As a great literary creator, George Eliot holds a singular position in reference to religious beliefs. To most literary artists religion is a vital part of life, which enters as a profound element into their teachings or into their interpretations of character and incident. Religion deeply affects the writings of Tennyson, Browning and Ruskin; its problems, its hopes, its elements of mystery and infinity touch all their pages. In an equal degree, though with a further departure from accredited beliefs, and with a greater effect from philosophical or humanitarian influences, has it wrought itself into the genius of Goethe, Carlyle and Hugo. Even the pages of Voltaire, Shelley and Heine have been touched by its magic influence; their words glow with its great interests, and bloom into beauty through its inspiration. None of these is more affected by religion than George Eliot has been; nor does it form a greater element in their writings than in hers.

What is singular about George Eliot’s position is, that she both affirms and denies; she is deeply religious and yet rejects all religious doctrines. No writer of the century has given religion a more important relation to human interests or made it a larger element in his creative work; and yet no other literary artist has so completely rejected all positive belief in God and immortality. In her books she depicts every phase of religious belief and life, and with sympathy and appreciation. A very large proportion of her characters are clergymen or other religious persons, who are described with accuracy and sympathy. Her own faith, the theory of religion she accepts, is not given to any of her characters. What she believes, appears only in her comments, and in the general effect which life produces on the persons she describes. She believed Christianity is subjectively true, that it is a fit expression of the inner nature and of the spiritual wants of the soul. She did not propagate the pantheism of Spinoza or the theism of Francis Newman, because she did not regard them as so near the truth as the Christianity of Paul. As intellectual theories they may have been preferable to her, but from the outlook of feeling which she ever occupied, Paul was the truer teacher, and especially because his teachings are linked with the spiritual desires and outpourings of many generations. The spontaneous movements of the human mind, which have taken possession of vast numbers of people through long periods of time, have a depth of meaning which the speculations of no individual theorizer can ever possess. Especially did she regard Christianity as a pure and noble expression of the soul’s inner wants and aspirations. It is an objective realization of feeling and sentiment, it gives purpose and meaning to man’s cravings for a diviner life, it links generation to generation in a continued series of beautiful traditions and noble inspirations. Her intellectual view of the subject was expressed to a friend in these words:

Deism seems to me the most incoherent of all systems, but to
Christianity I feel no objection but its want of evidence.

She also expressed more sympathy with the simple faith of the multitude than with the intellectual speculations of philosophers and theologians; and again, she said that she felt more sympathy with than divergence from the narrowest and least cultivated believer in Christianity. As a vehicle of the accumulated hopes and traditions of the world’s feeling and sorrow she appreciated Christianity, saw its beauty, felt deeply in sympathy with its spirit of renunciation, accepted its ideal of a divine life. She learned from Feuerbach that religion, that Christianity, gives fit expression to the emotional life and spiritual aspirations of man, and that what it finds within in no degree corresponds with that which surrounds man without.

Barren and lifeless as this view must seem to most persons, it was a source of great confidence and inspiration to George Eliot. It enabled her to appreciate the religious experiences of men, to portray most accurately and sympathetically a great variety of religious believers, and to give this side of life its place and proportion. At the same time, it was a personal satisfaction to her to be able to keep in unbroken sympathy with the religious experiences of her childhood and youth while intellectually unable to accept the beliefs on which these experiences rested. More than this, she believed that religion and spirituality of life are necessary elements of human existence, that man can never cast them off, and that man will lead a happy and harmonious life only when they have a true and fitting expression in his culture and civilization. She maintained, with Sara Hennell, that we may retain the religious sentiments in all their glow and in all their depth of influence, at the same time that the doctrines of theology and all those conceptions of nature and man on which they rest are rejected; that we may have a disposition of the heart akin to that of the prophets and saints of religion, while we intellectually cast aside all which gave meaning to their faith and devotion. According to George Eliot, religion rests upon feeling and the relations of man to humanity, as well as upon his irreversible relations to the universe. In The Mill on the Floss she has given a definition of it, in speaking of Maggie’s want of

that knowledge of the irreversible laws within and without her, which, governing the habits, becomes morality, and developing the feelings of submission and dependence, becomes religion.

It is the human side of religion which interests George Eliot, its influence morally, its sympathetic impulse, its power to comfort and console. Its supernatural elements seem to have little influence over her mind, at least only so far as they serve the moral aims of life. It is humanity which attracts her mind, inspires her ideal hopes, kindles her enthusiasms. Religion, apart from human encouragement and elevation, the suppression of human sin and sorrow, and the increase of human sympathy and joy, has little attraction for her. She takes no ground of opposition to the beliefs of others, expresses no contempt for any form of belief in God; but she measures all beliefs by their moral influence and their power to enkindle the enthusiasm of humanity.

The pantheistic theism defended by Lewes in his book on Comte, in 1853, seems to have been also accepted by George Eliot. We are told that her mind long wavered between the two, though pantheism was less acceptable than theism, on account of its moral indifference. It was undoubtedly the moral bearings of the subject which all the time had the greatest weight with her, and probably Kant’s position had not a little effect on her opinions. She came, at least, to find final satisfaction in agnosticism, to believe that all intellectual speculations on the subject are in vain. At the same time, her moral convictions grew stronger, and she believed in the power of moral activity to work out a solution of life when no other can be found. At this point she stood with Kant rather than with Comte, in accepting the moral nature as a true guide. She very zealously believed with Fichte in a moral order of the world, approving of the truth which underlies the words of Fichte’s English disciple, Matthew Arnold, when he discourses of “the Eternal, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness.” Her positive convictions and beliefs on the subject lie in this direction, and she firmly accepted the idea of a moral order and purpose. So much she thought we can know and rely on; beyond this she believed we can know nothing. Her later convictions on this subject have been expressed in a graphic manner by one of her friends. “I remember how,” says this person, “at Cambridge, I walked with her once in the Fellows’ Garden, of Trinity, on an evening of rainy May; and she, stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of man, the words God, Immortality, Duty, pronounced, with terrible emphasis, how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third. Never, perhaps, have sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensed law. I listened, and night fell; her grave, majestic countenance turned towards me like a sibyl’s in the gloom; it was as though she withdrew from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of promise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable fates.” All her later writings, at least, confirm this testimony to her assertion of the inconceivableness of God, and her open denial of faith in theism. She cannot have gone so far as to assert the non-existence of God, affirming only that she could not conceive of such a being as actually existing. She could not believe in a personal God, but Lewes’s conception of a dynamic life was doubtless acceptable.

