In the realm of the fine arts there was as remarkable an instance.  A brilliant but hypercriticised painter, Joseph William Turner, was met by a volley of abuse from all the art galleries of Europe.  His paintings, which have since won the applause of all civilized nations, “The Fifth Plague of Egypt,” “Fishermen on a Lee Shore in Squally Weather,” “Calais Pier,” “The Sun Rising Through Mist,” and “Dido Building Carthage,” were then targets for critics to shoot at.  In defense of this outrageously abused man, a young author of twenty-four years, just one year out of college, came forth with his pen, and wrote the ablest and most famous essays on art that the world ever saw, or ever will see—­John Ruskin’s “Modern Painters.”  For seventeen years this author fought the battles of the maltreated artist, and after, in poverty and broken-heartedness, the painter had died, and the public tried to undo their cruelties toward him by giving him a big funeral and burial at St. Paul’s Cathedral, his old-time friend took out of a tin box nineteen thousand pieces of paper containing drawings by the old painter, and through many weary and uncompensated months assorted and arranged them for public observation.  People say John Ruskin in his old days is cross, misanthropic, and morbid.  Whatever he may do that he ought not to do, and whatever he may say that he ought not to say between now and his death, he will leave this world insolvent as far as it has any capacity to pay this author’s pen for its chivalric and Christian defense of a poor painter’s pencil.  John Ruskin for William Turner.  Blood for blood.  Substitution!

What an exalting principle this which leads one to suffer for another!  Nothing so kindles enthusiasm or awakens eloquence, or chimes poetic canto, or moves nations.  The principle is the dominant one in our religion—­Christ the Martyr, Christ the celestial Hero, Christ the Defender, Christ the Substitute.  No new principle, for it was as old as human nature; but now on a grander, wider, higher, deeper, and more world-resounding scale!  The shepherd boy as a champion for Israel with a sling toppled the giant of Philistine braggadocio in the dust; but here is another David who, for all the armies of churches militant and triumphant, hurls the Goliath of perdition into defeat, the crash of his brazen armor like an explosion at Hell Gate.  Abraham had at God’s command agreed to sacrifice his son Isaac, and the same God just in time had provided a ram of the thicket as a substitute; but here is another Isaac bound to the altar, and no hand arrests the sharp edges of laceration and death, and the universe shivers and quakes and recoils and groans at the horror.