Just before this incident, however, his moral sense was beginning to revolt from certain parts of his creed. He was, he says, invited to a “fashionable séance of Evangelical doctrine, at the Earl of Ducie’s, presided over by Mr. Molyneux, then a divine of celebrity in that sect, who sat with one leg over his other knee, in the attitude always given to Herod at the Massacre of the Innocents in mediæval sculpture, and discoursed in tones of consummate assurance and satisfaction, and to the entire comfort and consent of his Belgravian audience, on the beautiful parable of the Prodigal Son. Which, or how many, of his hearers he meant to describe as having personally lived on husks, and devoured their father’s property, did not of course appear; but that something of the sort was necessary to the completeness of the joy in heaven over them, now in Belgrave Square, at the feet, or one foot, of Mr. Molyneux, could not be questioned. Waiting my time, till the raptures of the converted company had begun to flag a little, I ventured, from a back seat, to enquire of Mr. Molyneux what we were to learn from the example of the other son, not prodigal, who was, his father said, ‘ever with me and all that I have, thine.’ A sudden horror and unanimous feeling of the serpent having somehow got over the wall into their Garden of Eden, fell on the whole company; and some of them, I thought, looked at the candles, as if they expected them to burn blue. After a pause of a minute, gathering himself into an expression of pity and indulgence, withholding latent thunder, Mr. Molyneux explained to me that the home-staying son was merely a picturesque figure introduced to fill the background of the parable agreeably, and contained no instruction or example for the well-disposed scriptural student, but on the contrary, rather, a snare for the unwary, and a temptation to self-righteousness--which was, of all sins, the most offensive to God. Under the fulmination of which answer, I retired from the séance in silence, nor ever attended another of the kind from that day to this.”[7] It was just this lack of feeling for righteousness as such, the idea that you needed first to be a “most sinful sinner” if you wished to become a “most Christian Christian,” and a want of recognition that forgiveness was a spiritual and inward process, which caused the contemptuous references to his early form of doctrine which are scattered thickly throughout Ruskin’s later writings.