With as much emphasis she pronounced immortality unbelievable. She early accepted the theory of Charles Bray and Sara Hennell, that we live hereafter only in the life of the race. The moral bearings of the subject here also were most effective over her mind, for she felt that what we ought most of all to consider is our relations to our fellow-men, and that another world can have little real effect upon our present living. In her Westminster Review article on “Evangelical Teaching” as presented in Young’s Night Thoughts, she criticises the following declaration:

“Who tells me he denies his soul immortal,
What’er his boast, has told me he’s a knave.
His duty ’tis to love himself alone,
Nor care though mankind perish, if he smiles.”

Her comments on these lines of Young’s are full of interest, in view of her subsequent teachings, and they open an insight into her tendencies of mind very helpful to those who would understand her fully. Her interest in all that is human, her craving for a more perfect development of human sympathy and co-operation, are very clearly to be seen.

We may admit that if the better part of virtue consists, as Young appears to think, in contempt for mortal joys, in “meditation of our own decease,” and in “applause” of God in the style of a congratulatory address to Her Majesty all which has small relation to the well-being of mankind on this earth the motive to it must be gathered from something that lies quite outside the sphere of human sympathy. But, for certain other elements of virtue, which are of more obvious importance to untheological minds, a delicate sense of our neighbor’s rights, an active participation in the joys and sorrows of our fellow-men, a magnanimous acceptance of privation or suffering for ourselves when it is the condition of good to others, in a word, the extension and intensification of our sympathetic nature, we think it of some importance to contend that they have no more direct relation to the belief in a future state than the interchange of gases in the lungs has to the plurality of worlds. Nay, to us it is conceivable that in some minds the deep pathos lying in the thought of human mortality that we are here for a little while and then vanish away, that this earthly life is all that is given to our loved ones and to our many suffering fellow-men lies nearer the fountains of moral emotion than the conception of extended existence. And surely it ought to be a welcome fact, if the thought of mortality, as well as of immortality, be favorable to virtue. Do writers of sermons and religious novels prefer that we should be vicious in order that there may be a more evident political and social necessity for printed sermons and clerical fictions? Because learned gentlemen are theological, are we to have no more simple honesty and good-will? We can imagine that the proprietors of a patent water-supply have a dread of common springs; but, for our own part, we think there cannot be too great security against a lack of fresh water or of pure morality. To us it is a matter of unmixed rejoicing that this latter necessary of healthful life is independent of theological ink, and that its evolution is insured in the interaction of human souls as certainly as the evolution of science or art, with which, indeed, it is but a twin ray, melting into them with undefinable limits.

The considerations here presented are very effective ones, and quite as truthful as effective. There are human supports for morality of the most important and far-reaching character, and such as are outside of any theological considerations. We ought, as George Eliot so well says, to rejoice that the reasons for being moral are manifold, that sympathy with others, as well as the central fires of personality, or the craving to be in harmony with the Eternal, is able to conduce to a righteous conduct. Her objections to Young’s narrow and selfish defence of immortality are well presented and powerful, but they do not touch such high considerations as those offered by Kant. The craving for personal freedom and perfection is as strong and as helpful to the race as sympathy for others and yearning to lift up the weak and fallen. When the sense of personality is gone, man loses much of his character; and personality rests on a deep spiritual foundation which does not mean egotism merely, but which does mean for the majority a conviction of a continued existence. The tendency of the present time is to dwell less upon the theological and more upon the human motives to conduct; but it is to be doubted if the highest phases of morality can be retained without belief in God and a future life. The common virtues, the sympathetic motives to conduct, the spirit of helpfulness, may be retained intact, and even increased in power and efficiency, by those motives George Eliot presents; but the loftier virtues of personal heroism and devotion to truth in the face of martyrdom of one form or another, the saintly craving for purity and holiness, and the sturdy spirit of liberty which will suffer no bonds to exist, can be had in their full development only with belief that God calls us to seek for perfect harmony with himself. Kant’s view that a divine law within, the living word of God, calls ever to us as personal beings to attain the perfection of our natures in the perfection of the race, and in conformity to the eternal law of righteousness, is far nobler and truer than that which George Eliot accepted.

She was not a mere unbeliever, however, for she did not thrust aside the hope of immortality with a contemptuous hand. This problem she left where she left that concerning God, in the background of thought, among the questions which cannot be solved. She believed that the power to contribute to the future good of the race is hope and promise enough. At the same time, she was very tender of the positive beliefs of others, and especially of that yearning so many feel after personal recognition and development. Writing to one who passionately clung to such a hope, she said,

I have no controversy with the faith that cries out and clings from the depths of man’s need. I only long, if it were possible to me, to help in satisfying the need of those who want a reason for living in the absence of what has been called consolatory belief. But all the while I gather a sort of strength from the certainty that there must be limits or negations in my own moral powers and life experience which may screen from me many possibilities of blessedness for our suffering human nature. The most melancholy thought surely would be that we in our own persons had measured and exhausted the sources of spiritual good. But we know the poor help the poor.

These words seem to be uttered in quite another tone than that in which she asserted the unbelievableness of immortality, though they do not indicate anything more than a tender yearning for human good and a belief that she could not herself measure all the possibilities of such good. The consolation of which she writes, comes only of human sympathy and helpfulness. In writing to a friend suffering under the anguish of a recent bereavement, she said,

For the first sharp pangs there is no comfort; whatever goodness may surround us, darkness and silence still hang about our pain. But slowly the clinging companionship with the dead is linked with our living affections and duties, and we begin to feel our sorrow as a solemn initiation preparing us for that sense of loving, pitying fellowship with the fullest human lot which, I must think, no one who has tasted it will deny to be the chief blessedness of our life. And especially to know what the last parting is, seems needful to give the utmost sanctity of tenderness to our relations with each other. It is that above all which gives us new sensibilities to “the web of human things, birth and the grave, that are not as they were.” And by that faith we come to find for ourselves the truth of the old declaration, that there is a difference between the ease of pleasure and blessedness, as the fullest good possible to us wondrously mixed mortals.

In these words she suggests that sorrow for the dead is a solemn initiation into that full measure of human sympathy and tenderness which best fits us to be men. Looking upon all human experience through feeling, she regarded death as one of the most powerful of all the shaping agents of man’s destiny in this world. She speaks of death, in Adam Bede, as “the great reconciler” which unites us to those who have passed away from us. In the closing scenes of The Mill on the Floss it is presented as such a reconciler, and as the only means of restoring Maggie to the affections of those she had wronged. It is in The Legend of Jubal, however, that George Eliot has expressed her thought of what death has been in the individual and social evolution of mankind. The descendants of Cain

in glad idlesse throve,
Nor hunted prey, nor with each other strove;

but all was peace and joy with them. There were no great aspirations, no noble achievements, no tending toward progress and a higher life. On an evil day, Lamech, when engaged in athletic sport, accidentally struck and killed his fairest boy. All was then changed, the old love and peace passed away; but good rather than evil came, for man began to lead a larger life.

