Christ rose on the first day of the week, and that the early fathers, who arranged that portion of the ritual, did not understand the tradition of the resurrection.  “Three days and three nights,” according to the gospel, Christ was to lie in the tomb,—­not parts of three times twenty-four hours.  But the women went to the tomb “in the end of the Sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week,” and they found that he had already risen and was gone.  Now, as by the Jewish ritual the day began at sunset, the first day of the week began with the going down of the sun on Saturday, and, therefore, as Christ had already risen, he must have risen on the seventh day.  And the reason of this twilight visit was in the prohibition to touch a dead body on the Sabbath, and the zeal of the disciples sent them to the sepulchre at the earliest possible moment.  And I showed him how careless or ignorant of the record the redisposition of the sacred time had been, in the fact of the total disregard of the words of Christ, that he should lie in the earth three days and three nights; for they assumed him to have been crucified on Friday, while he must have lain buried Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and was therefore buried on Wednesday, just before sunset.  And this is confirmed by the text which says that the disciples hastened to bury Christ on the day of crucifixion, because the next day was the day of preparation for one of the high Sabbaths, which the early church, which instituted the observance of the first day, confounded with the weekly Sabbath, not knowing that a high Sabbath could not fall on the weekly Sabbath.

To this demonstration Ruskin, always deferent to the literal interpretation of the gospel, could not make a defense; the creed had so bound him to the letter that the least enlargement of the stricture broke it, and he rejected the whole tradition,—­not only the Sunday Sabbath, but the authority of the ecclesiastical interpretation of the texts.  He said, “If they have deceived me in this, they have probably deceived me in all,” and he came to the conclusion of rejecting all.  This I had not conceived as a possible consequence of the criticism of his creed, and it gave me great pain; for I was not a skeptic, as he, I have since learned, for a time became.  It was useless to argue with him for the spirit of the gospel; he had always held to its infallibility and the exactitude of doctrine, and his indignation was too strong to be pacified.  He returned somewhat, I have heard, to his old beliefs in later years, as old men will to the beliefs of their youth, and his Christianity was too sincere and profound for a matter of mistaken credence in mere formalities ever to affect its substance, and the years which followed showed that in no essential trait had the religious foundations of his character been moved.  For myself, I was still a sincere believer in the substantial accuracy of the body of Christian doctrine, and the revolt of Ruskin from it gave me great pain.  My own entire liberation from the burdens of futile beliefs had yet to come, and at that time he went further than I could go with him.  But we never discussed theological matters any more.