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 philosophy George Eliot is not of much account.  We question the richness of any moral wisdom which is not in harmony with the truths that Christian people regard as fundamental, and which they believe will save the world.  In some respects she has taught important lessons.  She has illustrated the power of conscience and the sacredness of duty.  She was a great preacher of the doctrine that “whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”  She showed that those who do not check and control the first departure from virtue will, in nine cases out of ten, hopelessly fall.

These are great certitudes.  But there are others which console and encourage as well as intimidate.  The Te Domine Speravi of the dying Xavier on the desolate island of Sancian, pierced through the clouds of dreary blackness which enveloped the nations he sought to save.  Christianity is full of promises of exultant joy, and its firmest believers are those whose lives are gilded with its divine radiance.  Surely, it is not intellectual or religious narrowness which causes us to regret that so gifted a woman as George Eliot—­so justly regarded as one of the greatest ornaments of modern literature—­should have drifted away from the Rock which has resisted the storms and tempests of nearly two thousand years, and abandoned, if she did not scorn, the faith which has animated the great masters of thought from Augustine to Bossuet.  “The stern mournfulness which is produced by most of her novels gives us the idea of one who does not know, or who has forgotten, that the stone was rolled away from the heart of the world on the morning when Christ arose from the tomb.”