Ruskin's inaugural lecture left an indelible impression on a generation of undergraduates. His message that Englishmen should go out and colonise every piece of fruitful land on which they could set foot became the guiding star of many aspiring colonial administrators. It was, indeed, an 'impossible ideal' that Ruskin had proposed, but it was one with a strong emotional appeal to romantic, idealistic youths.

Ruskin also expressed his admiration for the authoritarian style of the rulers of the dependent Empire. In A Knight's Faith (1885) he praised the heroes of the Punjab, Havelock, Lawrence and Edwardes. Their success, he proclaimed, was not owed to Parliamentary or any kind of collective wisdom. 'It is not by a majority of votes that Bunnoochees throw down their forts ... in every vital matter the right opinion is in the majority of one.'

Ruskin's mystical ideas made themselves felt in the Empire in a variety of other ways. Though by no means uncritically accepted by Milner, Parkin and Toynbee, they contributed to their belief in a more positive role for the state in the development of the Empire than was prevalent either in Conservative or Liberal contemporary thinking. Ruskin's teaching on the dignity of manual labour and on the revival of handicrafts such as spinning was to become an important element in the philosophy of M.K. Gandhi. J.A. Hobson of Lincoln College, whose attacks on imperialism Lenin was to admire, said that his own economic theories owed more to Ruskin than to anyone who taught him at Oxford, and he wrote a book on Ruskin as a social reformer.

Most important of all, Ruskin's dream, with its promise of the kingdom of heaven on earth, came at a time when the teachings of Darwin and others had undermined, to some degree, the foundations of orthodox Christianity as a personal faith, leaving many among the educated classes groping for some belief that could infuse existence with a sense of purpose and direction.

The loss of faith among the educated British scions is vividly described in one of the many accounts which survive of undergraduate life at Jowett's Balliol College, the memoirs of John MacMillan Brown, who came up to Balliol in 1871 and later went out to teach in New Zealand. Most of his contemporaries at Balliol, he recalled, had broken loose from their religious moorings and were adrift on a great ocean of belief in search, as a rule hopelessly, of some fixed point from which they could take their bearings. Like spiritual dynamite, he said, was the problem of evolution which Darwin had flung into contemporary debate with the Descent of Man. All the undergraduates in Brown's circle were reading ethnological books and had been struck by the implication that the fundamental doctrines of the Christian creed were rooted in the customs and beliefs of primitive peoples. This seemed to dispose of the idea that Christianity was a revelation from heaven.

Most damaging to the Christian faith, at least in its immediate effect, was William Winwoode Reade's The Martyrdom of Man, published in 1872. Reade, an obscure novel writer, had twice left his native Oxford to travel to the African continent in the 1860s, on a quest to refute the theory of evolution. A personal study of the habits of gorillas convinced him, however, that the human race and its civilisation evolved, as Darwin had postulated, from West African apes.

Despite many critical reviews, Reade's book was widely circulated and found ready acceptance among the general public. Quite apart from its passages about the universal history of mankind, it blatantly propagated atheistic views: 'Christianity is false. God worship is idolatry. Prayer is useless. The soul is not immortal. There are no rewards and punishments in a future state.' Instead, the rewards of man were in continuing and improving the human race. According to Reade, 'To develop to the utmost our genius and our love, that is the only true religion.'

For a number of Oxford men of this generation the stoicism of the classics and the mysticism of an imperial creed were to replace the lost faith in Christianity. From Brown's memoirs it seems that he never regained his faith. Fascinated by the story of Greek expansion in the Mediterranean and by Alexander's conquests, as well as by the accounts in Livy and Tacitus of the expansion of the Roman Empire, he determined to work in the British Empire; and after considering teaching posts in India and Canada, he obtained through Jowett's influence a professorship in the new University College of Canterbury, New Zealand.

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© 2005 Martin Erdmann