And a new spirit from that hour came o’er
The race of Cain: soft idlesse was no more,
But even the sunshine had a heart of care,
Smiling with hidden dread a mother fair
Who folding to her breast a dying child
Beams with feigned joy that but makes sadness mild.
Death was now lord of Life, and at his word
Time, vague as air before, new terrors stirred,
With measured wing now audibly arose
Throbbing through all things to some unknown close.
Now glad Content by clutching Haste was torn,
And Work grew eager, and Devise was born.
It seemed the light was never loved before,
Now each man said, “’Twill go and come no more.”
No budding branch, no pebble from the brook,
No form, no shadow, but new dearness took
From the one thought that life must have an end;
And the last parting now began to send
Diffusive dread through love and wedded bliss,
Thrilling them into finer tenderness.
Then Memory disclosed her face divine,
That like the calm nocturnal lights doth shine
Within the soul, and shows the sacred graves,
And shows the presence that no sunlight craves,
No space, no warmth, but moves among them all;
Gone and yet here, and coming at each call,
With ready voice and eyes that understand,
And lips that ask a kiss, and dear responsive hand.
Thus to Cain’s race death was tear-watered seed
Of various life and action-shaping need.
But chief the sons of Lamech felt the stings
Of new ambition, and the force that springs
In passion beating on the shores of fate.
They said, “There comes a night when all too late
The mind shall long to prompt the achieving hand,
The eager thought behind closed portals stand,
And the last wishes to the mute lips press
Buried ere death in silent helplessness.
Then while the soul its way with sound can cleave,
And while the arm is strong to strike and heave,
Let soul and arm give shape that will abide
And rule above our graves, and power divide
With that great god of day, whose rays must bend
As we shall make the moving shadows tend.
Come, let us fashion acts that are to be,
When we shall lie in darkness silently,
As our young brother doth, whom yet we see
Fallen and slain, but reigning in our will
By that one image of him pale and still.”

Death brings discord and sorrow into a world once happy and unaspiring, but it also brings a spiritual eagerness and a divine craving. Jabal began to tame the animals and to cultivate the soil, Tubal-Cain began to use fire and to work metals, while Jubal discovered song and invented musical instruments. Out of the longing and inner unrest which death brought, came the great gift of music. It had power to

Exult and cry, and search the inmost deep
Where the dark sources of new passion sleep.

Jubal passes to other lands to teach them the gift of song, but at last returns an old man to share in the affections of his people. He finds them celebrating with great pomp the invention of music, but they will not accept him as the Jubal they did honor to and believed dead. Then the voice of his own past instructs him that he should not expect any praises or glory in his own person; it is enough to live in the joy of a world uplifted by music. Thus instructed, his broken life succumbs.

Quitting mortality, a quenched sun-wave,
The All-creating Presence for his grave.

In this poem George Eliot regards death as a means of drawing men into a deeper and truer sympathy with each other. The same thought is more fully presented when she exultingly sings,

O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence: live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
For miserable aims that end with self.
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And with their mild persistence urge man’s search
To vaster issues.

Death teaches us to forget self, to live for others, to pour out unstinted sympathy and affection for those whose lives are short and difficult. It is the same thought as that given in reply to Young; mortal sorrows and pains should move us as hopes of immortality cannot. There accompanies this idea the larger one, that our future life is to be found in the better life we make for those who come after us. George Eliot believed with Comte, that we are to live again in minds made better by what we have done and been, that an influence goes out from every helpful and good life which makes the lives of those who come after us fairer and grander.

She rests this belief on no sentimental or ideal grounds. Its justification is to be found in science, in the law of hereditary transmission. Darwin and Spencer base the great world-process of evolution on the two laws of transmission and variation. The fittest survives, and the world advances. The survival of every fit and positive form of life in the better forms which succeed it is in accordance with a process or a law which holds true up into all the highest and subtlest expressions of man’s inner life. Heredity is as true morally and spiritually as physically, and our moral and spiritual offspring will partake of our own qualities; and, standing on the vantage ground of our lives, will rise higher than we. What George Eliot regards as the positive teaching of science becomes also an inspiring religious belief to her.

George Eliot accepted the belief of an immortality in the race with a deep and earnest conviction. It gave a great impulse to her life, it satisfied her craving for closer harmony and sympathy with her fellows, it satisfied her longing for the power to assuage sorrow and to comfort pain.

So to live is heaven;
To make undying music in the world,

and to have an influence for good result from our lives far down the future. Through the beneficent influences we can awake in the world

All our rarer, better, truer self.
That sobbed religiously in yearning song,
That watched to ease the burthen of the world,
... shall live till human time
Shall fold its eyelids, and the human sky
Be gathered like a scroll within the tomb
Unread forever.

It was this belief, so satisfying to her and so ardently entertained, which inspired the best and noblest of her poems. With an almost exultant joy, with the enthusiasm of an old-time devotee, she sings of that immortality which consists in renouncing all which is personal. The diffusive good which sweetens life for others through all time is the real heaven she sought.

This is life to come,
Which martyred men have made more glorious
For us who strive to follow. May I reach
That purest heaven, be to other souls
The cup of strength in some great agony,
Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love,
Beget the smiles that have no cruelty
Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,
And in diffusion ever more intense.
So shall I join the choir invisible
Whose music is the gladness of the world.

Believing that humanity represents an organic life and development, it was easy for George Eliot to accept the idea of immortality in the race. She reverenced the voice of truth

Sent by the invisible choir of all the dead.

It was to her a divine voice, full of tenderness, sympathy and strength. She was fascinated by this thought of the solemn, ever-present and all-powerful influence of the dead over the living; there was mystery and inspiration in this belief for her. All phases of religious history, all religious experiences, were by her interpreted in the light of this conception. The power of Jesus’s life is, that his trancendent beauty of soul lives in the “everlasting memories” of men, and that the cross of his shame has become

The sign
Of death that turned to more diffusive life

His influence, his memory, has lifted up the world with a great effect, and made his life, spirit and ideas an inherent part of humanity. He has been engrafted into the organic life of the race, and lives there a mighty and an increasing influence. What has happened in his case happens in the case of all the gifted and great. According to what they were living they enter into the life of the world for weal or woe. To become an influence for good in the future, to leave behind an undying impulse of thought and sympathy, was the ambition of George Eliot; and this was all the immortality she desired.

