Note 4 — LETTER LIV.

“Our ex-townsman has so effectually disposed of the Professor’s charges, that there is no need to endeavour to answer them further. We have only noticed them so far in order to show our readers the extent to which hatred of the Church becomes a craze with some persons, otherwise estimable no doubt, whose judgment is for the time swept away by passion. That there is no pleasing such persons is the more apparent from Mr. Ruskin’s curious comments upon the well-known story of the Rev. Septimus Hansard, the rector of Bethnal Green, who has caught the small-pox, the typhus fever, and the scarlet fever, on three several occasions4 in the discharge of his pastoral duties among the sick poor. When he fell down in his pulpit with the small-pox, he at once said he would go to an hospital, but refused to enter the cab which his friends called, lest he should infect it; and, a hearse happening to pass, he went in it—a fine instance of courage and self-devotion. Mr. Hansard’s stipend is five hundred a year, out of which he has to pay two curates. And what has Mr. Ruskin to say to this? Surely this must command his fullest sympathy, admiration, and approval? Far from it. His snarling comment is as follows:—‘I am very sure that while he was saving one poor soul in Bethnal he was leaving ten rich souls to be damned at Tyburn, each of which would damn a thousand or two more by their example or neglect.’ This peculiar mode of argument has the merit of being available under all circumstances; for, of course, if Mr. Hansard’s parish had happened to be Tyburn instead of Bethnal, Mr. Ruskin would have been equally ready with the glib remark that while the rector was saving one rich soul to Tyburn, he was leaving ten poor souls to destruction in Bethnal. Are we to understand that Mr. Ruskin thinks Mr. Hansard ought to be able to be in two places at once, or are we to shrug our shoulders and say that some persons are hard to please? The heroism of self-sacrifice Mr. Ruskin considers to be a waste and a mistake. Mr. Hansard’s life has all, says the Professor, ‘been but one fit of scarlet fever—and all aglow in vain.’ That noble-minded men should devote themselves to the noblest work of the Church for the love of Christ, and of those for whom He died, is apparently beyond Mr. Ruskin’s conception. Love of sensation, he says, is the cause of it all. ‘Sensation must be got out of death, or darkness, or frightfulness.… And the culmination of the black business is that the visible misery drags and beguiles to its help all the enthusiastic simplicity of the religious young, and the honest strength of the really noble type of English clergymen, and swallows them, as Charybdis would life-boats. Courageous and impulsive men, with just sense enough to make them soundly practical, and therefore complacent, in immediate business, but not enough to enable them to see what the whole business comes to when done, are sure to throw themselves desperately into the dirty work, and die like lively moths in candle-grease.’ We have read philosophy something like the above extract elsewhere before, and we think the philosopher’s name was Harold Skimpole. What the gospel is with which Mr. Ruskin proposes to supplant Christianity and to regenerate the world, we do not know. A gospel of this tone, however, published in tenpenny instalments, is not likely ever to reach the hands of the workmen and labourers of Great Britain, much less their hearts.