Fors Clavigera (Volume 6 of 8): $b Letters to the workmen and labourers of Great BritainRuskin, John
General
Fors Clavigera (Volume 6 of 8): $b Letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain
Ruskin, John
Aesthetics; Conduct of life; Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century; Social problems; Working class -- Great Britain
But indeed the market value of this commodity has greatly fallen in
these times. “Damn the Laws of God,” answered a City merchant of
standing to a personal friend of mine, who was advising him the other
day to take a little of that capital into his business.
Then, finally, there is just one article of property more to be
catalogued, and I have done. The Lawgiver Himself, namely; the Master
of masters, whom, when, as human dogs, we discover, and can call our
own Master, we are thenceforth ready to die for, if need be. Which Mr.
Harrison and the other English gentlemen who are at present discussing,
in various magazines, the meaning of the word ‘religion’ [84]
(appearing never to have heard in the course of their education, of
either the word ‘lictor’ or ‘ligature’) will find, is, was, and will
be, among all educated scholars, the perfectly simple meaning of that
ancient word; and that there can be no such thing, even for sentimental
Mr. Harrison, as a religion of Manity, nor for the most orthodox
hunting parson, as a religion of Dogity; nor for modern European
civilization as a religion of Bitchity, without such submission of
spirit to the worshipped Power as shall in the most literal sense
‘bind’ and chain us to it for ever.
And now, to make all matters as clear as may be, I will put down in the
manner of a Dutch auction—proceeding to the lower valuation,—the
articles of property, rightly so called, which belong to any human
creature.
I. The Master, or Father, in the old Latin phrase, ‘Pater Noster;’ of
whom David wrote, “Whom have I in heaven but thee, and there is none
upon earth that I desire beside thee;” but this possession, includes in
Plato’s catalogue, the attendant spirits, “θεοὺς, ὄντας δεσπότας, καὶ
τοὺς τούτοις ἑπομένους”—“the Gods, being Masters, and those next to
them,” specially signified in another place as “the Gods, and the
Angels, and the Heroes, and the Spirits of our Home, and our
Ancestors.”
II. The Law or Word of God, which the Bible Society professes to
furnish for eighteenpence. But which, indeed, as often heretofore
stated in Fors Clavigera, is by no means to be had at that low figure;
the whole long hundred and nineteenth Psalm being little more than one
agonizing prayer for the gift of it: and a man’s life well spent if he
has truly received and learned to read ever so little a part of it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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