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Many people are agents of destruction wherever they go; they pull flowers they do not want, and throw them away again; they switch off the heads of others. They thus inflict discomfort and pain on these lower forms of consciousness. Why should trees be broken and flowers pulled and flung aside to gasp out their lives on the dusty highway? Children should be taught their duty to plants, so that they would range field and woods with senses alert to all the silent appeals for help.

But we consign this part of ethical theosophy to the realm of pleasant romance and leave it there.

To the scientific aspects and claims of theosophy we shall only briefly refer. It does not deal closely, nor in detail, with the physical sciences nor with the psychological, although Mr. Sinnett identifies the human will with the animal desires. Nevertheless, the wild dream-spirit, the boastful assumption based on ignorance, seems at times to dominate. Mrs. Besant says:

We find in India the beginnings of astronomy, geometry, medicine, with psychology, carried to a point unapproached in modern times. In China, Egypt, Chaldea, Greece, science flourished, and in all these lands applied science left triumphs of engineering skill at which our punier modern world still looks with amaze. For in science, as in religion and in philosophy, esoteric philosophy is the complete body of truth.

In truth, when we read the "science" of theosophy a feeling comes over us as of one wandering in the dim twilight, or we feel like smiling as broadly as theosophists do when they refer to Darwinian evolutionists seeking for the missing links between man and ape. In history, also, our most advanced scholars are like school children compared with the mahatmas, one of whom assures us that the present "rush" of the Japanese into the life modes of advanced Western civilization is only a "caricature," and will soon pass away, for the Japanese, like the Chinese, are only degenerate remnants of the old Atlantean, or fourth, race of men. And that mahatma knows, for he has read under the ocean depths the records of the past races of men and animals; he can prophesy with definite mathematical statements the progressive changes of man for the millions of years to come. When Mr. Sinnett stated that of the seven planets of our chain Mercury and Mars are visible, while the two in advance of Mercury and the two

beyond Mars are invisible, Madame Blavatsky learned from a mahatma that this Earth was the only planet visible to us; the other six he could see, but we cannot, for our senses are always functionally adapted to the globe in which we happen to be. Or, again, we had supposed our terms "lunatic" and "lunacy" had reference to a superstitious belief in the active influence of the moon, and that the phrase "man in the moon" was a sort of jocose slang; but we get a hint of their true import when Mrs. Besant says, "Though it is true that animals will not pass into the human stage in the present cycle, yet they may be helped up to the point which we had reached when we left the moon."

Our conclusion regarding theosophy as a philosophy and a science is the following: While we admire its philosophic spirit, enjoy its speculations, heed some of its fertile suggestions, most heartily wish we could understand and work such a superb system of mathematics as its teachers profess to know, yet as a philosophy it is in part a failure, in part a dream, in part a romance, and in part a vagary.

S. P. Hillman

ART. VIII.-A RUSKIN MOSAIC.

JOHN RUSKIN's death at Brantwood, last January, seems almost like the closing in of the century. It is more than fifty years since he wrote his Modern Painters, which, according to his own description, "declares the perfectness and eternal beauty of the work of God, and tests all work of man by concurrence with or subjection to that." Here is the kernel of his teaching as an art critic. Himself a preacher who had missed the pulpit, he sought to "attach to the artist the responsibility of the preacher." He dwelt with emphasis on the contrast between his two friends Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti :

To Rossetti the Old and New Testaments were only the greatest poems he knew; and he painted scenes from them with no more actual belief in their relation to the present life and business of men than he gave also to the "Morte d'Arthur" and the "Vita Nuova." But to Holman Hunt the story of the New Testament, when once his mind entirely fastened on it, became what it was to an old Puritan, or an old Catholic of true blood-not merely a reality, not merely the greatest of realities, but the only reality. So that there is nothing in the earth for him any more that does not speak of that; there is no course of thought nor force of skill for him but it springs from and ends in that.

He looked on Hunt's "Light of the World" as the most perfect instance of expressional purpose with technical power which the world had produced. In an earlier number of this Review we saw how Ruskin reached religious anchorage after many a storm. He was able in 1877 for the first time in Oxford to speak boldly of immortal life.

