Ruskin was one of several great Victorians, including George Eliot and W.E. Gladstone, Cardinal Newman and Cardinal Manning, whose intellectual lives were grounded in the Evangelicalism of their youth which they then left behind them (see Ruskin and religion).
It would have been at the instigation of his mother, Margaret Ruskin, that Ruskin, in his own words in Praeterita ( Works, 35.490), 'received' his religion from Bunyan and from Isaac Ambrose (the Puritan divine whose standard work was entitled Looking unto Jesus (1658)). For all Margaret's more extreme views, however, the Ruskins would not have associated themselves with the pre-millennialist, pentecostal, adventist and revivalist Irvingites, who believed in God's direct intervention in the world and therefore supported direct human intervention in social affairs, being closer to the 'Clapham Sect' in their opinions.
In his boyhood and early manhood, Ruskin attended a variety of churches and chapels in South London, and heard hundreds of Evangelical sermons, including those of the Revd Henry Melvil, one of the most famous preachers of his generation. As a boy, Ruskin not only summarised some of these sermons, but also wrote his own. Even though Oxford later introduced him to a wider range of clergy, and thus doctrines, it was Evangelicalism that shaped the religious life of the young 'Author of Modern Painters'. The story of his later revisions to Modern Painters I, however, is also the story of his increasing embarrassment at the aggressive Evangelicism of the first edition. (See Wheeler, Ruskin's God, pp.3-179.)