has all but expunged from the
Christian code. The hardness is essentially against the wrong-doing, not
against the doer of it; and against it rather as it affects others than
as it burdens, worries, or overshadows his own life. It subsists in and
springs from the intensity with which, in a nature robust and energetic
in no ordinary degree, right and wrong have asserted themselves as the
realities of existence. Even Seth can be more tolerant than Adam,
because the gentle, placid moral beauty of his nature is, so far as this
may ever be, the result of temperament; while in Adam whatever has been
attained has been won through inward struggle and self-conquest.

In the 'Mill on the Floss,' the moral interest of the whole drama is
concentrated to a very great degree on Maggie Tulliver; and in her is
also mainly concentrated the representative struggle between good and
evil, the spirit of the Cross and that of the world; for Stephen Guest is
little more than the objective form under which the latent evil of her
own humanity assails her. Her life is the field upon which we see the
great conflict waging between the elements of spiritual life and
spiritual death; swaying amid heart-struggle and pain, now toward
victory, now toward defeat, till at last all seems lost. Then at one
rebound the strong brave spirit recovers itself, and takes up the full
burden of its cross; sees and accepts the present right though the heart
is breaking; and the end is victory crowned and sealed by death.

From her first appearance as a child, those elements of humanity are most
prominent in her which, unguided and uncontrolled, are most fraught with
danger to the higher life; and for her there is no real outward guidance
or control whatever. The passionate craving for human sympathy and love,
which meets no fuller response than from the rude instinctive fondness of
her father and the carefully-regulated affection of her brother, on the
one hand prepares her for the storm of passion, and on the other, chilled
and thrown back by neglect and refusal, threatens her with equal danger
of hardness and self-inclusion. The strong artist temperament, the power
of spontaneous and intense enjoyment in everything fair and glad to eye
and ear, repressed by the uncongenial accessories around her, tends to
concentrate her existence in a realm of mere imaginative life, where, if
it be the only life, the diviner part of our being can find no
sustenance. This