have faith in the working out of higher
possibilities than the Catholic or any other Church has presented; and
those who have strength to wait and endure are bound to accept no
formula which their whole souls--their intellect, as well as their
emotions--do not embrace with entire reverence. The highest calling and
election is _to do without opium_, and live through all our pain with
conscious, clear-eyed endurance.' She would never accept the common
optimism. As she says here:--'Life, though a good to men on the whole,
is a doubtful good to many, and to some not a good at all. To my thought
it is a source of constant mental distortion to make the denial of this
a part of religion--to go on pretending things are better than they
are.'

Of the afflicting dealings with the world of spirits, which in those
days were comparatively limited to the untutored minds of America, but
which since have come to exert so singular a fascination for some of the
most brilliant of George Eliot's younger friends (see iii. 204), she
thought as any sensible Philistine among us persists in thinking to this
day:--

If it were another spirit aping Charlotte Bronte--if here and
there at rare spots and among people of a certain temperament, or
even at many spots and among people of all temperaments, tricksy
spirits are liable to rise as a sort of earth-bubbles and set
furniture in movement, and tell things which we either know
already or should be as well without knowing--I must frankly
confess that I have but a feeble interest in these doings,
feeling my life very short for the supreme and awful revelations
of a more orderly and intelligible kind which I shall die with an
imperfect knowledge of. If there were miserable spirits whom we
could help--then I think we should pause and have patience with
their trivial-mindedness; but otherwise I don't feel bound to
study them more than I am bound to study the special follies of a
peculiar phase of human society. Others, who feel differently,
and are attracted towards this study, are making an experiment
for us as to whether anything better than bewilderment can come
of it. At present it seems to me that to rest any fundamental
part of religion on such a basis is a melancholy misguidance of
men's minds from the true sources of high and pure emotion (iii.
161).

The period of George Eliot's productions