st be still trodden in solitude, with bleeding
feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old time."

He also discourses of the gain which it is to man that the future is hidden
from his knowledge,

"So absolute is our soul's need of something hidden and uncertain for
the maintenance of that doubt and hope and effort which are the breath
of its life, that if the whole future were laid bare to us beyond
to-day, the interest of all mankind would be bent on the hours that
lie between; we should pant after the uncertainties of our one morning
and our one afternoon; we should rush fiercely to the exchange for
our last possibility of speculation, of success, of disappointment;
we should have a glut of political prophets foretelling a crisis or
a no-crisis within the only twenty-four hours left open to prophecy.
Conceive the condition of the human mind if all propositions whatsoever
were self-evident except one, which was to become self-evident at
the close of a summer's day, but in the mean time might be the subject
of question, of hypothesis, of debate. Art and philosophy, literature
and science, would fasten like bees on that one proposition that had
the honey of probability in it, and be the more eager because their
enjoyment would end with sunset. Our impulses, our spiritual
activities, no more adjust themselves to the idea of their future
reality than the beating of our heart, or the irritability of our
muscles."

All is hidden from man that does not grow out of human experience, and
it is better so. Such is George Eliot's method of dealing with our craving
for a higher wisdom and a direct revelation. Such wisdom and such
revelation are not to be had, and they would not help man if he had them.
The mystery of existence rouses his curiosity, stimulates his powers,
develops art, religion, sympathy, and all that is best in human life. In
her presentations of the men and women most affected by religious motives
she adheres to this theory, and represents them as impelled, not by the
sense of God's presence, but by purely human considerations. She makes
Dorothea Brooke say,--

"I have always been thinking of the different ways in which
Christianity is taught, and whenever I find one way that makes it a
wider blessing than any other, I cling to that as the truest--I mean
that which takes in the most good of all kinds,