“A Theme”

In its scolding of those who spend money on “useless” entertainments and “trinkets” instead of supporting missionaries, the fragment of argument transcribed by Ruskin corresponds to the sentiments, if not specific language and examples, of an essay in the Evangelical Magazine, “The Question of Liberality Considered in Reference to Missions and Other Christian Efforts”. Published in the May 1829 issue, its date makes a good fit with a terminus ad quem for “a theme” based on the position of Ruskinʼs piece in MS II, particularly if the magazine essay originated in a sermon or lecture that Ruskin might have heard a month or two earlier. Regardless of whether this published essay had any specific connection with the origin of Ruskinʼs transcript, however, its argument and context may help to illuminate the circumstances surrounding what Ruskin heard.

The subtitle of the Evangelical Magazine essay describes its purpose: “An attempt to ascertain what Classes of Professing Christians are most defective in liberality towards the cause of Evangelical Religion, both at Home and Abroad”. The audience is the “church of God”, and the London Missionary Society (LMS) in particular, which has taken on “nothing less than the conversion of the whole world to God”. The writer believes that the Christian liberality on which this enormous mission depends is “but imperfectly understood, and but partially felt” if the LMS congratulates itself on having raised forty‐six thousand pounds in the previous year—a sum that may seem munificent compared to collections prior to the cause of foreign missions, but that is paltry compared to the goal that the (British) church has now set for itself. The moral danger of underestimating both the challenges of the missions and their cost is a “prone[ness] to set up wrong standards of duty, and to make ill‐established comparisons of conduct, and thus to flatter ourselves into groundless conceits of our high attainments in moral excellence”. Rhetorically, then, the speaker poses both as an “expostulating friend” against the “unbelief and selfishness” of the “Classes of Professing Christians” who are “defective in liberality” and as a skeptical agent who is not dazzled into complacency by seeming success (pp. 180–81, 184–85). The speaker recorded by Ruskin targets comparatively vulnerable classes in theater‐goers and trinket buyers, and the speaker even falters when invoking the enormity of the charitable goal, but the rhetorical structure of the talk that Ruskin heard presumably was similar to this essay. Such arguments formed a context of Ruskinʼs later rhetorical exaggerations in “The Nature of Gothic” in which he compares ladies who buy glass beads to slave drivers.

In a similar fashion, the Evangelical Magazine essay proceeds to identify groups who fail in Christian liberality. First to be called out are “our more wealthy ministers”, hypocrites who hoard their own wealth while urging their congregations to philanthropy. The next classification would have struck the Ruskins as closer to home—the the secular “rich”, specifically “the men who have either retired from business with their comfortable competency of one, two, or three thousand a year and upwards; or who are still in trade with an income of the same amount”. Rich men in these circumstances, the writer supposes, annually allow perhaps a total of thirty pounds to “the cause of religion generally, both at home and abroad”, an amount the writer considers the least “they ought to contribute to the cause of Missions alone” (pp. 182–83). By this standard, John James Ruskin was generous, effectively tithing a tenth of his income. In 1829, to sample just that year, he received £3853 in income from his firm plus a few hundred pounds from other sources, while he logged £229 in “Charity & Gifts” as well as £135 to support three of his nieces and nephews orphaned by the death of his sister and £38 to help Margaretʼs relations. John Jamesʼs abbreviated notes make it difficult to sort the donations precisely among religious, secular, and family causes, but all three categories are certainly represented. The various “church” and “Bible” donations include £50 for “orphans” paid to the familyʼs clergyman, Edward Andrews, but how much, if any, went to foreign missions in this year is obscure (Account Book, 15r, 13r, 13v).

The remaining classes named in the essay as failing to give their share are “the Christians who inhabit small towns and villages”, the fault lying in part with the “great public institutions of the age” habitually looking to the metropolis for support, but also with village dwellers who “have never seriously considered their obligations to the cause of Christ at large” (p. 183). In fact, by 1820 the LMS had established a nationwide network of local auxiliaries, so the speaker is here haranguing an existing audience (Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture, 63). Finally, the writer is stern with “young persons, who, though they live with their parents, possess a separate income at their own disposal”, yet substitute their parentsʼ benevolence for their own (p. 184). For years to come, Ruskin relied on his father for charities that John James did not necessarily approve, but John controlled no income of his own until after his fatherʼs death.

