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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: the contrary, painstaking, and, I think, forcible, as compared with
most religious writing; especially in its frankness and
fearlessness: but it was wholly mistaken: for I had been educated
in the doctrines of a narrow sect, and had read history as obliquely
as sectarians necessarily must.
Mingled among these either unnecessary or erroneous statements, I
find, indeed, some that might be still of value; but these, in my
earlier books, disfigured by affected language, partly through the
desire to be thought a fine writer, and partly, as in the second
volume of 'Modern Painters,' in the notion of returning as far as I
could to what I thought the better style of old English literature,
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