eligious experience?" Is there a
descendant of the Puritans who will not relish the fair play of this?
"They might give the name of piety to much that was only Puritanic
egoism; they might call many things sin that were not sin, but they had
at least the feeling that sin was to be avoided and resisted, and
color-blindness, which may mistake drab for scarlet, is better than total
blindness, which sees no distinction of color at all." Is not Adam Bede
justified in saying that "to hear some preachers you'd think a man must
be doing nothing all his life but shutting his eyes and looking at what's
going on in the inside of him," or that "the doctrines are like finding
names for your feelings so that you can talk of them when you've never
known them?" Read all she has said before you object to anything she has
said. Then see whether you will find fault with her for delineating the
motives of those with whom "great illusions" are mistaken for "great
faith;" of those "whose celestial intimacies do not improve their
domestic manners," however "holy" they may claim to be; of those who
"contrive to conciliate the consciousness of filthy rags with the best
damask;" of those "whose imitative piety and native worldliness is
equally sincere;" of those who "think the invisible powers will be
soothed by a bland parenthesis here and there, coming from a man of
property"--parenthetical recognition of the Almighty! May not "religious
scruples be like spilled needles, making one afraid of treading or
sitting down, or even eating?"

But if this is a great mind fascinated with the insoluble enigma of human
motives, it is a mind profoundly in sympathy with those who are puzzling
hopelessly over the riddle or are struggling hopelessly in its toils.
She is "on a level and in the press with them as they struggle their way
along the stony road through the crowd of unloving fellow-men." She says
"the only true knowledge of our fellows is that which enables us to feel
with them, which gives us a finer ear for the heart-pulses that are
beating under the mere clothes of circumstance and opinion." No artist
in fiction ever had a finer ear or a more human sympathy for the
straggler who "pushes manfully on" and "falls at last," leaving "the
crowd to close over the space he has left." Her extraordinary skill in
disclosing "the peculiar combination of outward with inward facts which
constitute a man's critical actions," only makes her the more chari