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.

All good men have for centuries been trying to tell whom this
Substitute was like, and every comparison, inspired and uninspired,
evangelistic, prophetic, apostolic, and human, falls short, for Christ