o have little power of moral renovation
or sympathetic impulse in it; but it quickened George Eliot's mind with
enthusiasm and ardor. The "enthusiasm of humanity" filled her whole soul,
was a luminous hope in her heart and an inspiring purpose to her mind.
With Goethe and Carlyle she found in work for humanity the substitute
for all faith and the cure for all doubt. Faust finds for his life a
purpose, and for the universe a solution, when he comes to labor for the
practical improvement of humanity. This was George Eliot's own conclusion,
that it is enough for us to see the world about us made a little better
and more orderly by our efforts. All her noblest characters find in
altruism a substitute for religion, and they find there a moral anchorage.
She says very plainly in _Middlemarch_, that every doctrine is capable of
"eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct
fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men." To the same effect is her
saying in _Romola_, that "with the sinking of the high human trust the
dignity of life sinks too; we cease to believe in our own better self,
since that also is a part of the common nature which is degraded in
our thought; and all the finer impulses of the soul are dulled." In
_Janet's Repentance_ she has finely presented this faith in sympathetic
humanitarianism, showing how Janet found peace in the sick-room where all
had been doubt and trial before.

Day after day, with only short intervals of rest, Janet kept her place
in that sad chamber. No wonder the sick-room and the lazaretto have so
often been a refuge from the tossings of intellectual doubt--a place of
repose for the worn and wounded spirit. Here is a duty about which all
creeds and all philosophies are at one:--here, at least, the conscience
will not be dogged by doubt--the benign impulse will not be checked by
adverse theory: here you may begin to act without settling one
preliminary question. To moisten the sufferer's parched lips through
the long night-watches, to bear up the drooping head, to lift the
helpless limbs, to divine the want that can find no utterance beyond
the feeble motion of the hand or beseeching glance of the eye--these
are offices that demand no self-questionings, no casuistry, no assent
to propositions, no weighing of consequences. Within the four walls
where the stir and glare of the world are shut out, and every voice is