An interest in missionary work was central to middle‐class identity within Congregationalism (see Congregationalism and the Evangelical Magazine). More specifically, the Ruskins may have been drawn into a fascination with foreign missions by the rising career of their favorite preacher, the Reverend Dr. Edward Andrews. Their excitement peaked around the time of Andrewsʼs engagement as Johnʼs tutor, starting in April–May 1829, about the same time when John transcribed his “theme”, and also when all three Ruskins and cousin Mary Richardson were reading together the journals of Reginald Heber, Bishop of Calcutta (Heber, Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India from Calcutta to Bombay, 1822–25 [Dearden, Library of John Ruskin, 154 [no. 1218]). Margaret considered Heberʼs “prose . . . highly poetical” and looked forward to “hearing it read . . . again” by John James when he returned home (Margaret to John James Ruskin, 4 March 1829, RFL, ed. Burd, 186). A week later, John wrote in response to Heberʼs poems, which John James was sending home: “Every poem that I meet with now is by bishop Heber bishop Heber bishop Heber nothing but bishop Heber, why I scarcely knew his name a fortnight ago, and all the poems that are by him I like—especially the one that you sent to Mary” (John to John James Ruskin, 10 March 1829, RFL, ed. Burd, 192). Soon, Andrews would arrange for the first publication of Ruskinʼs own poems, “Lines Written at the Lakes in Cumberland | Derwentwater” and “On Skiddaw and Derwent‐Water”.

Andrewsʼs association with the LMS started at least two years earlier, when, on 19 April 1827, he helped to organize a meeting at his Beresford Street Chapel, Walworth, to form a local auxiliary to the LMS, “lament[ing] that a Society had not been formed earlier” (“Missionary Chronicle for July, 1827—Domestic Missionary Intelligence—Walworth”; and on the auxiliary societies, which at a local level mirrored the national LMS meetings, and sometimes hosted presentations by returning missionaries and even converted subjects, see Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture, 63–65). By the next year in May 1828, at the thirty‐fourth annual meeting of the LMS in London, Andrewsʼs star was rising in the LMS. His engraved portrait in gown and bands, Rev^d. D^r. Andrews, was featured in the June 1828 issue of the Evangelical Magazine, the societyʼs official periodical, which regularly headed each monthly issue with a full‐page portrait engraving of a prominent clergyman. At the annual meeting in May, Andrews was chosen to deliver the concluding prayer for the opening sermon of the proceedings.

Andrews was networking. The opening sermon of the 1828 annual meeting was preached at Surrey Chapel, the massive London venue built for the famed evangelical preacher, Rowland Hill (1744–1833) (“Missionary Chronicle for June, 1828—Surrey Chapel”, 262). A month earlier, on 9 April, Hill himself had paid Andrews the compliment of preaching and chairing a meeting of the Surrey Mission Society at “Dr. Andrewsʼs Chapel, Walworth”. The size and ornateness of these chapels were indexes of the preachersʼ fame. The Beresford Street Chapel, Walworth (founded 1818), was built for Andrews to accommodate over a thousand of his admiring followers, while Surrey Chapel in Blackfriars had been erected to house an audience of over three thousand for Hillʼs popular preaching (“Religious Intelligence—London—Surrey Mission Society”; and see Edward Andrews [1787–1841]; and Munden, “Hill, Rowland [1744–1833]”).