The religious tendencies of George Eliot’s mind are rather to be noted in her conception of renunciation than in her beliefs about God and immortality. These latter beliefs were of a negative character as she entertained them, but her doctrine of renunciation was of a very positive nature. The central motive of that belief was not faith in God, but faith in man. It gained all its charm and power for her out of her conception of the organic life of the race. Her thought was, that we should live not for self, but for humanity. What so many ardent souls have been willing to do for the glory of God she was willing to do for the uplifting of man. The spirit of renunciation with her took the old theologic form of expression to a considerable extent, associated itself in her thought with the lofty spiritual consecration and self-abnegation of other ages. So ardently did she entertain this doctrine, so fully did she clothe it with the old forms of expression, that many have been deceived into believing her a devoted Christian. A little book was published in 1879 for the express purpose of showing that “the doctrine of the cross” is the main thought presented throughout all George Eliot’s books. This book was read by George Eliot with much delight, and was regarded by her as the only criticism of her works which did full justice to her purpose in writing them. She is presented in that book as the writer of fiction who “stands out as the deepest, broadest and most catholic illustrator of the true ethics of Christianity; the most earnest and persistent expositor of the true doctrine of the cross, that we are born and should live to something higher than love of happiness.” “Self-sacrifice as the divine law of life, and its only true fulfilment; self-sacrifice, not in some ideal sphere sought out for ourselves in the vain spirit of self-pleasing, but wherever God has placed us, amid homely, petty anxieties, loves and sorrows; the aiming at the highest attainable good in our own place, irrespective of all results of joy or sorrow, of apparent success or failure such is the lesson” that is conveyed in all her books. George Eliot is presented as a true teacher of the doctrine which admonishes us to love not pleasure but God, to forsake all things else for the sake of obedience and devotion, to shun the world and to devote ourselves perpetually to God’s service. The Christian doctrine of renunciation has always bidden men put their eyes on God, forget everything beside, and seek only for that divine life which is spiritual union with the Eternal.

That doctrine was not George Eliot’s. Christianity bids men renounce the world for the sake of a perfect union with God; George Eliot desires men to renounce selfishness for the sake of humanity. The Christian idea includes the renunciation of all self-seeking, it bids us give ourselves for others, it even teaches us that others are to be preferred to ourselves. Yet all this is to be done, not merely for the sake of the present, but in view of an eternal destiny, and because we can thus only fulfil God’s will and attain to holy oneness with him. George Eliot did, however, throughout her writings, identify the altruist impulse to live for others with the Christian doctrine of the cross. To her, the life of devotion to humanity, which she has so beautifully presented in the poem, “O may I join the Choir Invisible,” was the true interpretation of the Christian doctrine of self-sacrifice. She accepted this world-old religious belief, consecrated with all the tears and sacrifices and martyrdoms of the world, as a true expression of a want of the soul, as the poetic expression of emotions and aspirations which ever live in man. It is a beautiful symbolism of that need of his fellows man ever has, of the conviction which is growing stronger, that man must live for the race and not for himself. The individual is nothing except as he identifies himself with the corporate body of humanity; the true fulfilment of life comes only to those who in some way recognize this fact, and give themselves for the good of the world. George Eliot even goes so far in her willingness to renounce self that she says in Theophrastus Such, “I am really at the point of finding that this world would be worth living in without any lot of one’s own. Is it not possible for me to enjoy the scenery of earth without saying to myself, I have a cabbage-garden in it?”

The relations of the individual to the past and the present of the race make duties and burdens and woes for him which he has not created, but which are given him to bear. The sins of others bring pain and sorrow to us; we are a part of all the good and evil of the world. The present is determined by the past; we must accept the lot created for us by those who have gone before us. “He felt the hard pressure of our common lot, the yoke of that mighty, resistless destiny laid upon us by the past of other men.” says George Eliot of one of her characters. The past brings us burdens and sorrows difficult to bear; it also brings us duties. We owe to it many things; our debt to the race is an immense one. That debt can only be discharged by a life of devotion and loyalty, by doing what we can to make humanity better. The Christian idea of a debt owed to God, which we can only repay by perfect loyalty and self-abnegation, becomes to George Eliot a debt owed to humanity, which we can only repay in the purest altruistic spirit.

The doctrine of renunciation has been presented again and again by George Eliot; her books are full of it. It is undoubtedly the central theme of all her teaching. In the conversation between Romola and Savonarola when she is escaping from her home and is met by him, it is vividly expressed. Savonarola speaks as a Christian, as a Catholic, as a monk; but the words he uses quite as well serve to express George Eliot’s convictions. The Christian symbolism laid aside, and all was true to her; yet her feelings, her sense of corporate unity with the past, would not even suffer her to lay aside the symbolism in presenting her thoughts on this subject. Romola pleads that she would not have left Florence as long as she could fulfil a duty to her father: but Savonarola reminds her that there are other duties, other ties, other burdens.

“If your own people are wearing a yoke, will you slip from under it, instead of struggling with them to lighten it? There is hunger and misery in our streets, yet you say, ’I care not; I have my own sorrows; I will go away, if peradventure I can ease them.’ The servants of God are struggling after a law of justice, peace and charity, that the hundred thousand citizens among whom you were born may be governed righteously; but you think no more of that than if you were a bird, that may spread its wings and fly whither it will in search of food to its liking. And yet you have scorned the teaching of the Church, my daughter. As if you, a wilful wanderer, following your own blind choice, were not below the humblest Florentine woman who stretches forth her hands with her own people, and craves a blessing for them; and feels a close sisterhood with the neighbor who kneels beside her, and is not of her own blood; and thinks of the mighty purpose that God has for Florence; and waits and endures because the promised work is great, and she feels herself little.”

She then asserts her purpose not to go away to a life of ease and self-indulgence, but rather to one of hardship; but that plea is not suffered to pass.

“You are seeking your own will, my daughter. You are seeking some good other than the law you are bound to obey. But how will you find good? It is not a thing of choice: it is a river that flows from the foot of the Invisible Throne, and flows by the path of obedience. I say again, man cannot choose his duties. You may choose to forsake your duties, and choose not to have the sorrow they bring. But you will go forth; and what will you find, my daughter? Sorrow without duty bitter herbs, and no bread with them.”

Savonarola bids her draw the crucifix from her bosom, which she secretly carries, and appeals to her by that symbol of devotion and self-sacrifice to remain true to her duties, to accept willingly the burdens given her to bear, not to think of self, but only of others. He condemns the pagan teaching she had received, of individual self-seeking, and the spirit of culture, refinement and ease which accompanied that teaching. She looks on the image of a suffering life, a life offered willingly as a sacrifice for others good, and he says,

“Conform your life to that image, my daughter; make your sorrow an offering; and when the fire of divine charity burns within you, and you behold the need of your fellow-men by the light of that flame, you will not call your offering great. You have carried yourself proudly, as one who held herself not of common blood or of common thoughts; but you have been as one unborn to the true life of man. What! you say your love for your father no longer tells you to stay in Florence? Then, since that tie is snapped, you are without a law, without religion; you are no better than a beast of the field when she is robbed of her young. If the yearning of a fleshly love is gone, you are without love, without obligation. See, then, my daughter, how you are below the life of the believer who worships that image of the Supreme Offering, and feels the glow of a common life with the lost multitude for whom that offering was made, and beholds the history of the world as the history of a great redemption, in which he is himself a fellow-worker, in his own place and among his own people! If you held that faith, my beloved daughter, you would not be a wanderer flying from suffering, and blindly seeking the good of a freedom which is lawlessness. You would feel that Florence was the home of your soul as well as your birthplace, because you would see the work that was given you to do there. If you forsake your place, who will fill it? You ought to be in your place now, helping in the great work by which God will purify Florence and raise it to be the guide of the nations. What! the earth is full of iniquity full of groans the light is still struggling with a mighty darkness, and you say, ’I cannot bear my bonds; I will burst them asunder; I will go where no man claims me?’ My daughter, every bond of your life is a debt: the right lies in the payment of that debt; it can lie nowhere else. In vain will you wander over the earth; you will be wandering forever away from the right.”

