cies
of the moral life.' But hers is not seldom the severe fairness of the
judge, and the pity that may go with putting on the black cap after a
conviction for high treason. In the midst of many an easy flowing page,
the reader is surprised by some bitter aside, some judgment of intense
and concentrated irony with the flash of a blade in it, some biting
sentence where lurks the stern disdain and the anger of Tacitus, and
Dante, and Pascal. Souls like these are not born for happiness.

* * * * *

This is not the occasion for an elaborate discussion of George Eliot's
place in the mental history of her time, but her biography shows that
she travelled along the road that was trodden by not a few in her day.
She started from that fervid evangelicalism which has made the base of
many a powerful character in this century, from Cardinal Newman
downwards. Then with curious rapidity she threw it all off, and embraced
with equal zeal the rather harsh and crude negations which were then
associated with the _Westminster Review_. The second stage did not last
much longer than the first. 'Religious and moral sympathy with the
historical life of man,' she said (ii. 363), 'is the larger half of
culture;' and this sympathy, which was the fruit of her culture, had by
the time she was thirty become the new seed of a positive faith and a
semi-conservative creed. Here is a passage from a letter of 1862 (she
had translated Strauss, we may remind ourselves, in 1845, and Feuerbach
in 1854):--

Pray don't ask me ever again not to rob a man of his religious
belief, as if you thought my mind tended to such robbery. I have
too profound a conviction of the efficacy that lies in all
sincere faith, and the spiritual blight that comes with no-faith,
to have any negative propagandism in me. In fact, I have very
little sympathy with Freethinkers as a class, and have lost all
interest in mere antagonism to religious doctrines. I care only
to know, if possible, the lasting meaning that lies in all
religious doctrine from the beginning till now (ii. 243).

Eleven years later the same tendency had deepened and gone farther:--

All the great religions of the world, historically considered,
are rightly the objects of deep reverence and sympathy--they are
the record of spiritual struggles, which are the types of our
own. This is to me preeminently true of Hebrew