formalism or in a succession of emotions unrelated to actual living. He emphasized the old truth, "No man can serve two masters." A man cannot endure as seeing Him who is invisible and at the same time bow before the golden shrine of the "Goddess of Getting-on. Christianity is not something remote from life. It is that which can permeate, transform, and glorify every sphere and every task. A certain English lord is quoted as saying, "I respect Christianity as much as any man, but I object when they try to make it interfere with a man's private life." In his book New Worlds for Old, H. G. Wells tells of a transaction by which the capital of a railroad was swollen from forty million to nearly one hundred and twentythree millions to cover an expenditure in improvements of twenty-two and a half millions. It is unfortunately often the case that financiers who mulct the public in this fashion are members of orthodox communion, and make a point of being regarded as religious. Ruskin objected to formal piety being a cloak for predatory industrialism. In The Crown of Wild Olives we find this sentence, striking in its simple truth: "The one Divine work-the one ordered sacrifice is to do justice."

Ruskin was not a socialist, although many of the ideas of modern socialism have sprung

from seed which he planted. We must also admit that he was not entirely successful in his effort to apply his social teaching to the life of his generation. Yet it must be remembered that seldom indeed do the prophet and the executive dwell in the same tenement of clay. We have no particular reason for believing that Amos of Tekoa would have been the ideal man to organize a new social system; we find it slightly difficult to picture John the Baptist in the guise of an ecclesiastical organizer. Ruskin was an artist and a preacher and not an administrator. Of him it can be said as of the parish priest in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales:

"But Cristes lore, and his apostles twelve,

He taughte, but first he folwed it him-selve."

Carlyle and Spencer, in the seclusion of their libraries, talked most passionately, and often most wisely, about the regeneration of modern society. They lived laborious, strenuous, silent, useful lives, but they never stirred one finger to change the conditions against which they fulminated. No one blames them; they had other work. But Ruskin, by far the most productive of our modern English writers, toiled "like a curate or missionary in some crowded parish," caring for the bodies, the

minds, and the souls of his weaker brethren. Frederic Harrison has well said, "The first life of John Ruskin was the life of a consummate teacher of art and master of style; the second life was the life of priest and evangelist."

Unlike certain modern preachers of the social gospel, Ruskin did not minimize individual righteousness. In valiant, hard-hitting English he denounces the godlessness of a people of jaded moral sense. His sarcastic version of the Ten Commandments is a veritable philippic against subtle hypocrisy:

"Thou shalt have gods of self and ease and pleasure before me. Thou shalt worship thine own imaginations as to house and goods and business, and bow down and serve them. Thou shalt remember the Sabbath day, to see to it that all its hours are given to sloth and lounging and stuffing the body with rich foods, leaving the children of sorrow and ignorance to perish in their sodden misfortune. Thou shalt kill and slay men by doing as little as possible thyself, and squeezing as much as possible out of others. Thou shalt look upon loveliness in womanhood to soil it with impurity. Thou shalt steal daily; the employer from the servant and the servant from the employer, and the devil take the hindmost. Thou shalt get thy livelihood by weaving a

great web of falsehoods and sheathing thyself in lies. Thou shalt covet thy neighbor's house to possess it for thyself; thou shalt covet his office and his farm, his goods and his fame, and everything that is his. And to crown all these laws the devil has added a new commandment-thou shalt hate thy neighbor as thou dost hate thyself."

Ruskin, above all else, endeavored to avoid expressing banal nothingness in eloquent language. He was mostly exceedingly concrete in his denunciations of evil doing. As he grew older he was dominated more and more by a sense of wrongs to be righted. The thought that in the midst of sorrow, suffering, wretchedness, and sin those whose talents and opportunities should have made them the real leaders of their people, were giving their days to game-preserving and to vapid society made him grow bitter. To him sin was no empty abstraction. His very soul was thrilled by what Carlyle called "a divine rage against falsity." His stern words like a flame of fire descended upon grossness, luxury, and mammonism. With something of the spirit and power of the Hebrew prophets he stood for duty rather than privilege, character rather than possession, and ideals rather than materials. He knew that a transformed society

could consist only of regenerated men and women. He knew of the battles between the powers of light and the powers of darkness which are fought in every human heart. "Every faculty of man's soul, and every instinct of it by which he is meant to live, is exposed to its own special form of corruption: and whether within man, or in the external world, there is a power or condition of temptation which is perpetually endeavoring to reduce every glory of his soul, and every power of his life, to such corruption as is possible to them." Much as he stressed social betterment, he realized that it is futile without individual salvation. The truth, "Man is more than meat," stands at the very heart of his teaching. It was borne in upon him that the making of human souls is the most important manufacture in which a nation's energies could be engaged. He hoped to rouse England to a sense of her failure and to cause her to put first things first. He said, "In some far-away and yet undreamt-of hour I can imagine that England may cast all thoughts of possessive wealth back to the barbaric nations among whom they first arose; and that while the sands of the Indus and the adamant of Golconda may yet stiffen the housings of a charger and flash from the turbans of a slave, she, as