410 THE STONES OF VENICE

visible; and then the human being has to make its power upon his own heart visible also, and to give it the honour of the good thoughts it has raised up in him, and to write upon it the history of his own soul. And sometimes he may be able to do more than this, and to set it in strange lights, and display it in a thousand ways before unknown: ways specially directed to necessary and noble purposes, for which he had to choose instruments out of the wide armoury of God. All this he may do: and in this he is only doing what every Christian has to do with the written, as well as the created word, “rightly dividing the word of truth.”¹ Out of the infinity of the written word, he has also to gather and set forth things new and old,² to choose them for the season and the work that are before him, to explain and manifest them to others, with such illustration and enforcement as may be in his power, and to crown them with the history of what, by them, God has done for his soul. And, in doing this, is he improving the Word of God? Just such difference as there is between the sense in which a minister may be said to improve a text, to the people’s comfort, and the sense in which an atheist might declare that he could improve the Book, which, if any man shall add unto, there shall be added unto him the plagues that are written therein;³ just such difference is there between that which, with respect to Nature, man is, in his humbleness, called upon to do, and that which, in his insolence, he imagines himself capable of doing.⁴

§ 6. Have no fear, therefore, reader, in judging between Nature and art, so only that you love both. If you can love one only, then let it be Nature; you are safe with her: but do not then attempt to judge the art, to which you do not care to give thought or time. But if you love both, you may judge between them fearlessly; you may estimate the

¹ [2 Timothy ii. 15.]

² [Mathew xiii. 52.]

³ [Revelation xxii. 18.]

⁴ [With § 5 here, compare Modern Painters, vol. i. (Vol. III. p. 137), where Ruskin likens the proper function of the artist’s mind to “a glass of sweet and strange colour ... and a glass of rare strength ... to bring nature up to us and near us.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]