Читать книгу Life of Octavia Hill as Told in Her Letters онлайн

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We are not to execute our own designs for Ruskin, at any rate yet. I have been doing his letters in the work hours.... About what you and G. have been saying, I should answer, that I think you are quite right in maintaining that, if the war is right, we must be right in praying to God to help us in it; but I think there is a certain cowardice, a shrinking from looking facts in the face, when people say that they are not asking God to help them to kill men. That is not the end, but it is the means. What I think we want to see is that all things are as nothing in comparison with right; that we have no business to calculate results; that we are to give up comfort, homes, those who are dearest to us, life, everything, to defend right. I wish very much to have time to think what a nationality is, that it should be worth so much. I feel that it is worth everything. I suppose every nation has a separate work to do, which would be left undone were it extinct. I think a nation can never perish till it has so far neglected its mission that its existence has no more meaning. If it has fulfilled its work it will be given more to do; so with the Jews; they had borne witness to a living Ruler, a King of the people; they had had glimpses that the King would be more fully revealed; they believed that it was He who had brought them out of captivity, had strengthened them in battle. They had forgotten Him, and asked for a visible king like the other nations, when their glory was to be different from them, those other nations. The king was given; the prophet saw that there was a divine meaning in the cry for one; but Saul was the representative of the people, he was a mere general. He was wrecked; and yet there was a meaning in the offer. The earthly king might set himself up, might tyrannize over the people; but he was the continual witness of a power, which he might recognize and bow before; life was as nothing to the Israelites, nationality everything. And they did not fall because they thought so little of life; they thought too much of it, if you look upon life as merely the breath. But if life is the light of men, we have no evidence, we can have none, that it is in the power of man to take it away. They did not give it, and they cannot destroy it. If in Him was the life, in Him it is, and ever will be; we may surely trust to Him those whom He has made. The light which shined in the darkness was surely that which has been in our soldiers, in the long-suffering they have had; their breath, their bodies man can destroy; but that which has given them strength is still theirs, when their last struggle on earth has ended, and they go perhaps to a more awful fight; but with a peace which cannot leave them. The Jews fell; they thought they were different from all the world, when they were most like it. They were boasting of their privileges, trusting in themselves; they evidently thought the highest sign of godliness was utter selfishness. They would have thought it a triumph for Christ, if He had saved Himself. He died that death might have no more darkness for us, no more loneliness; for He was light and life, that He might bear witness that breath is not the most precious thing; that there is One Who is always trying to destroy that higher life, but that it is His gift and He will preserve it....