But the solvent influences did not stop there. They seldom fail to proceed. Rebuilding rather than repair is generally necessary to a broken down system of thought. But that which left him in great darkness was an experience which could have so affected no one but Ruskin. This was the third event. It was the discovery at Venice that the best work was done by irreligious painters. He found that “Tintoret only occasionally forgot himself into religion,” and that Titian had no religion at all, and yet had to be given as the standard of perfection in painting. Ruskin concluded, first, and quite truly, that “human work must be done honourably and thoroughly, because we are now men; whether we expect to be angels, or ever were slugs, being practically no matter. That by the work we have done and not by our belief we shall be judged.”[12] He went on, by generalizing, to a further conclusion in that year, afterwards to be corrected. The conclusion and the correction divide the periods of Ruskin’s life. He concluded that the group of great worldly painters of various nations, Turner, Titian, Velasquez, Sir Joshua, Gainsborough, Tintoret, and Paul Veronese, did more perfect and stronger work than the sacred army of obedient Catholics headed by Cimabue, Giotto and Angelico, who worked under the guidance of a heavenly vision. This seems a strange reason for losing faith. It can only be understood when we remember that Ruskin regarded art as the expression of the painter’s whole nature, especially the soul of him; and if the endowment from heaven were really potent, it should inspire the artist to do work that is clearly supreme. That it did not do so was Ruskin’s stumbling-block. I will not anticipate the ultimate solution; but only pause to mourn over the many stumbling-blocks which our theories put in our way. Because the lot decided unfairly, Silas Marner, the wronged of heaven, lost his faith. How many have been and are unable to see through pain and poverty to God. How many have bound their faith to the accuracy of a record or the fidelity of a frail fellow-creature. Of the religious utterances of this first period, which ended in 1858, the second volume of _Modern Painters_ is the most typical. To me, it was the door by which in 1882 I entered into my love of Ruskin the author, as _Fors_ led me to love and reverence the man. The subject is an analysis of Beauty as a various expression of the mind of God. It is published separately; it is not a long book; and it might be read for a second time along with the Author’s notes of 1883. These give us the verdict of age upon the enthusiasm of its own youth, and are vastly entertaining. Even as Tennyson, in his “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After,” puts his quietus upon the ebullitions of the most rhythmic and moving utterance of his youth, so does Ruskin, with mocking self-blame, speak with fatherly candour to the Oxford Graduate of 1845.