Ever, my dear Sir, very faithfully yours, JOHN RUSKIN. [From "New Year's Address," etc. (as above), 1878.] _A PAGAN MESSAGE._ HERNE HILL, LONDON, S.E. _19 Dec._ 1877. MY DEAR SIR: I am sure you know as well as I that the best message for any of your young men who really are trying to read their Bibles is whatever they first chance to read on whatever morning. But here's a Pagan message for them, which will be a grandly harmonized bass for whatever words they get on the New Year. Inter spem curamque, timores et inter iras, _Omnem_ crede diem tibi diluxisse supremum.[138] ("Amid hope and sorrow, amid fear and wrath, believe _every_ day that has dawned on thee to be thy last.") Ever faithfully yours, JOHN RUSKIN. FOOTNOTES: [138] Horace, Epistles, i. 4. 12. [From "The Science of Life."] _THE FOUNDATIONS OF CHIVALRY._[139] VENICE, _February 8th_, 1877. MY DEAR----: This is a nobly done piece of work of yours--a fireman's duty in fire of hell; and I would fain help you in all I could, but my way of going at the thing would be from the top down--putting the fire out with the sun, not with vain sprinklings. People would say I wasn't practical, as usual of course; but it seems to me the last thing one should do in the business is to play Lord Angelo, and set bar and door to deluge. Not but I should sift the windows of our Oxford printsellers, if I had my full way in my Art Professorship; but I can't say the tenth part of what I would. I'm in the very gist and main effort of quite other work, and can't get my mind turned to this rightly, for this, in the heart of it, involves--well, to say the whole range of moral philosophy, is nothing; this, in the heart of it, one can't touch unless one knew the moral philosophy of angels also, and what that means, "but are as the angels in heaven." For indeed there is no true conqueror of Lust but Love; and in this beautifully scientific day of the British nation, in which you have no God to love any more, but only an omnipotent coagulation of copulation: in which you have no Law nor King to love any more, but only a competition and a constitution, and the oil of anointing for king and priest used to grease your iron wheels down hill: when you have no country to love any more, but "patriotism is nationally what selfishness is individually,"[140] such the eternally-damned modern view of the matter--the moral syphilis of the entire national blood: and, finally, when you have no true bride and groom to love each other any more, but a girl looking out for a carriage and a man for a position, what have you left on earth to take pleasure in, except theft and adultery?