We may venture, under the shadow of his loss, to turn some pages of the library bequeathed us by the great literary artist, in order to learn what he gained from those Bible readings with his mother at Herne Hill which have become historic. He says in Praeterita: "To that discipline-patient, accurate, and resolute-I owe not only a knowledge of the book, which I find occasionally serviceable, but much of my general power of taking pains and the best part of my taste in literature."

January-February, 1895.

The one hundred and nineteenth psalm, which his mother made him commit to memory, he described as "now become of all the most precious to me, in its overflowing and glorious passion of love for the law of God." Ruskin would have been ready to take the position held by John Bright, who once told Mr. Gladstone that he would be content to stake upon the Book of Psalms, as it stands, the great question whether there is or is not a divine revelation. Ruskin felt that the first half of the Psalter contained "the sum of personal and social wisdom. The first, eighth, twelfth, fourteenth, fifteenth, nineteenth, twenty-third, and twenty-fourth psalms, well learned and believed, are enough for all personal guidance; the forty-eighth, seventy-second, and seventy-fifth have in them the law and the prophecy of all righteous government; and every real triumph of natural science is anticipated in the one hundred and fourth." He sums up under seven heads the gist of Bible teaching. It contains the stories of the Fall and the Flood, founded on a true horror of sin; the story of the patriarchs, "of which the effective truth is visible to this day in the polity of the Jewish and Arab races;" the story of Moses; of the kings; of the prophets-" virtually that of the deepest mystery, tragedy, and permanent fate, of national existence;" the story of Christ; the moral law of St. John, and his closing Apocalypse of its fulfillment. Then he asks, "Think if you can match that table of contents in any other-I do not say book, but literature. Think . . . what literature could have taken its place, or fulfilled its function, though every library in the world had remained, unravaged, and every teacher's truest words had been written down."

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But loyalty to the Bible is not the only test of Ruskin's hold on the great realities. His noble note on St. Paul's benediction (2 Cor. xiii, 14) shows how he felt the power of that word "grace" which Dr. Dale said he longed to see restored to the Christian pulpit. "By simply obeying the orders of the Founder of your religion," Ruskin reminds us, "all grace, graciousness, or beauty and favor of gentle life will be given to you in mind and body, in work and in rest. The grace of Christ exists, and can be had if you will." The lovely letter written to some young girls who wished to know the rules of

St. George's Society is full of simple loyalty to Christ. "St. George's first order for you, supposing you were put under his charge, would be that you should always, in whatever you do, endeavor to please Christ-and he is quite easily pleased if you try." How beautifully Ruskin joins that zeal for pleasing Christ with joyful and hearty obedience to parents and superiors. The girls are given the following cautions:

Keep absolute calm of temper, under all chances; receiving everything that is provoking or disagreeable to you as coming directly from Christ's hand; and the more it is likely to provoke you, thank him for it the more; as a young soldier would his general for trusting him with a hard place to hold on the rampart. And, remember, it does not in the least matter what happens to you-whether a 'clumsy school-fellow tears your dress, or a shrewd one laughs at you, or the governess doesn't understand you. The one thing needful is that none of these things should vex you. For your mind, at this time of your youth, is crystallizing like sugar-candy; and the least jar to it flaws the crystal, and that permanently.

All the world knows Ruskin's belief in thoroughness. His mother, with her Spartan discipline, swept away the gorgeous Punch and Judy show brought by his pitying Croydon aunt. She taught him the habit of fixed attention with both eyes and mind. He never ceased to preach that doctrine. "In order to do anything thoroughly well, the whole mind and the whole available time must be given to that single art." He tells us in Praeterita how he once watched some men engaged in bricklaying and paving: "When I took the trowel into my own hand I abandoned at once all hope of attaining the least real skill with it, unless I gave up all thoughts of any future literary or political career." It was his great dictum that "no truly great man can be named in the arts but it is that of one who finishes to the uttermost." The vine leaves of Titian's "Bacchus and Ariadne," in the National Gallery at London, pointed the moral, and he was careful to show that in Turner's painting of "Ivy Bridge" the veins are seen on the wings of a butterfly not above three inches in diameter, while in one of the smaller drawings of Scarborough, in Ruskin's own possession, the mussels on the beach were rounded, and some even shown as shut and some as open, though none were as large as the type of this article.

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