Again, what is the will of the Lord, and what does Mr. Ruskin mean by proclaiming it? That He loves righteousness and hates iniquity we know. The difficulty is in applying this general rule in detail. What is its bearing upon the policy of the Government, upon any particular trade strike, upon the tangled web of good and evil motives which makes up the moral consciousness of an average shopkeeper? I conceive Mr. Ruskin to be thinking of preachers like Bernard, Savonarola, or Latimer, of denunciations like those of Isaiah, or of our Lord. He seems to mean that the clergyman should stand on a clear mountain summit, looking down over the whole field of life, discerning with the eye of a prophet every movement of evil on a small scale or on a large. There have been such teachers in whose hands science, economy, politics, seemed all to become branches of theology, members of one great body of Divine truth. But not every man's lips are thus touched with the coal from the altar. Many an excellent and most useful preacher would make but wild work if he took to denouncing social movements or the spirit of the age. A singular illustration of the danger that besets these sweeping moral judgments is to be found in Mr. Ruskin's own denunciation of usury, that is, of taking interest for money. Few people will agree either with the particular opinion that every old lady who lives harmlessly on her railway dividends ought to be excommunicated, or with the general principle implied in this opinion, that every prohibition in the Old Testament is still as valid as ever under social circumstances altogether different. People who need denouncing do not, as a rule, come to church to be denounced. And it would be a great error to conclude, from our Lord's language to the Pharisees and Sadducees, that the tone in which He addressed the individual sinner was harsh or scathing. The preacher must remember that he is a physician of souls, and the physician's touch is gentle. Think for a moment what worldliness is--how easy it is to say bitter things about it!--and then picture to yourselves a little tradesman with a wife and seven or eight children to keep on his scanty profits. What wonder if he sets too high a value on money? How difficult for him to understand the words which bid him take no thought for the morrow! There is a time, no doubt, for fierce language, but it does not often come. The preacher is no more exempt than other people from the golden rule to put himself in his neighbour's place, and try to see things with his neighbour's eyes. Another difficulty arises out of the manner in which Mr. Ruskin speaks of the relation of his Chamouni guides to dogmatic teaching. They ought not, he says, to be compelled to hold opinions on the subject, say, of the height of the Celestial Mountains, the crevasses which go down quickest to the pit, and other cognate points of science, differing from, or even contrary to, the tenets of the guides of the Church of France.