Romola hesitates, she pleads that her brother Dino forsook his home to become a monk, and that possibly Savonarola may be wrong. He then appeals to her conscience, and assures her that she has assumed relations and duties which cannot be broken from on any plea. The human ties are forever sacred; there can exist no causes capable of annulling them.

“You are a wife. You seek to break your ties in self-will and anger, not because the higher life calls upon you to renounce them. The higher life begins for us, my daughter, when we renounce our own will to bow before a Divine law. That seems hard to you. It is the portal of wisdom, and freedom, and blessedness. And the symbol of it hangs before you. That wisdom is the religion of the cross. And you stand aloof from it; you are a pagan; you have been taught to say, ’I am as the wise men who lived before the time when the Jew of Nazareth was crucified.’ And that is your wisdom! To be as the dead whose eyes are closed, and whose ear is deaf to the work of God that has been since their time. What has your dead wisdom done for you, my daughter? It has left you without a heart for the neighbors among whom you dwell, without care for the great work by which Florence is to be regenerated and the world made holy; it has left you without a share in the Divine life which quenches the sense of suffering self in the ardors of an ever-growing love. And now, when the sword has pierced your soul, you say, ’I will go away; I cannot bear my sorrow.’ And you think nothing of the sorrow and the wrong that are within the walls of the city where you dwell; you would leave your place empty, when it ought to be filled with your pity and your labor. If there is wickedness in the streets, your steps should shine with the light of purity; if there is a cry of anguish, you, my daughter, because you know the meaning of the cry, should be there to still it. My beloved daughter, sorrow has come to teach you a new worship; the sign of it hangs before you.”

This teaching of renunciation is no less distinctly presented in The Mill on the Floss, the chief ethical aim of which is its inculcation. It is also there associated with the Catholic form of its expression, through Maggie’s reading of The Imitation of Christ, a book which was George Eliot’s constant companion, and was found by her bedside after her death. It was the spirit of that book which attracted George Eliot, not its doctrines. Its lofty spirit of submission and renunciation she admired; and she believed that altruism can be made real only through tradition, only as associated with past heroisms and strivings and ideals. As an embodiment of man’s craving for perfect union with humanity, for full and joyous submission to his lot, the old forms of faith are sacred. They carry the hopes of ages; they are a pictured poem of man’s inward strivings. To break away from these memories is to forsake one’s home, is to repudiate one’s mother. We cannot intellectually accept them, we cannot assent to the dogmas associated with them; but the forms are the spontaneous expressions of the heart, while the dogmas are an after-thought of the inquiring intellect. The real meaning of the cross of Christ is self-sacrifice for humanity’s sake; that was its inspiration, that has ever been its true import. It was this view of the subject which made George Eliot so continuously associate her new teachings with the old expressions of faith.

In altruism she believes is to be found the hope of the world, the cure of every private pain and grief. Altruism means living for and in the race, as a willing member of the social organic life of humanity, as desiring not one’s own good but the welfare of others. That doctrine she applies to Maggie’s case. This young girl was dissatisfied with her life, out of harmony with her surroundings, and could not accept the theories of life given her.

She wanted some explanation of this hard, real life; the unhappy-looking father, seated at the dull breakfast-table; the childish, bewildered mother; the little sordid tasks that filled the hours, or the more oppressive emptiness of weary, joyless leisure; the need of some tender, demonstrative love; the cruel sense that Tom didn’t mind what she thought or felt, and that they were no longer playfellows together; the privation of all pleasant things that had come to her more than to others she wanted some key that would enable her to understand, and in understanding endure, the heavy weight that had fallen on her young heart. If she had been taught “real learning and wisdom, such as great men knew,” she thought she should have held the secrets of life; if she had only books, that she might learn for herself what wise men knew! Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets. She know little of saints and martyrs, and had gathered, as a general result of her teaching, that they were a temporary provision against the spread of Catholicism, and had all died at Smithfield.

Into the darkness of Maggies life a light suddenly comes in the shape of the immortal book of Thomas a Kempis. Why that book; why along such a way should the light come? The answer is, that George Eliot meant to teach certain ideas. It is this fact which justifies her reader in taking these scenes of her novels, these words spoken in the interludes, as genuine reflections and transcripts of her own mind. Maggie turns over a parcel of books brought her by Bob Jakin, to find little in them

but Thomas a Kempis. The name had come across her in her reading, and she felt the satisfaction, which every one knows, of getting some ideas to attach to a name that strays solitary in the memory. She took up the little old clumsy book with some curiosity; it had the corners turned down in many places, and some hand, now forever quiet, had made at certain passages strong pen-and-ink marks, long since browned by time. Maggie turned from leaf to leaf, and read where the quiet hand pointed. “Know that the love of thyself doth hurt thee more than anything in the world.... If thou seekest this or that, and wouldst be here or there to enjoy thy own will and pleasure, thou shalt never be quiet nor free from care; for in everything somewhat will be wanting, and in every place there will be some that will cross thee.... Both above and below, which way soever thou dost turn thee, everywhere thou shalt find the cross; and everywhere of necessity thou must have patience, if thou wilt have inward peace, and enjoy an everlasting crown.... If thou desire to mount unto this height, thou must set out courageously, and lay the axe to the root, that thou mayest pluck up and destroy that hidden inordinate inclination to thyself, and unto all private and earthly good. On this sin, that a man inordinately loveth himself, almost all dependeth, whatsoever is thoroughly to be overcome; which evil being once overcome and subdued, there will presently ensue great peace and tranquillity.... It is but little thou sufferest in comparison of them that have suffered so much, were so strongly tempted, so grievously afflicted, so many ways tried and exercised. Thou oughtest therefore to call to mind the more heavy sufferings of others, that thou mayest the easier bear thy little adversities. And if they seem not little unto thee, beware lest thy impatience be the cause thereof.... Blessed are those ears that receive the whispers of the divine voice, and listen not to the whisperings of the world. Blessed are those ears which hearken not unto the voice which soundeth outwardly, but unto the Truth which teacheth inwardly.”

