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Out of context: Reply #18271
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A duteous observer of the Sabbath, he had attended a service of an old, proto-Protestant sect, the Waldensians, where the preacher, “a somewhat stunted figure in a plain black coat,” sermonized “on the wickedness of the wide world” and “on the exclusive favour with God” of his sparse congregation. “Myself neither cheered nor greatly alarmed by this doctrine,” Ruskin wrote, he left the chapel and went to the municipal gallery, where in one room a Veronese, “Solomon and the Queen of Sheba”—the queen and her retinue arrive bearing gifts, the most delectable of which may be the queen herself—“glowed in full afternoon light.” As he looked at the painting, he heard, through the open windows, “swells and falls” of a military band that “seemed to me more devotional, in their perfect art, tune, and discipline, than anything I remembered of evangelical hymns. And as the perfect colour and sound gradually asserted their power on me, they seemed finally to fasten me in the old article of Jewish faith, that things done delightfully and rightly were always done by the help and in the Spirit of God.” On “that day, my evangelical beliefs were put away, to be debated of no more.”