THE CONSTRUCTION OF SHEEPFOLDS 565

But this following page is the one which induced me to answer your letter at all-you speak of the redemption “not of us but of the whole world” in Christ. What do you-what can you-mean by this? It would be, I do not say the happiest day of my life, but the beginning of another life to me, if you could justify those words. I will not go further-the rest of your letter touches on minor points; but pray answer me this-or if you like better to write to Furnivall-and call me hard names to your better content when not addressing me directly-do so, though I should not think it rude if you called me them to my face, any more than I think an Alpine stream rude when I throw a stone into it, and it splashes me. Only do not speak so as to make Furnivall excommunicate me. This “being defamed, we entreat.”¹

Ever respectfully and faithfully yours,

J. RUSKIN.

[Maurice rejoined in a second letter (April 4, 1851) from which the following passage is an extract: “You will see, I think, why I can most heartily sympathise with all your rules of conduct about your neighbours and Lady--, admiring especially your distinctions respecting sickness and suffering, and yet dissent altogether from your apparent interpretation of our Lord’s acts, and from the doctrine of excommunication which you attempted in your pamphlet to deduce from them. I suspected that there was this essential hearty humanity lurking under your exclusiveness, and that made me stamp and swear the more fiercely at the wolf’s clothing in which you had thought acts, and from the doctrine of excommunication which you attempted in your pamphlet to deduce from them. I suspected that there was this essential hearty humanity lurking under your exclusiveness, and that made me stamp and swear the more fiercely at the wolf’s clothing in which you had thought fit to hide the true fleece. I never said, or dreamed, that our Lord loved publicans qua extortioners, or harlots qua unchaste women; I should have thought that blasphemy. But I said He loved publicans qua men, and harlots qua women; and that, instead of excommunication them, He went straight to them, ate and drank with them, claimed them as men and women. I cannot use your language exactly, and say that He waited till they were penitents. He says the contrary Himself: ‘I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance’-the repentance was not necessarily there, nor was it the ground of His sympathy. He owned them as having the nature He took, as being His brothers and sisters; and on that ground, and in that way, He awakened their repentance. They did repent when they acknowledged Him as their Lord and Brother. But when the maxim and practice of the Pharisees and respectable Jews generally went to the direct excommunication of them as excluded from God’s covenant and mercy, is it not a strange turning of things upside down to call those parts of our Lord’s conduct which most offended them (the Pharisees) and outraged all their prejudices, an excommunication? And if I am taught by the Gospels to consider these acts as a direct assertion of communion with men as men, and so, as an exhibition of Himself in His character of the Son of Man and of the Son of God also revealing the mind of His Father, may I not storm a little when you seem to me wholly to pervert and reverse the nature and object of them?” On the text of which Ruskin had made so much (see above, p. 564), Maurice thus replied: “But the great stumbling-block is ‘Let him be unto thee as an heathen man and a publican.’ And this occurs in the Gospel of Matthew

¹ [1 Corinthians iv. 13.]

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