IV.PRE-RAPHAELITISM 139

114. I say that Classicalism began, wherever civilisation began, with Pegan Faith. Mediævalism began, and continued, wherever civilisation began and continued to confess Christ. And, lastly, Modernism began and continues, wherever civilisation began and continues to deny Christ.

You are startled, but give me a moment to explain. What, you would say to me, do you mean to tell us that we deny Christ? we who are essentially modern in every one of our principles and feelings, and yet all of us professing believers in Christ, and we trust most of us true ones? I answer, So far as we are believers indeed, we are one with the faithful of all times,-one with the classical beiever of Athens and Ephesus, and one with the mediæval believer of the banks of the Rhone and the valleys of the Monte Viso.¹ But so far as, in various strange ways, some in great and some in small things, we deny this belief, in so far we are essentially infected with this spirit, which I call Modernism.

115. For observe, the change of which I speak has nothing whatever to do with the Reformation, or with any of its effects. It is a far broader thing than the Reformation. It is a change which has taken place, not only in reformed England, and reformed Scotland; but in unreformed France, in unreformed Italy, in unreformed Austria. I class hones Protestants and honest Roman Catholics for the present together, under the general term Christians: if you object to their being so classed together, I pray your pardon, but allow me to do so at present, for the sake of perspicuity, if for nothing else; and so classing them, I say that a change took place, about the time of Raphael, in the spirit of Roman Catholics and Protestants both; and that change consisted in the denial of their religious belief, at least in the external and trivial affairs of life, and often in far more serious things.

¹ [Ruskin frequently refers in similar terms to the Protestant communities which had their centre at Geneva, and to those of the Vaudois valleys which may be described as lying beneath Monte Viso; see, for instance, for Geneva, Time and Tide, § 45, and Præterita, ii. § 84; and for the Vaudois valleys, Prœterita, iii. 3st 23.]

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