ts up, and the sorceress who pulls down. We recall the misers we have
scorned, and the hypocrites whom we have detested. We see on her canvas
the vulgar rich and the struggling poor, the pompous man of success and
the broken-down man of misfortune; philanthropists and drunkards, lofty
heroines and silly butterflies, benevolent doctors and smiling
politicians, quacks and scoundrels and fools, mixed up with noble men
and women whose aspirations are for a higher life; people of kind
impulses and weak wills, of attractive personal beauty with meanness of
mind and soul. We do not find exaggerated monsters of vice, or faultless
models of virtue and wisdom: we see such people as live in every
Christian community. True it is that the impression we receive of human
life is not always pleasant; but who in any community can bear the
severest scrutiny of neighbors? It is this fidelity to our poor humanity
which tinges the novels of George Eliot with so deep a gloom.

But the sadness which creeps over us in view of human imperfection is
nothing to that darkness which enters the soul when the peculiar
philosophical or theological opinions of this gifted woman are
insidiously but powerfully introduced. However great she was as a
delineator of character, she is not an oracle as a moral teacher. She
was steeped in the doctrines of modern agnosticism. She did not believe
in a personal God, nor in His superintending providence, nor in
immortality as brought to light in the gospel. There are some who do not
accept historical Christianity, but are pervaded with its spirit. Even
Carlyle, when he cast aside the miracles of Christ and his apostles as
the honest delusions of their followers, was almost a Calvinist in his
recognition of God as a sovereign power; and he abhorred the dreary
materialism of Comte and Mill as much as he detested the shallow atheism
of Diderot and Helvetius. But George Eliot went beyond Carlyle in
disbelief. At times, especially in her poetry, she writes almost like a
follower of Buddha. The individual soul is absorbed in the universal
whole; future life has no certainty; hope in redemption is buried in a
sepulchre; life in most cases is a futile struggle; the great problems
of existence are invested with gloom as well as mystery. Thus she
discourses like a Pagan. She would have us to believe that Theocritus
was wiser than Pascal; that Marcus Aurelius was as good as Saint Paul.

Hence, as a teacher of morals and philo