as represented by these two, is
triumphantly settled by a quotation which Adam brings from our old
friend Mrs. Poyser:--

Mrs. Poyser used to say--you know she would have her word about
everything--she said Mr. Irwine was like a good meal o' victual, you
were the better for him without thinking on it; and Mr. Ryde was like
a dose o' physic, he griped and worrited you, and after all he left
you much the same.[1]

[1] "Adam Bede," i. 269.

In "The Mill on the Floss," too, the "brazen" Mr. Stelling is
represented as "evangelical," in so far as he is anything; while Dr.
Kenn, a very high Anglican, is spoken of with all veneration; although,
perhaps, "George Eliot's" opinion as to the efficiency of the high
Anglican clergy may be gathered from the circumstance that when the
Doctor interferes for the benefit of Maggie Tulliver, he not only fails
to be of any use, but exposes himself to something like the same kind of
gossip which had arisen from Mr. Amos Barton's hospitality to Madame
Czerlaski. As to Methodism, again, the reader need hardly be reminded of
the sayings which we have quoted from Mrs. Poyser. And while the feeble
and "wool-gathering" Seth Bede becomes a convert, the strong-minded Adam
holds out, even although he is so tolerant as to marry a female
Methodist preacher, and to let her enjoy her "liberty of prophesying"
until stopped by a general order of the Wesleyan Conference.

From all these things the natural inference would seem to be that the
authoress is neither High-Church nor Low-Church nor Dissenter, but a
tolerant member of what is styled the Broad-Church party--a party in
which we are obliged to say that breadth and toleration are by no means
universal. It would seem that, instead of being exclusively devoted to
any one of the religious types which she has embodied in the persons of
her tales (for as yet she has not presented us with a clergyman of any
liberal school), she regards each of them as containing an element of
pure Christianity, which, although in any one of them it may be alloyed
by its adjuncts and by the faults of individuals, is in itself of
inestimable value, and may be held alike by persons who differ widely
from each other as to the forms of religious polity and as to details of
Christian doctrine.

But what is to be thought of the fact that the authoress of these tales
is also the translator of Strauss's notorious book? Is the Gospel which
she has represented in so ma