Like the 1829 essay in the Evangelical Magazine, the sermon delivered at the Surrey Chapel at the opening of the 1828 LMS meeting harped on the theme of Christian liberality. Preached by the Reverend Richard Alliott, “The Nature and Obligation of Christian Liberality” was based on Matthew 10:8: “Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils: freely ye have received, freely give”. The argument traced the Christian obligation of liberality to the Apostlesʼ endowment with “miraculous powers by the use of which they might bave enriched themselves” were it not that such use of their powers “was wholly inconsistent the character of . . . [Christʼs] dispensation”. Just so, Alliott pressed his hearers, Christians possess “the Gospel in our hands, conveying greater and better blessings;—for these we are indebted to the bounty of God, and it is according to his purpose that, that which we bave freely received, we should also freely communicate”. The perorartion appealed to “Philanthropists, as above all other means calculated to ameliorate and improve the condition of the most barbarous and wretched of the human race; and to Englishmen, as involving in its results the honour and prosperity of our own country,—the cause of Missions being considered as, indeed, the cause of our country—of the world—of the salvation of men,—and of the glory of our great Creator” (“Missionary Chronicle for June, 1828—Surrey Chapel”, 261–62).

Fixated on the poetical Heber and the ambitious Andrews, the Ruskins would have followed Andrewsʼs rise in the LMS, having attended Beresford Street Chapel since 1826 if not earlier, while they may have given less attention to a humbler, yet more influential local connection with the LMS. The Surrey County Auxiliary Missionary Society, which arose from the April 1827 meeting in Walworth, was next reported as organizing in Dorking. The sermon on that occasion was delivered by the Reverend William Orme (1787–1830), who served as foreign secretary of the LMS, and who since 1824 had ministered at a Congregational chapel in Camberwell (known at that time as the Protestant Dissenting Meeting House, according to an account of the ordination of his successor, John Burnett [1789–1862]). Orme was a Scot, who started his ministry as pastor of the Congregational Tabernacle in Perth, and played a significant role in the organization of Scottish Congregationalism before moving south, where he soon gained his post in the LMS, but died suddenly in 1830 following an illness (“Missionary Chronicle for January, 1828—Domestic Missionary Intelligence—Surrey Auxiliary”; Gordon and Pimlott, “Orme, William [1787–1830]”; “Religious Intelligence—London—Ordinations”).

It seems inevitable that the Ruskins would have been aware of Ormeʼs ministry in Camberwell. They owned a copy of his posthumously published Life and Times of Richard Baxter (1830) (Dearden, Library of John Ruskin, 245 [no. 1917]), and they could not have missed his engraved portrait in the January 1830 issue of the Evangelical Magazine and his memorial in the July 1830 issue. Could Ormeʼs chapel have been the site of the meeting in the early months of 1829 that gave Ruskin the text of his “theme”? The disdain for the theater reflected in Ruskinʼs theme seems an unlikely viewpoint for Andrews, who wrote plays himself; and the memorial of Orme suggests other contrasts with the Walworth preacher. Regarding Ormeʼs scholarship, it was admitted, “[i]n what was strictly philological he might be excelled by those whose superior classical attainments or greater advantages might qualify them for such pursuits”—those such as the Reverend Dr. Andrews whose classical learning was widely respected, qualifying him to tutor the precocious Ruskin—“but by none was [Orme] excelled in an extensive and accurate acquaintance with the word of God”. In his preaching, moreover, Orme “sought not for figures but facts; and was more conversant with arguments than ornaments”. Unlike the florid and poetically fanciful Andrews, he “aimed to convince the judgment and impress the heart . . . with no attempt at ingenious conceits and far‐fetched resemblances” (“Memoir of the Late Rev. William Orme”, 292, 293).

(Note: The Surrey County Auxiliary Missionary Society was not the same organization as the Surrey Mission Society, at which, as mentioned above, Rowland Hill officiated in a meeting at Andrewsʼs chapel. The latter was a home mission, not a foreign mission. It had been established over thiry years earlier, “composed of Christians of various denominations” for the domestic, not foreign, “purpose of preaching the Gospel, establishing Schools”, and “circulating the Scriptures and Religious Tracts in the villages of Surrey”. Hillʼs sermon to the Society on the text of 1 Timothy 4:12, “Let no man despise thy youth; but be thou an example of the believers, in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity”, was probably directed at the societyʼs local missionaries who had “been the means of introducing the Gospel into about 100 villages” in the county (“Religious Intelligence—London—Surrey Mission Society”; “Missionary Chronicle for January, 1828—Domestic Missionary Intelligence—Surrey Auxiliary”)