A strange thrill of awe passed through Maggie while she read, as if she had been wakened in the night by a strain of solemn music, telling of beings whose souls had been astir while hers was in stupor. She went on from one brown mark to another, where the quiet hand seemed to point, hardly conscious that she was reading seeming rather to listen while a low voice said,

“Why dost thou here gaze about, since this is not the place of thy rest? In heaven ought to be thy dwelling, and all earthly things are to be looked on as they forward thy journey thither. All things pass away, and thou together with them. Beware thou cleave not unto them lest thou be entangled and perish.... If a man should give all his substance, yet it is as nothing. And if he should do great penances, yet are they but little. And if he should attain to all knowledge, he is yet far off. And if he should be of great virtue and very fervent devotion, yet is there much wanting; to wit, one thing which is most necessary for him. What is that? That having left all, he leave himself, and go wholly out of himself, and retain nothing of self-love.... I have often said unto thee, and now again I say the same. Forsake thyself, resign thyself, and thou shalt enjoy much inward peace.... Then shall all vain imaginations, evil perturbations and superfluous cares fly away; then shall immoderate fear leave thee, and inordinate love shall die.”

Maggie drew a long breath and pushed her heavy hair back, as if to see a sudden vision more clearly. Here, then, was a secret of life that would enable her to renounce all other secrets here was a sublime height to be reached without the help of outward things here was insight, and strength, and conquest, to be won by means entirely within her own soul, where a supreme Teacher was waiting to be heard. It flashed through her like the suddenly apprehended solution of a problem, that all the miseries of her young life had come from fixing her heart on her own pleasure, as if that were the central necessity of the universe; and for the first time she saw the possibility of shifting the position from which she looked at the gratification of her own desires, of taking her stand out of herself, and looking at her own life as an insignificant part of a divinely guided whole. She read on and on in the old book, devouring eagerly the dialogues with the invisible Teacher, the pattern of sorrow, the source of all strength; returning to it after she had been called away, and reading until the sun went down behind the willows. With all the hurry of an imagination that could never rest in the present, she sat in the deepening twilight forming plans of self-humiliation and entire devotedness, and, in the ardor of first discovery, renunciation seemed to her the entrance into that satisfaction which she had so long been craving in vain. She had not perceived how could she until she had lived longer? the inmost truth of the old monk’s outpourings, that renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly. Maggie was still panting for happiness, and was in ecstasy because she had found the key to it. She knew nothing of doctrines and systems of mysticism or quietism; but this voice out of the far-off middle ages was the direct communication of a human soul’s belief and experience, and came to Maggie as an unquestioned message. I suppose that is the reason why the small, old-fashioned book, for which you need only pay sixpence at a book-stall, works miracles to this day, turning bitter waters into sweetness, while expensive sermons and treatises, newly issued, leave all things as they were before. It was written down by a hand that waited for the heart’s promptings; it is the chronicle of a solitary hidden anguish, struggle, trust and triumph, not written on velvet cushions to teach endurance to those who are treading with bleeding feet on the stones. And so it remains to all time a lasting record of human needs and human consolations; the voice of a brother who, ages ago, felt, and suffered, and renounced, in the cloister, perhaps, with serge gown and tonsured head, with much chanting and long fasts, and with a fashion of speech different from ours, but under the same silent, far-off heavens, and with the same passionate desires, the same strivings, the same failures, the same weariness.

Life now has a meaning for Maggie, its secret has been in some measure opened. Only by bitter experiences does she at last learn the full meaning of that word; but all her after-life is told for us in order that the depth and breadth and height of that meaning may be unfolded. Very soon Maggie is heard saying,

“Our life is determined for us and it makes the mind very free when we
give up wishing, and only think of bearing what is laid upon us, and
doing what is given us to do.”

It is George Eliot who really speaks these words; hers is the thought which inspires them.

Yet Maggie has not learned to give up wishing; and the sorrow, the tragedy of her life comes in consequence. She is pledged in love to Philip, the son of the bitter enemy of her family, and is attracted to Stephen, the lover of her cousin Lucy. A long contest is fought out in her life between attraction and duty; between individual preferences and moral obligations. The struggle is hard, as when Stephen avows his love, and she replies,

“Oh, it is difficult life is very difficult. It seems right to me sometimes that we should follow our strongest feeling; but, then, such feelings continually come across the ties that all our former life has made for us the ties that have made others dependent on us and would cut them in two. If life were quite easy and simple, as it might have been in Paradise, and we could always see that one being first toward whom I mean, if life did not make duties for us before love comes, love would be a sign two people ought to belong to each other. But I see I feel that it is not so now; there are things we must renounce in life; some of us must resign love. Many things are difficult and dark to me, but I see one thing quite clearly that I must not, cannot seek my own happiness by sacrificing others. Love is natural; but surely pity, and faithfulness and memory are natural too. And they would live in me still and punish me if I did not obey them. I should be haunted by the suffering I had caused. Our love would be poisoned.”

Against her will she elopes with Stephen, or her departure with him is so understood; but us soon as she realizes what she has done, her better nature asserts itself, and she refuses to go on. Stephen pleads that the natural law which has drawn them together is greater than every other obligation; but Maggie replies,

“If we judged in that way, there would be a warrant for all treachery
and cruelty. We should justify breaking the most sacred ties that can
ever be formed on earth.”

He then asks what is outward faithfulness and constancy without love. Maggie pleads the better spirit.

“That seems right at first; but when I look further, I’m sure it is not right. Faithfulness and constancy mean something else besides doing what is easiest and pleasantest to ourselves. They mean renouncing whatever is opposed to the reliance others have in us whatever would cause misery to those whom the course of our lives has made dependent on us. If we if I had been better, nobler, those claims would have been so strongly present with me I should have felt them pressing on my heart so continually, just as they do now in the moments when my conscience is awake, that the opposite feeling would never have grown in me as it has done: it would have been quenched at once. I should have prayed for help so earnestly I should have rushed away as we rush from hideous danger. I feel no excuse for myself none. I should never have failed toward Lucy and Philip as I have done, if I had not been weak, selfish and hard able to think of their pain without a pain to myself that would have destroyed all temptation. Oh. what is Lucy feeling now? She believed in me she loved me she was so good to me! Think of her!”

She can see no good for herself which is apart from the good of others, no joy which is the means of pain to those she holds dear. The past has made ties and; memories which no present love or future joy can take away; she must be true to past obligations as well as present inclinations.

