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Show Catholics and, Protestants y . -Jidmm 'lMskiti. (Boston rtepublie.) For the funeral of John Ruskin. the great English art critic and labor advocate, ad-vocate, the village tailor at Coniston sent a wreath bearing the quaint inscription; in-scription; "There was a man sent from God, whose name was John." Hundreds Hun-dreds of thousands of workingmen throughout England had indeed during, his life come to regard Ruskin's as a voice crying in the wilderness: "Prepare "Pre-pare ye the way of the Lord," and now that he has passed into the beyond (Jan. 20, 1!)00), within a twelve-month of the hour when the "disgusting nineteenth nine-teenth century (to quote his own phrase) I will not say breathes, but j steams its last," the two obituary years have given us from the writing folk many estimates, the sure drift of which is that he was one of the majestic ma-jestic souls of history, and a prophet of pro-Catholic toleration. It happened that he could disseminate his influence widely and rapidly through books; as he said, "Thought is lightning; speech is thunder." But his fame appears destined des-tined to be not merely that of the author, au-thor, Ruskin's figure abides as that of one who if he had been a Catholic might .have been offered as a candidate for sainthood. By Catholic minds it is recognized that the last half of his life was much like an honest recantation recanta-tion and repentance for the equally honest violence of his anti-Catholic spirit in the early books on art, and his memory is heartily blessed as that of "the pioneer and apostle of the Catholic revival." To illustrate the condition of his mind when, the son of Scotch parents, the pupil, as well as the son of a completely com-pletely Calvinistic mother, he came into the world of literature, we may glance at one remarkable passage. It may be said that no Catholic has respect for one who is converted to the faith merely mere-ly through admiration of the outward beauty of the ceremonies, and thus we may agree with the substance of what he writes; but nobody save a rabid bigot could have put the idea into words so certain to outrage Catholic feeling as these juvenescent extravagances extrava-gances of Ruskin: "Of all these fatuities, the basest is being lured into the Roman Church by the glitter of it, .like larks "Into a trap by broken glass; to be blown dnto a change of religion by the whine of an organ pipe; stitched into a new creed by gold threads on priests' petticoats; jingled into a change of conscience by the chimes of a belfry. I know nothing in the shape of error so dark as this, no imbecility so absolute, no teaching so contemntible." And there was much greater violence than this. Yet the time came when he could say that as between Protestant Protest-ant and Catholic he could not choose, and when he pointed with remorse "to his "Stones in Venice," which he said had been all the more harmful because of its sincerity. Honest he had been from the beginning and honest he persisted per-sisted to the end.- Last year the Rev. Hardwlcke Drum-mond Drum-mond Rawnsley, canon of Carlise, one of Ruskin's close friends, brought out at Glasgow a charming book called "Ruskin and the English Lakes." We read how the great man once lectured Rawnsley because "it was the simple duty of every squire and every clergyman clergy-man to see that idle hands should have something found for them to do by other than" the devil. "Why," he demanded, de-manded, "don't the bishops admonish their clergy to see to it that side by side with parish, chur.i and parish mission room there shll be a parish' workshop, where, the blacksmith and the village carpenter shall of a winter win-ter evening teach all. the children who will be diligent and will learn, the nature na-ture of iron and wood, and the use of their eyes and hands?" Ruskin was preaching this doctrine at every opportunity, op-portunity, and 'in the early eighties some of his friends took it up. The result re-sult was that throughout Cumberland and Westmoreland counties wood carving carv-ing and hammering in brass and the sale thereof began,' some of the villages vil-lages of the lake district making, these things in winter and selling them to the summer boarders. At Keswick a school of industrial arts grew up, of which the output in one year came to $S,500. Spinning, which had become obsolete, was revived with flax from Belfast and wool grown at hand, and a beautiful cottage at Keswick bears over its portico the sign, "The Ruskin Linen Industry." Many similar enterprises enter-prises went up elsewhere. Meanwhile, Ruskin had taken up th cause of . workingmen everywhere. 