The Indianapolis journal. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1867-1904, 1885-05-17
TWELVE PAGES.
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GEORGE ELIOT.

In his essay on George Eliot, Mr.. Myers
says: walking with her in the fellows gar
den of Trinity, or an evening of rainy May,
she taking the three words as her text which
have so often been used in the inspiring
trnmpet-calls of men, the words God, Immor-
tnlity, Duty, pronounced with terrible
earnestness; how uncomfortable was the
first, how unreasonable was the second, and
yet how peremptory and absolute the third.
Never, perhaps, had sterner accents affirmed
the sovereignty OF personal and unrecom-
pensing law. listened and night fell; her
grave, majestic countenance turned toward me
like SYPHILIS in the gloom; it was as though
she withdrew from my grasp one by one, the
two scrolls Of promise, and left me the third
scroll only, awful with inevitable fate"
This transcript of Mr.. Myers shows how
assuredly George Eliot was law unto herself,
but not in the sense of the ordinary skeptics
and agnostics. The law that was active In her
she ascribed to no higher source than her own
mind Her books and her life, as recorded
by Mr.. Cross, show that her life was one long
effort to prove that the human conception Of
good and of duty may be an equivalent for
the supernatural and that the belief in re-
vealed religion and God of the universe is
not necessary to the highest outcome of
thought and action.
Here is strange thing the most learned
and perhaps the most philosophical woman of
the nineteenth century, the highest mental
product OF a Christian civilization-her own
mental life a steady and constant growth from
childhood into and past middle life-earnestly
booking all religious creeds, and especially the
Christian system, in the face with the eye of
q clear and pure reason, and still pronouncing
and fostering.
She passed, as was said in the critical essay
In last weeks Journal, upon her life and genius,
''from evangelical dissent to conformity; from
conformity to positivism, but under every
form of faith and no faith, dominated always
by the conscientious determination to seek
the light, to reflect every ray that falls upon
her, and to impart to all around her a share in
The illumination.
Here is phenomenon alike in social life and
morals. Probably George Eliot never rightly
knew herself and her own life, and could have
given no philosophical explanation of the para
aox that is, or one that would have at least
been satisfactory to the deepest reason and
sentiment of the times of which she is one Of
the brightest ornaments.
A learned woman, an austere skeptic-ethics
morals social questions, religious systems, her
stock in trade and familiar to her-George
Eliot stands in the foremost ranks of the
Christian civilization which created and
nodded her, as the woman who was her own
god, believing the law of duty, which her
biographers rightly make SO much of, was a
sufficient religion in itself She .worshiped at
mortality was dream; the substance of
things hoped for was to her nothing. To be
sure George Eliot is not the first who
has put away from her the Christian
system, and has lived noble life
without its aid and comfort. But she was
not with the current of the times; to her all
made for art and culture; she had no SYM
pathy with the principle that the fool
ish things of the world are used to con-
found the WISE Her art and culture studies
would have been more to the world if the
religious ideals of the world had been their
background; for the belief is strong in the
human heart that life looks both backward
and forward, and all art, all thought, and all
culture, is the reflection of power outside of
and greater than the mental conception of
any human being.
THE BOSTONIANS