“There are memories and affections, and longing after perfect goodness, that have such a strong hold on me, they would never quit me for long; they would come back and be pain to me repentance. I couldn’t live in peace if I put the shadow of a wilful sin between myself and God. I have caused sorrow already I know I feel it; but I have never deliberately consented to it; I have never said, ’They shall suffer that I may have joy.’”

And again, she says,

“We can’t choose happiness either for ourselves or for another; we can’t tell where that will lie. We can only choose whether we will indulge ourselves in the present moment, or whether we will renounce that, for the sake of obeying the divine voice within us for the sake of being true to all the motives that sanctify our lives. I know this belief is hard; it has slipped away from me again and again; but I have felt that if I let it go forever I should have no light through the darkness of this life.”

In these remarkable passages from Romola and The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot presented her own theory of life. One of her friends, in giving an account of her moral influence, speaks of “the impression she produced, that one of the greatest duties of life was that of resignation. Nothing was more impressive as exhibiting the power of feelings to survive the convictions which gave them birth, than the earnestness with which she dwelt, on this as the great and real remedy for all the ills of life. On one occasion she appeared to apply it to herself in speaking of the short space of life that lay before her, and the large amount of achievement that must be laid aside as impossible to compress into it and the sad, gentle tones in which the word resignation was uttered, still vibrate on the ear.” Not only renunciation but resignation was by her held to be a prime requisite of a truly moral life. Man must renounce many things for the sake of humanity, but he must also resign himself to endure many things because the universe is under the dominion of invariable laws. Much of pain and sorrow must come to us which can in no way be avoided. A true resignation and renunciation will enable us to turn pain and sorrow into the means of a higher life. In Adam Bede she says that “deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.” She teaches that man can attain true unity with the race only through renunciation, and renunciation always means suffering. Self-sacrifice means hardship, struggle and sorrow; but the true end of life can only be attained when self is renounced for that higher good which comes through devotion to humanity. Her noblest characters, Maggie Tulliver, Romola, Jubal, Fedalma, Armgart, attain peace only when they have found their lives taken up in the good of others. To her the highest happiness consists in being loyal to duty, and it “often brings so much pain with it that we can only tell it from pain by its being what we would choose before everything else, because our souls see it is good.”

George Eliot’s religion is without God, without immortality, without a transcendent spiritual aim and duty. It consists in a humble submission to the invariable laws of the universe, a profound love of humanity, a glorification of feeling and affection, and a renunciation of personal and selfish desires for an altruistic devotion to the good of the race. Piety without God, renunciation without immortality, mysticism without the supernatural, everywhere finds eloquent presentation in her pages. Offering that which she believes satisfies the spiritual wants of man, she yet rejects all the legitimate objects of spiritual desire. Even when her characters hold to the most fervent faith, and use with the greatest enthusiasm the old expressions of piety, it is the human elements in that faith which are made to appear most prominently. We are told that no radiant angel came across the gloom with a clear message for Romola in her moment of direst distress and need. Then we are told that many such see no angels; and we are made to realize that angelic voices are to George Eliot the voices of her fellows.

In those times, as now, there were human beings who never saw angels or heard perfectly clear messages. Such truth as came to them was brought confusedly in the voices and deeds of men not at all like the seraphs of unfailing wing and piercing vision men who believed falsities as well as truths, and did the wrong as well as the right. The helping hands stretched out to them were the hands of men who stumbled and often saw dimly, so that these beings unvisited by angels had no other choice than to grasp that stumbling guidance along the path of reliance and action which is the path of life, or else to pause in loneliness and disbelief, which is no path, but the arrest of inaction and death.

The same thought is expressed in Silas Marner, that man is to expect no help and consolation except from his fellow-man.

In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may he a little child’s.

Even more explicit in its rejection of all sources of help, except the human, is the motto to “The Lifted Veil.”

Give me no light, great Heaven, but such as turns
To energy of human fellowship;
No powers beyond the growing heritage
That makes completer manhood.

The purpose of this story is to show that supernatural knowledge is a curse to man. The narrator of the story is gifted with the power of divining even the most secret thoughts of those about him, and of beholding coming events. This knowledge brings him only evil and sorrow. His spiritual insight did not save him from folly, and he is led to say,

“There is no short cut, no patent tram-road to wisdom. After all the centuries of invention, the soul’s path lies through the thorny wilderness, which must be still trodden in solitude, with bleeding feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old time.”

He also discourses of the gain which it is to man that the future is hidden from his knowledge,

“So absolute is our soul’s need of something hidden and uncertain for the maintenance of that doubt and hope and effort which are the breath of its life, that if the whole future were laid bare to us beyond to-day, the interest of all mankind would be bent on the hours that lie between; we should pant after the uncertainties of our one morning and our one afternoon; we should rush fiercely to the exchange for our last possibility of speculation, of success, of disappointment; we should have a glut of political prophets foretelling a crisis or a no-crisis within the only twenty-four hours left open to prophecy. Conceive the condition of the human mind if all propositions whatsoever were self-evident except one, which was to become self-evident at the close of a summer’s day, but in the mean time might be the subject of question, of hypothesis, of debate. Art and philosophy, literature and science, would fasten like bees on that one proposition that had the honey of probability in it, and be the more eager because their enjoyment would end with sunset. Our impulses, our spiritual activities, no more adjust themselves to the idea of their future reality than the beating of our heart, or the irritability of our muscles.”

All is hidden from man that does not grow out of human experience, and it is better so. Such is George Eliots method of dealing with our craving for a higher wisdom and a direct revelation. Such wisdom and such revelation are not to be had, and they would not help man if he had them. The mystery of existence rouses his curiosity, stimulates his powers, develops art, religion, sympathy, and all that is best in human life. In her presentations of the men and women most affected by religious motives she adheres to this theory, and represents them as impelled, not by the sense of Gods presence, but by purely human considerations. She makes Dorothea Brooke say,

“I have always been thinking of the different ways in which Christianity is taught, and whenever I find one way that makes it a wider blessing than any other, I cling to that as the truest I mean that which takes in the most good of all kinds, and brings in the most people as sharers in it.”

Of the same character is the belief which comforts Dorothea, and takes the place to her of prayer.

“That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are a part of the divine power against evil widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.”

Mr. Tryan, in Janet’s Repentance, is a most ardent disciple of Evangelicalism, and accepts all its doctrines; but George Eliot contrives to show throughout the book, that all the value of his work and religion consisted in the humanitarian spirit of renunciation he awakened.

George Eliot does not entirely avoid the supernatural, but she treats it as unexplainable. Instances of her use of it are to be found in Adam Bede’s experience while at work on his father’s coffin, in the visions of Savonarola, and in Mordecai’s strange faith in a coming successor to his own faith and work. For Adam Bede’s experience there is no explanation given, nor for that curious power manifest in the “Lifted Veil.” On the other hand, the spiritual power of Savonarola and Mordecai have their explanation, in George Eliot’s philosophy, in that intuition which is inherited insight. In her treatment of such themes she manifests her appreciation of the great mystery which surrounds man’s existence, but she shows no faith in a spiritual world which impinges on the material, and ever manifests itself in gleams and fore-tokenings.

