than
piety, love is better than all the ceremonial worship of the world, and
it is better to love something than to believe anything on this globe.
So this minister, seeking a mark to throw an arrow somewhere--trying to
find some little place in the armor--charges me with having disparaged
Queen Victoria. That you know is next to blasphemy. Well, I never did
anything of the kind--never said a word against her in in life, neither
as wife, or mother, or Queen--never doubted but that she is a good
woman enough, and I have always admitted that her reputation was good
in the neighborhood where she resides. I never had any other opinion.
All I said in the world was--I was endeavoring to show that we are now
to have an aristocracy of brain and heart--that is all--and I said,
'speaking of Louis Napoleon, he was not satisfied with simply being an
emperor and having a little crown on his head, but wanted to prove that
he had something in his head, so he wrote the life of Julius Caesar,
and that made him a member of the French Academy; and speaking of King
William, upon whose head is the divine petroleum of authority, I asked
how he would like to exchange brains with Haeckel, the philosopher.
Then I went over to England, and said "Queen Victoria wears the garment
of power given her by blind fortune, by eyeless chance; 'George Eliot'
is arrayed in robes of glory, woven in the loom of her own genius."
Thereupon I am charged with disparaging a woman. And this priest, in
order to get even with me, digs open the grave of "George Eliot" and
endeavors to stain her unresisting dust. He calls her an
adulteress--the vilest word in the languages of men--and he does it
because she hated the Presbyterian creed, because she, according to his
definition, was an atheist, because she lived without faith and died
without fear, because she grandly bore the taunts and slanders of the
Christian world. "George Eliot" carried tenderly in her heart the
faults and frailties of her race. She saw the highway of eternal right
through all the winding paths, where folly vainly stalks with
thorn-pierced hands, the fading flowers of selfish joy; and whatever
you may think or I may think of the one mistake in all her sad and
loving life, I know and feel that in the court where her conscience sat
as judge she stood acquitted, pure as light and stainless as a star.
"George Eliot" has joined the choir invisible whose music is the
gladness of this world, and her