3 . ! - v - v I ' ; . ' 1 - A. l . ii'. . i - i John "Raskin. teaching himself in the Workingmen' s college, and smiting hip and thigh the British manufacturer .who employed human souls under mean conditions. "If ever," said Canon Rawnsley at the unveiling of the Ruskin memorial. Friar's Crag, Keswick, "our sulphurous,' sulphur-ous,' smoke-smothered lities , of the plain see blue sky above their heads, if ever our factory-plagued-and-pois-oned rivers run clear, if ever plant life and three life and bird life return to cheer the toiler in the towns, we shall owe it largely to the spirit of the man who perceived and taught that all good work might be worship, and was meant for joy, and that no good I work was possible until a man had i ceased to be a hand, a mere machine, a cog in an iron wheel, and had been allowed to bring his mind and soul to the task, under conditions that admit- ! ted of happiness and health." Frederic Harrison has written a biography bio-graphy of Ruskin in which he calls him "one of the dominant influences of the. Victorian era," who as a professor pro-fessor at Oxford,, made "pictures and painters mere texts foi a religious and metaphysical propaganda; . his chair a pulpit for a neo-Christianity or paleo-Catholicism paleo-Catholicism of his own invention." In the still despised and assaulted middle mid-dle ages where he had: found his "guild" models for the parish , workshops work-shops which we have just been noticing, notic-ing, Ruskin found many years before he died, and found it through his study of religious art and architecture, the beauty and glory of mediavel Christianity, Christi-anity, which he restored to the England Eng-land which had so long lost and denied de-nied and reviled it. Because he was an art critic and because be-cause he loved and taught beauty, this restoration of the Mediaeval by Ruskin, the erstwhile bigot, now an intellectual giant in England, was misnamed "aes- theticism," and was mimicked by deluded de-luded disciples, some of them sincere, others not. Among the latter was the late Oscar Wilde, who burlesqued it for American dollars. W. S. Gilbert, in the comic opera "Patience," made game of them all, and like them all, laid stress on the revival of Mediaeval manners, costumes and other unessential details. This was far from interpreting Ruskin. Said he once in discussing cheaply ornamental or-namental architecture: "Exactly as a woman of feeling would not wear false jewels, so would a builder of honor disdain false ornaments. orna-ments. The using of them is just as downright and inexcusable a lie. You use that which pretends to a worth it has not: which pretends to have cost, and to be, what it did not and is not; it is an imposition, a vulgarity, an impertinence, imper-tinence, and a sin.. Down with it to the ground, grind it to powder, leave its ragged place upon the wall, rather: you have not paid for it, you have no business busi-ness with it, you do not want it. Nobody No-body wants ornaments in this world, but everybody wants integrity." What Ruskin found in Mediaeval art and life and faith, was not coloring and clothes and liturgy, but truth Catholic truth. The Rev. D. Lynch, S. J., contributes to the December Messenger a striking article on Ruskin's "Religious Evolution." Evolu-tion." "Sir Walter Scott," he says, "has often of-ten received the credit of being one of the first to help in dissipating the dense dark cloud of Anglo-Saxon fanaticism against the ancient religion of the race. But there is a greater than Sir Walter here." After tracing the art studies which gave Ruskin the refutation of his earlier anti-Papal views, Father Lynch declares: "Ruskin went far beyond the defense of Mediaeval Catholicism. His final resting place was in ' a certain sense in the mysticism of the saints. He was too much of a seer not to ascend as-cend to them." From Oxford, we are reminded, he wrote: "Here I am, trying to reform the world, and I suppose I ought to begin be-gin with myself. I am trying to do St. Benedict's work and I ought to be a saint." And again: "I feel that I ought to be scratched, or starved, or boiled, or something unpleasant; and I don't know if I'm a saint or a sinner in the least, in Mediaeval language." - "Faith he had," concludes Father Lynch, "but not that of the Church of England. He led in the family prayer at Brantwood, criticised the English liturgy as compared with Mediaeval forms and wrote collects for private use; but although intimate with Father Fa-ther Gibson of Coniston, to whose church he gave a window, and who ministered spiritually to several of the Brantwood household, he did not attend at-tend any public form of worship. His Catholic ideas and his intimacy with Cardinal Manning naturally led to the report that he had become a Catholic: but near as he came, and logically as he should have gone further, the veil was never quite withdrawn. 'I was, am and can be, only a Christian Catholic in the wide and eternal sense. I have been that these five-and-twenty years at least." There was so long a period before Ruskin's actual death when his mind was clouded, taking him out of current life, that it seems impossible to conceive con-ceive him as having survived until two years ago. The retirement gave him distance from his contemporaries, and the world had time to make up its mind about him while yet his physical presence pres-ence remained. It is an exercise not often given to the people of a generation genera-tion the calm certain acceptance of one whom they have know-n as a member mem-ber of the universal school of immortals. immor-tals. . It is still more unusual for Protestant Prot-estant and Catholic alike to unite without with-out delay in homage to one who was neither, but who loved God and served man. |
