a Christian mother, may at last be able to attain the virtues of a heathen one and be able to lead forth her sons saying, "These are My Jewels.'"

It is much easier to find in the writings of Ruskin eloquent, helpful, soul-stirring, idealkindling sermons than it is to find the outlines of his theology. He was far from being a systematic thinker. It is hard to compress into stern syllogisms the fine frenzy of the poet. Until he was forty years of age his theology was the softened Calvinism which he inherited from his parents. He was in Oxford in the days of the Tractarian movement, but was absolutely untouched by it. He was always more interested in conclusions than he was in the processes by which they were attained. But about 1860 he became very much unsettled in regard to the thought foundations of his religious life. Had this inevitable readjustment come earlier, it would have been much less painful. To analyze his later theology would be difficult. But we do know that he became fired with an even greater passion for righteousness and justice. His love of good became more fervent and his hatred of evil more intense. With even greater frequency he recurred to Christ and his teachings. In the introduction to his Notes on the

Construction of Sheepfolds he remarks, "Many persons will probably find fault with me for publishing opinions which are not new; but I shall bear the blame contentedly believing that opinions on this subject could hardly be just if they were not eighteen hundred years old." His theology, unsystematic as it may be, is distinctively Christocentric.

Few writers quote the Bible so frequently or so effectively. Some of his noblest passages are almost biblical paraphrases. The last paragraph of the second paper of Sesame and Lilies is a notable example of this. In Præterita he gives a list of the chapters which his mother with the greatest exactness compelled him to memorize. He says that in this way his mother “established my soul in life," and adds the following comment: "And truly, though I have picked up the elements of a little further knowledge-in mathematics, meteorology, and the like, in after life-and owe not a little to the teaching of many people, this maternal installation of my mind in the property of chapters, I count very confidently the most precious, and, on the whole, the one essential part of all my education." To say the least, such a statement is not without profound pedagogical significance. It, moreover, helps us to understand the dominating forces in the

life and writings of Ruskin. He was most emphatically a biblical preacher.

He has been criticized for his unrestrained language of denunciation. He speaks of London, the home of Chaucer and Milton, the city which Johnson loved and Turner painted, as "that great foul city, rattling, growling, smoking, stinking, a ghastly heap of fermenting brickwork, pouring out poison at every pore.' In common with Carlyle, Ruskin, it must be admitted, excelled in the richness of his vocabulary of vituperation But in the Book which Ruskin knew above all others we find that the major and minor prophets spoke words of undiluted strength, and that Peter and Paul were not afraid to speak out. Then, too, there was One greater than prophet or apostle who denounced the formalistic, hypocritical scribes and Pharisees in words so fraught with fury that language almost breaks down beneath their weight. To hate wrong is the mark of a real Christian. A man tremendously in earnest in the presence of "ignorance, animality, and brutemindedness" does not keep silent or speak in accents of cowardly mildness. In no age does the prophet of the living God quail before enthroned evil.

The heart of John Ruskin was strangely warmed within him. Few men have been so

impressed with the high seriousness of life. He believed that the issues of life and death depended upon the gospel. "Precious indeed those thirty minutes by which the teacher tries to get at the separate hearts of a thousand men, to convince them of all their weaknesses, to shame them for all their sin, to warn them of all their dangers, to try them by this way and that, to stir the hard fastenings of the doors where the Master himself has stood and knocked, yet none opened, and to call at the openings of those dark streets where Wisdom herself hath stretched forth her hands and no man regarded. Thirty minutes to raise the dead in." Nowhere do we find a better summary of what for over half a century, misunderstood, assailed, ridiculed, and thwarted, John Ruskin tried to do. He was a preacher of the life abundant, a soldier beneath the ensign of the King of kings.

MOST great men live in the future, but Jonathan Edwards was the child of the past. Most emphatically he was not one of the great radicals who overthrow long-entrenched systems and lay new foundations upon which after generations can build. On the contrary, he used his transcendent genius in a vain attempt to revitalize a dead philosophy and a fast-dying creed. But in spite of this, by the dominating force of a mighty intellect, he towers to-day, among our American thinkers, like a colossus.

In the early days of the New England theocracy the clergy were the lords of the land. The New England parson in his black Geneva cloak and close-fitting black velvet cap was an autocrat of the autocrats. He ruled his little world with a scepter of iron. From the high pulpit in the cold and cheerless meetinghouse he preached the militant, unyielding gospel of John Knox and John Calvin with an almost oracular authority. Woe to the unlucky wight