iversal
sorrows. Suffering harmonizes. Feeling the need of mutual help, we are
prompted by it to labor for others." [Footnote: Foundations of a Creed,
vol. I., pp. 147, 153.] Morality is social, not personal; the result of
those instincts which draw men together in community of interests,
sympathies and sufferings. Its sanctions are all social; its motives are
purely human; its law is created by the needs of humanity. There is no
outward coercive law of the divine will or of invariable order which is to
be supremely regarded; the moral law is human need as it changes from age
to age. The increase of human sympathies in the process of social evolution
gives the true moral ideal to be aspired after. What will increase the
social efficiency of the race, what will promote altruism, is moral.

Alike because of the invariable order of nature, and the social dependence
of men on each other, are the effects of conduct wrought out in the
individual. George Eliot believes in "the orderly sequence by which the
seed brings forth a crop after its kind." All evil is injurious to man,
destructive of the integrity of his life. She teaches the doctrine of
Nemesis with as much conviction, thoroughness and eloquence as the old
Greek dramatists, making sin to be punished, and wrong-doing to be
destructive. Sometimes she presents this doctrine with all the stern,
unpitying vigor of an Aeschylus, as a dire effect of wrong that comes upon
men with an unrelenting mercilessness. In _Janet's Repentance_ she says,--

Nemesis is lame, but she is of colossal stature, like the gods; and
sometimes, while her sword is not yet unsheathed, she stretches out her
huge left arm and grasps her victim. The mighty hand is invisible, but
the victim totters under the dire clutch.

Her doctrine of Nemesis resembles that of the old Greeks more than that of
the modern optimists and theists. Hers is not the idealistic conception of
compensation, which measures out an exact proportion of punishment for
every sin, and of happiness for every virtuous action. Wrong-doing injures
others as well as those who commit the evil deed, and moral effects reach
far beyond those who set them in operation. Very explicitly is this fact
presented in _The Mill on the Floss_.

So deeply inherent is it in this life of ours that men have to suffer
for each other's sins, so inevitably diffusive is human suffering, that
even justice makes its victims, and we