492 PRÆTERITA-III

And then followed, of course, the discovery that all beautiful prayers were Catholic,-all wise interpretations of the Bible Catholic;-and every manner of Protestant written services whatsoever either insolently altered corruptions, or washed-out and ground-down rags and débris of the great Catholic collects, litanies, and songs of praise.¹

“But why did not you become a Catholic at once, then?”

It might as well be asked, Why did not I become a fire-worshipper? I could become nothing but what I was, or was growing into. I no more believed in the living Pope than I did in the living Khan of Tartary. I saw indeed that twelfth-century psalters were lovely and right, and that presbyterian prayers against time, by people who never expected to be any the better for them, were unlovely and wrong. But I had never read the Koran, nor Confucius, nor Plato, nor Hesiod, and was only just beginning to understand my Virgil and Horace. How I ever came to understand them is a new story, which must be for next chapter:² meantime let me finish the confessions of this one in the tale of my final apostacy from Puritan doctrine.

20. The most stern practical precept of that doctrine still holding me,-it is curiously inbound with all the rest, -was the Sabbath keeping;³ the idea that one was not to seek one’s own pleasure on Sunday, nor to do anything useful. Gradually, in honest Bible reading, I saw that Christ’s first article of teaching was to unbind the yoke of the Sabbath, while, as a Jew, He yet obeyed the Mosaic law concerning it; but that St. Paul had carefully abolished it altogether, and that the rejoicing, in memory of the Resurrection, on the Day of the Sun, the first of the week, was only by misunderstanding, and much wilful obstinacy, confused with the Sabbath of the Jew.⁴

¹ [Compare The Lord’s Prayer and the Church, Epilogue, § 5 (Vol. XXXIV. p. 219).]

² [The story was not told in the next chapter, as printed; but see now, p. 533.]

³ [For which, see above, ii. § 111 (p. 346).]

⁴ [For record of a conversation on this subject between Ruskin and Mr. Stillman, his travelling companion at Chamouni in 1860, see Vol. XVII. pp. xxiii.-xxiv.]

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