od in our own place, irrespective of all results of joy or sorrow, of
apparent success or failure--such is the lesson" that is conveyed in all
her books. George Eliot is presented as a true teacher of the doctrine
which admonishes us to love not pleasure but God, to forsake all things
else for the sake of obedience and devotion, to shun the world and to
devote ourselves perpetually to God's service. The Christian doctrine of
renunciation has always bidden men put their eyes on God, forget everything
beside, and seek only for that divine life which is spiritual union with
the Eternal.

That doctrine was not George Eliot's. Christianity bids men renounce the
world for the sake of a perfect union with God; George Eliot desires men to
renounce selfishness for the sake of humanity. The Christian idea includes
the renunciation of all self-seeking, it bids us give ourselves for others,
it even teaches us that others are to be preferred to ourselves. Yet all
this is to be done, not merely for the sake of the present, but in view of
an eternal destiny, and because we can thus only fulfil God's will and
attain to holy oneness with him. George Eliot did, however, throughout her
writings, identify the altruist impulse to live for others with the
Christian doctrine of the cross. To her, the life of devotion to humanity,
which she has so beautifully presented in the poem, "O may I join the Choir
Invisible," was the true interpretation of the Christian doctrine of
self-sacrifice. She accepted this world-old religious belief, consecrated
with all the tears and sacrifices and martyrdoms of the world, as a true
expression of a want of the soul, as the poetic expression of emotions and
aspirations which ever live in man. It is a beautiful symbolism of that
need of his fellows man ever has, of the conviction which is growing
stronger, that man must live for the race and not for himself. The
individual is nothing except as he identifies himself with the corporate
body of humanity; the true fulfilment of life comes only to those who in
some way recognize this fact, and give themselves for the good of the
world. George Eliot even goes so far in her willingness to renounce self
that she says in _Theophrastus Such_, "I am really at the point of finding
that this world would be worth living in without any lot of one's own. Is
it not possible for me to enjoy the scenery of earth without saying to
myself, I have a cabbage-garden in it?"

The relat