ciate her new teachings with the old expressions of faith.

In altruism she believes is to be found the hope of the world, the cure of
every private pain and grief. Altruism means living for and in the race, as
a willing member of the social organic life of humanity, as desiring not
one's own good but the welfare of others. That doctrine she applies to
Maggie's case. This young girl was dissatisfied with her life, out of
harmony with her surroundings, and could not accept the theories of life
given her.

She wanted some explanation of this hard, real life; the
unhappy-looking father, seated at the dull breakfast-table; the
childish, bewildered mother; the little sordid tasks that filled the
hours, or the more oppressive emptiness of weary, joyless leisure; the
need of some tender, demonstrative love; the cruel sense that Tom
didn't mind what she thought or felt, and that they were no longer
playfellows together; the privation of all pleasant things that had
come to _her_ more than to others--she wanted some key that would
enable her to understand, and in understanding endure, the heavy weight
that had fallen on her young heart. If she had been taught "real
learning and wisdom, such as great men knew," she thought she should
have held the secrets of life; if she had only books, that she might
learn for herself what wise men knew! Saints and martyrs had never
interested Maggie so much as sages and poets. She know little of saints
and martyrs, and had gathered, as a general result of her teaching,
that they were a temporary provision against the spread of Catholicism,
and had all died at Smithfield.

Into the darkness of Maggie's life a light suddenly comes in the shape of
the immortal book of Thomas a Kempis. Why that book; why along such a way
should the light come? The answer is, that George Eliot meant to teach
certain ideas. It is this fact which justifies her reader in taking these
scenes of her novels, these words spoken in the interludes, as genuine
reflections and transcripts of her own mind. Maggie turns over a parcel of
books brought her by Bob Jakin, to find little in them--

but _Thomas a Kempis_. The name had come across her in her reading, and
she felt the satisfaction, which every one knows, of getting some ideas
to attach to a name that strays solitary in the memory. She took up the
little old clumsy book with some curio