Letters to the Clergy on the Lord's Prayer and the ChurchRuskin, John
Religion
Letters to the Clergy on the Lord's Prayer and the Church
Ruskin, John
Church of England -- Clergy; Lord's prayer; Ruskin, John, 1819-1900 -- Correspondence
But several fallacies underlie this second question. The fallacy that
the moral principles of our nature are necessarily connected with the
extent of our intellectual capacities; the fallacy that Divine Truths
can be adequately expressed through the inaccurate instrument of human
language; the fallacy that deep things are necessarily made plain by the
use of plain words; the fallacy that everything upon which we act is
necessarily understood. A plain man does not refuse to use the telegraph
because he may know nothing about the Correlation of Force, or a simple
person to travel because "space" is beyond his comprehension. If the
Gospel is, as St. Paul says it is, a revelation of the power of God unto
salvation, an amount of mystery must necessarily surround it. Since it
is impossible that the Divine Nature should be to us other than a
mystery, a revelation of Divine purposes such as is the Gospel as
understood by the Church, must remain mysterious also. Only upon the
supposition that our Lord was the teacher of a high but still human
morality can we remove all mystery from the Christian Gospel, if it
still deserve the name. Such teaching might be conveyed in plain words
and short terms, but it would cease to be a Gospel which angels desire
to look into, and could hardly be described as the "manifold wisdom of
God," or be the story of the "love of Christ, which passeth knowledge."
The Gospel, as the Church understands it, rests upon the revealed fact
of the Incarnation, or the union of the Infinite with the Finite, that
He who is very God of very God became man in order to introduce the
Divine possibility of manhood being made to partake of the Divine
nature; and so long as the triumphal chant ascends that "the Catholic
Faith is this," so long will the Church's Faith be veiled indeed with
mystery, and so long will she continue to gather within her bounds the
humble and holy men of heart, who are content to say, "I cannot
understand: I love." That "God sent His only-begotten Son into the
world that we might live through Him" are short and plain words enough,
and Gospel enough, surely, but the depth of their meaning is
unfathomable by even the most cultivated understanding, to which the
power of God and the wisdom of God may appear to be but foolishness.
LETTER IX
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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