And surely our clergy need not be surprised at the daily increasing distrust in the public mind of the efficacy of Prayer, after having so long insisted on their offering supplication, _at least_ every Sunday morning at eleven o'clock, that the rest of their lives hereafter might be pure and holy, leaving them conscious all the while that they would be similarly required to inform the Lord next week, at the same hour, that "there was no health in them"! Among the much rebuked follies and abuses of so-called "Ritualism," none that I have heard of are indeed so dangerously and darkly "Ritual" as this piece of authorized mockery of the most solemn act of human life, and only entrance of eternal life--Repentance. Believe me, dear Mr. Malleson, Ever faithfully and respectfully yours, J. RUSKIN. XI [Greek: kai mê eisenegkês hêmas eis peirasmon, alla rhusai hêmas apo tou ponêrou; hoti sou estin hê basileia kai hê dunamis kai hê doxa eis tous aiônas; amên.] _Et ne nos inducas in tentationem; sed libera nos a malo; Quia tuum est regmum, potentia, et gloria in sæcula sæculorum. Amen._ BRANTWOOD, _14th September, 1879_. DEAR MR. MALLESON,--The gentle words in your last letter referring to the difference between yourself and me in the degree of hope with which you could regard what could not but appear to the general mind Utopian in designs for the action of the Christian Church, surely might best be answered by appeal to the consistent tone of the prayer we have been examining. Is not every one of its petitions for a perfect state? and is not this last clause of it, of which we are to think to-day--if fully understood--a petition not only for the restoration of Paradise, but of Paradise in which there shall be no deadly fruit, or, at least, no tempter to praise it? And may we not admit that it is probably only for want of the earnest use of this last petition, that not only the preceding ones have become formal with us, but that the private and simply restricted prayer for the little things we each severally desire, has become by some Christians dreaded and unused, and by others used faithlessly, and therefore with disappointment?