It is to be noted, however, that many traces of mysticism appear in her works. This might have been expected from her early love of the transcendentalists, as well as from her frequent perusal of Thomas a Kempis. More especially was this to be expected from her conception of feeling as the source of all that is best in man’s life. The mystics always make feeling the source of truth, prefer emotion to reason. All thinkers who lay stress on the value of feeling are liable to become mystics, even if materialists in their philosophy. Here and there in her pages this tendency towards mysticism, which manifests itself in some of the more poetic of the scientists of the present time, is to be seen in George Eliot. Some of her words about love, music and nature partake of this character. Her sayings about altruism and renunciation touch the border of the mystical occasionally. Had she been less thoroughly a rationalist she would doubtless have become a mystic in fact. Her tendency in this direction hints at the close affinity between the evolutionists of to-day and the idealists of a century ago. They unite in making matter and mind identical, and in regarding feeling as a source of truth. These are the two essential thoughts on which all mysticism rests. As modern science becomes the basis of speculation about religion, and gives expression to these doctrines, it will develop mysticism. Indeed, it is difficult to know wherein much that George Eliot wrote differs from mysticism. Her subjective immortality derived much of its acceptableness and beauty from those poetic phases given to it by idealistic pantheism. Her altruism caught the glow of the older humanitarianism, Her conception of feeling and emotional sympathy is touched everywhere with that ideal glamour given it by the mystical teachings of an earlier generation. Had she lived half a century earlier she might have been one of Fichte’s most ardent disciples, and found in his subjective idealism the incentive to a higher inspiration than that attained to under the leadership of Comte. Her religion would then have differed but little from what it did in fact, but there would have been a new sublimity and a loftier spirit at the heart of it.

George Eliot retains the traditional life, piety and symbolism of Christianity, but she undertakes to show they have quite another meaning than that usually given them. Her peculiarity is that she should wish to retain the form after the substance is gone. Comte undertook to give a new outward expression to those needs of the soul which lead to worship and piety; but George Eliot accepted the traditional symbolisms as far better than anything which can be invented. If we would do no violence to feeling and the inner needs of life, we must not break with the past, we must not destroy the temple of the soul. The traditional worship, piety and consecration, the poetic expression of feeling and sentiment, must be kept until new traditions, a new symbolism, have developed themselves out of the experiences of the race. God is a symbol for the great mystery of the universe and of being, the eternity and universality of law. Immortality is a symbol for the transmitted impulse which the person communicates to the race. The life and death of Christ is a symbol of that altruistic spirit of renunciation and sorrow willingly borne, by which humanity is being lifted up and brought towards its true destiny. Feeling demands these symbols, the heart craves for them. The bare enunciation of principles is not enough; they must be clothed upon by sentiment and affection. The Christian symbols answer to this need, they most fitly express this craving of the soul for a higher and purer life. The spontaneous, creative life of humanity has developed them as a fit mode of voicing its great spiritual cravings, and only the same creative genius can replace them. The inquiring intellect cannot furnish substitutes for them; rationalism utterly fails in all its attempts to satisfy the spiritual nature.

Such is George Eliot’s religion. It is the “Religion of Humanity” as interpreted by a woman, a poet and a genius. It differs from Comte’s as the work of a poet differs from that of a philosopher, as that of a woman differs from that of a man. His positive religion gives the impression of being invented; it is artificial, unreal. Hers is, at least, living and beautiful and impressive; it is warm, tender and full of compassion, He invents a new symbolism, a new hierarchy, and a new worship; that is, he remodels Catholicism to fit the Religion of Humanity. She is too sensible, too wise, or rather too poetic and sympathetic, to undertake such a transformation, or to be satisfied with it when accomplished by another. She gives a new poetic and spiritual meaning to the old faith and worship; and in doing this makes no break with tradition, rejects nothing of the old symbolism.

It was her conviction that nothing of the real meaning and power of religion escaped by the transformation she made in its spiritual contents. She believed that she had dropped only its speculative teachings, while all that had ever made it of value was retained. That she was entirely mistaken in this opinion scarcely needs to be said; or that her speculative interpretation, if generally accepted, would destroy for most persons even those elements of religion which she accepted. A large rich mind, gifted with genius and possessed of wide culture, as was hers, could doubtless find satisfaction in that attenuated substitute for piety and worship which she accepted. There certainly could be no Mr. Tryan, no Dinah Morris, no Savonarola, no Mordecai, if her theories were the common ones; and it would be even less possible for a Dorothea, a Felix Holt, a Daniel Deronda, or a Romola to develop in such an atmosphere. What her intellectual speculations would accomplish when accepted as the motives of life, is seen all too well in the case of those many radical thinkers whom this century has produced. Only the most highly cultivated, and those of an artistic or poetic temperament, could accept her substitute for the old religion. The motives she presents could affect but a few persons; only here and there are to be found those to whom altruism would be a motive large enough to become a religion. To march in the great human army towards a higher destiny for humanity may have a strong fascination for some, and is coming to affect and inspire a larger number with every century; but it is not enough to know that the race is growing better. What is the end of human progress? we have a right to ask. Does that progress go on in accordance with some universal purpose, which includes the whole universe? We must look not only for a perfect destiny for man, but for a perfect destiny for all worlds and beings throughout the infinitude of God’s creative influence. A progressive, intellectual religion such as will answer to the larger needs of modern life, must give belief in a universal providence, and it must teach man to trust in the spiritual capacities of his own soul. Unless the universe means something which is intelligible, and unless it has a purpose and destiny progressive and eternal, it is impossible that religion will continue to inspire men. That is, only a philosophy which gives such an interpretation to the universe can be the basis of an enduring and progressive religion.

If religion is to continue, it is also necessary that man should be able to believe in the soul as something more than the product of environment and heredity. It is not merely the belief in immortality which has inspired the greatest minds, but the inward impulse of creative activity, resting on the conviction that they were working with God for enduring results. Absorption into the life of humanity can be but a feeble motive compared with that which grows out of faith in the soul’s spiritual eternity in co-operation with God.

George Eliot’s religion is highly interesting, and in many ways it is suggestive and profitable. Her insistence on feeling and sympathy as its main impulses is profoundly significant; but that teaching is as good for Theism or Christianity as for the Religion of Humanity, and needs everywhere to be accepted. In like manner, her altruistic spirit may be accepted and realized by those who can find no sympathy for her intellectual speculations. Love of man, self-sacrifice for human good, cannot be urged by too many teachers. The greater the number of motives leading to that result, the better for man.