"Ruskin never gave up insisting that all art, literature included, was worship, but this insistence does not make him either a 'religious' or a 'moral' critic of literature. Though he moved in outward religion from Evangelical Protestantism to agnostic naturalism and on finally to a private version of primitive Catholicism, Ruskin's pragmatic religion always remained a Wordsworthian 'natural piety,' in which aesthetic and spiritual experience were not to be distinguished from one another. Ruskin's literary taste was formed by the King James Bible, more than any other reading, and therefore from the start he associated expressive and devotional values. In this also he stands with the great Romantics, whose theories of the Imagination are all displaced, radical Protestant accounts of the nakedness of the soul before God."
From Harold Bloom's essay on Ruskin in Essayists and Prophets.
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