During this middle period of prime mental power, he wrote nineteen volumes, and numerous catalogues and pamphlets. They are, in order of time: _The Two Paths_, _Modern Painters_, vol. v., _Unto This Last_, _Munera Pulveris_, _Sesame and Lilies_, _The Ethics of the Dust_, _The Crown of Wild Olive_, _Time and Tide_, _The Queen of the Air_, _Lectures on Art at Oxford_, the first half of _Flors Clavigera_, _Aratra Pentelici_, _The Eagle’s Nest_, _Love’s Meinie_, _Ariadne Florentina_, _Val D’Arno_, and most of the papers reprinted in _On the Old Road_. As an author he was in his full strength.
The significance of the period is that under the most painful uncertainties of doctrine, true religion shone still, blazed beaconlike, in fact: blazed as a beacon blazes when blown by tempest. But few readers ever thought of the writer as a heretic. He preached all the time the simple eternal sanction for right conduct which the nature of man, akin to the Divine, provides. He recognized the ineradicable claim which the teaching of the New Testament has upon our obedience. He attacked the Churches, not for being too Christian, but for not being anything like Christian enough. Referring to his mother’s gift of twenty-six chapters learnt by heart, he says in 1874:--
“The chapters became, indeed, strictly conclusive and protective to me in all modes of thought; and the body of divinity they contain, acceptable through all fear or doubt; nor, through any fear or doubt or fault have I ever lost my loyalty to them, nor betrayed the first command in the one I was made to repeat oftenest: ‘Let not Mercy and Truth forsake thee.’ And at my present age of fifty-five, in spite of some enlarged observations of what modern philosophers call the Reign of Law, I perceive more distinctly than ever the Reign of a Spirit of Mercy and Truth--infinite in pardon and purification for its wandering and faultful children, who have yet Love in their hearts; and altogether adverse and implacable to its perverse and lying enemies, who have resolute hatred in their hearts, and resolute falsehood on their lips.”[15]
The classical passage, as I should esteem it, for this period is in _The Eagle’s Nest_,[16] the Oxford Lectures of 1872; which contain some of his most careful religious writing: