thus the Apostolic words come true, in this minor respect, as in all others, that men are alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, having the
Understanding
darkened because of the hardness of their
hearts
, and so, being past feeling, give themselves up to lasciviousness. For we do indeed see constantly that men having naturally acute perceptions of the beautiful, yet not receiving it with a pure heart, nor into their hearts at all, never comprehend it, nor receive good from it; but make it a mere minister to their desires, and accompaniment and seasoning of lower sensual pleasures, until all their emotions take the same earthly stamp, and the sense of beauty sinks into the servant of lust. Nor is what the world commonly understands by the cultivation of taste anything more or better than this; at least in times of corrupt and over-pampered civilization, when men build palaces and plant groves and gather luxuries, that they and their devices may hang in the corners of the world like fine-spun cobwebs, with greedy, puffed-up, spider-like lusts in the middle. And this, which in Christian times is the abuse and corruption of the sense of beauty, was in that Pagan life, of which St Paul speaks, little less than the essence of it, and the best they had.
(
b
) [A reference, in Dr Westcott's note on 6:12, to Ruskin's
Modern Painters
, was for some time difficult to identify owing to an uncertainty as to the page-number. Ultimately the passage intended was discovered, beyond all doubt, to be a passage in Pt IX. c. xii. § 18; which has accordingly been printed in the Commentary
ad loc.
But the following two passages, which the Index to
Modern Painters
in the first instance suggested as perhaps intended, may be felt to be worth citing in addition to the other; which in one or two points they illustrate and supplement.]
The reason of this I believe to be that the right faith of man is not intended to give him repose, but to enable him to do his work. It is not intended that he should look away from the place he lives in now, and cheer himself with thoughts of the place he is to live in next, but that he should look stoutly into this world, in faith that, if he does his work thoroughly here, some good to others or himself, with which however he is not at present concerned, will come of it hereafter. And this kind of brave, but not very hopeful or cheerful, faith I perceive to be always rewarded by clear practical success and splendid intellectual power; while the faith which dwells on the future fades away into rosy mist and emptiness of musical air. That result indeed follows naturally enough on its habit of assuming that things must be right, or must come right, when probably the fact is that, so far as we are concerned, they are entirely wrong, and going wrong: and also on its weak and false way of looking on what these religious persons call the bright side of things, that is to say, on one side of them only, when God has given them two sides and intended us to see both.
(
Modern Painters
, vol. v. p. 229, small edition; Pt IX. c. ii. § 11.)
Now, as far as I have watched the main powers of human mind, they have risen first from the resolution to see fearlessly, pitifully and to its very worst, what those deep colours mean, wheresoever they fall; not by any means to pass on the other side, looking pleasantly up to the sky, but to stoop to the horror, and let the sky, for the present, take care of its own clouds. However this may be in moral matters, with which I have nothing here to do, in my own field of inquiry the fact is so; and all great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness. If, having done so, the human spirit can by its courage and faith conquer