4903. EBB to John Ruskin
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 29, 140–141.
[Rome]
[late May 1861] [1]
If your “religious friends are casting you off,” my dear friend, they can scarcely be religious or friends– Your sad letter drew me into a sad sympathy with you. Seeming to myself to see more clearly than you say you do, & feeling certainly a stronger cheerfulness, I understand nevertheless what the difficulty is, & believe that if I escape a shock now it is because the bands of some traditions of religious teaching were loosened in me formerly & gradually during my long sequestration from the external communion of churches. I have long seen that the foundations of all the visible churches are giving way, .. that the scholastic forms which contained essential truths, were splitting into atoms, .. that an oak planted in a flower pot must shatter the vessel, if it lived & grew,—that if Christianity were a vital principle, it must develop–
Now, the crisis is on us .. & people are becoming suddenly aware of it, in the clashing of earthen vessels [2] & iron suns!– [3]
The remark struck me my dear friend as coming from Newman,—& the more that I have at different times heard the same spontaneous remark from two other men .. much his inferiors intellectually though intelligent, .. & both sceptics as to providence- Heard, .. “a foolish remark!”? That if the divine handwriting be generally overlarge for our reading, might not the serré character of certain sequent events be suddenly legible to us, & prove an intention in the whole? When Crusoe saw one footstep on the shore .. only one-was it not enough to ‘prove the presence of a man? would he have been wise in exclaiming “a coincidence of toe marks!”? The impression of the one foot was decisive rather to Crusoe, & no reader ever called him foolish or rash for it.
Of course this disposes of the question in a very limited way- You, for instance, see no footsteps whatever. But Mr Newman, who thinks he does, is justified, it seems to me in inferring that a man has <***>
Docket, in Pen’s hand: (found inside a letter from / Ruskin. RBB).
Publication: None traced.
Source: Author’s draft at Berg Collection.
1. This draft is a response to letter 4895, which EBB had received by the time she wrote letter 4901. The letter to which Pen refers in the docket is letter 4895.
2. Cf. II Corinthians 4:7.
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