. The vision of her past
wrong-doing, and what it had brought on her, came with a pale ghastly
illumination over every imagined deed that was a rash effort at
freedom, such as she had made in her marriage. [Footnote: Chapter LIV.]

The way in which wrong-doing affects us to our hurt is suggested also in
_Romola_, where its results upon the inward life are explicitly revealed.

Under every guilty secret there is hidden a brood of guilty wishes,
whose unwholesome infecting life is cherished by the darkness. The
contaminating effect of deeds lies less in the commission than in
the consequent adjustment of our desires--the enlistment of our
self-interest on the side of falsity; as, on the other hand, the
purifying effect of public confession springs from the fact that by it
the hope in lies is forever swept away, and the soul recovers the noble
attitude of simplicity.

In the same novel the effect of wrong-doing is regarded as an inward and
subduing fear of the consequences of our conduct. This dread so commonly
felt, and made a most effective motive by all religions, George Eliot
regards as the soul's testimony to the great law of retribution. Experience
that moral causes produce moral effects, as that law is every day taught
us, takes hold of feeling, and becomes a nameless dread of the avenging
powers.

Having once begun to explain away Baldassarre's claim, Tito's thought
showed itself as active as a virulent acid, eating its rapid way
through all the tissues of sentiment. His mind was destitute of that
dread which has been erroneously decried as if it were nothing higher
than a man's animal care for his own skin; that awe of the divine
Nemesis which was felt by religious pagans, and, though it took a more
positive form under Christianity, is still felt by the mass of mankind
simply as a vague fear at anything which is called wrong-doing. Such
terror of the unseen is so far above mere sensual cowardice that it
will annihilate that cowardice: it is the initial recognition of a
moral law restraining desire, and checks the hard bold scrutiny of
imperfect thought into obligations which can never be proved to have
any sanctity in the absence of feeling. "It is good," sing the old
Eumenides, in Aeschylus, "that fear should sit as the guardian of the
soul, forcing it into wisdom--good that men should carry a threatening