(February 8, 1819–January 20, 1900), was an English critic, author and philanthropist. He stated:
Whatever merit there is in anything that I have written is simply due to the fact that when I was a child my mother daily read me a part of the Bible and daily made me learn a part of it by heart. 2517
To my early knowledge of the Bible I owe the best part of my taste in literature, and the most precious, and on the whole, the one essential part of my education. 2518
In Volume II of Ruskin’s Praeterita, he wrote:
A firm word concerning Christianity itself … what was the total meaning of it? … The total meaning was, and is, that the God who made earth and its creatures took at a certain time upon the earth the flesh and form of man; in that flesh sustained pain, and died the death of the creature He had made; rose again after the dead into a glorious human life, and when the date of the human race is ended will return in visible form and render to every man according to his work. Christianity is the belief in, and the love of, God thus manifested.2519
In the Preface to The Crown of Olives, John Ruskin exclaims:
The English people are in possession of a Book which tells them, straight from the lips of God, all they ought to do and need to know. I have read that Book with as much care as the most of them for some forty years; and am thankful that on those who trust it I can press its pleadings.
My endeavor has uniformly been to make them trust it more deeply than they do; trust it, not in their own favorite verses only, but in the sum of all; trust it, not as a fetich or talisman which they are to be saved by daily repetition of, but as a Captain’s order, to be obeyed at their peril.2520
To The Pall Mall Gazette, John Ruskin expounds:
I see in your columns, as in other literary journals, more and more buzzing and fussing about what M. Renan has found the Bible to be; or Mr. Huxley, not to be; or the school-board, that it must not be; etc., etc., etc. Let me tell your readers who care to know, in the fastest possible words, what it is.
It is the grandest group of writings existent in the rational world, translated in the first strength of the Christian faith; translated with beauty and felicity into every language of the Christian world; and the guide, so translated, of all the arts and acts of that world which has been noble, fortunate, and happy.2521