Frondes Agrestes: Readings in 'Modern Painters'Ruskin, John
Philosophy
Frondes Agrestes: Readings in 'Modern Painters'
Ruskin, John
Art; Painting
78. Among the children of God, there is always that fearful and bowed
apprehension of His majesty, and that sacred dread of all offence to
Him which is called the Fear of God; yet of real and essential fear
there is not any, but clinging of confidence to Him as their Rock,
Fortress, and Deliverer; and perfect love, and casting out of fear; so
that it is not possible that, while the mind is rightly bent on Him,
there should be dread of anything earthly or supernatural; and the
more dreadful seems the height of His majesty, the less fear they feel
that dwell in the shadow of it. "Of whom shall I be afraid?"
79. If for every rebuke that we utter of men's vices, we put forth a
claim upon their hearts; if for every assertion of God's demands from
them, we could substitute a display of His kindness to them; if side
by side with every warning of death, we could exhibit proofs and
promises of immortality; if, in fine, instead of assuming the being of
an awful Deity, which men, though they cannot, and dare not deny, are
always unwilling, sometimes unable to conceive, we were to show them a
near, visible, inevitable, but all beneficent Deity, whose presence
makes the earth itself a heaven, I think there would be fewer deaf
children sitting in the market-place.
80. If not by sympathy discovered, it is not in words explicable with
what divine lines and light the exercise of godliness and charity will
mould and gild the hardest and coldest countenance, neither to what
darkness their departure will consign the loveliest. For there is not
any virtue the exercise of which, even momentarily, will not impress a
new fairness upon the features.
81. The love of the human race is increased by their individual
differences, and the unity of the creature, made perfect by each
having something to bestow and to receive, bound to the rest by a
thousand various necessities and various gratitudes; humility in each
rejoicing to admire in his fellow that which he finds not in himself,
and each being in some respect the complement of his race.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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