Although Ruskin had been accused by the clerical art critic Eagles of blaspheming in his application of biblical texts to Turner in the first edition of Modern Painters I (1843), and had responded with revisions to the text, he is here unembarrassed about describing the artist as an intermediary between God and man, who offers us a new version of Revelation 21. (See Ruskin and Eagles and Ruskin and religion and Wheeler, Ruskin's God, pp.36-37.)