well-being" of the people. He struck at the chiefs and princes of India because he believed that they stood in the way of that well-being. He was entirely mistaken; but nevertheless he threw down only one of the pillars on which our rule is sustained, and when the Mutiny came upon us, the bulk of the people remained loyal. Lord Lytton has undermined the foundations of both pillars, and a very brief continuance of his policy will bring them down with a crash. How this has been accomplished I have now to relate. I begin with his policy on the Frontier, because all the other transactions of which I shall have to speak are connected with that policy, as effects with their cause.

The Negotiations with Shere Ali.

Despite of all that has been written and said on the subject, to most people the origin of the war in Afghanistan appears involved in as great obscurity as ever. Leading Liberal politicians are in this benighted condition not less than the rank and file of the Tories. More people than formerly are willing to admit that the Government was rash and mistaken in its calculations--that the Treaty of Gundamuck has not fulfilled the expectations it awakened; but a war of some kind, they believe, was forced upon the Government by the attitude of Russia and the disposition of the Ameer. This belief is entirely erroneous. The war was a war of deliberately planned aggression, entirely unjustified either by the attitude of Russia or the disposition of the Ameer. Unless we perceive this we are not in a position to form a sound estimate of the effect wrought in the minds of the princes and people of India. The wanton character of the war is, therefore, the first thing I must demonstrate.

When Lord Lytton reached India, the situation in Afghanistan was as follows:--The late Ameer Shere Ali had succeeded in establishing a degree of order throughout Afghanistan, to which the country had been a stranger for many years. His officers were loyal and devoted; intrigue and rebellion had everywhere failed to make headway; and he was on terms of sincere friendship with the Governor-General at Calcutta. There was, at this time, no fear that the Russians in Central Asia desired to exercise any unwarrantable influence in Afghanistan; on the contrary, in the despatch to Lord Northbrook's Government, in which Lord Salisbury propounded his new policy of establishing a permanent Embassy at Kabul, he said--