He was devout by training. Morning and evening he read his chapter out of the Bible; and the fourteenth century manuscript he used in later years occupied a prominent and handy place in the study at Brantwood. In Swiss and Italian villages in his early journeys he read the service through on Sunday to his servant, when there was no Protestant Church. From the Biblical references in the indexes to his works, you would suppose they were a theological library. In his Oxford Lectures Art was the illustration, but conduct the theme, and Art was chosen as an illustration because in it the artist shows what manner of Man he is, in a way that cannot be dissembled.
What are the qualifications which fit a man to be a religious researcher, a mountain-top gazer into heaven?
He must know from his own experience the meaning of holiness, thereby gaining a practical knowledge of God. He must, in Pauline words, be crucified with Christ, though he may not care for such an expression; he must preach not himself and please not himself. Such a man John Ruskin was. Among the many wayward and impulsive men who have been “dear to the Muses and to the nymphs not unbeloved,” not all like him have been also masters of themselves, and kept on their foreheads the white stone, with the new name written. Ruskin was himself noble and sweet in his life, a man of sorrows, well acquainted with grief endured in silence, with nothing ignoble in his eighty years of generous charity and lonely service. He had passed, too, through that experience which seems essential to the wielding of spiritual power. He had had his great renunciation, he had heard some hard call, and had obeyed. The prophets have all gone on the Via Crucis: they have all lost their lives that they might find them. As Whittier abandoned a hopeful political career and remained poor till he was sixty that he might help to free the slave, and gained his spiritual power thereby, so Ruskin in 1860 went boldly out to do battle with the Society that loved and honoured him.
Further, such a man must greatly dare. He must face the demon of the study first; then, too probably, the resentment of organized religion. One cannot succeed as a researcher without discovering something new; and that is bound to modify or overthrow something old and established.