Mrs. Bray was also a woman of large intelligence, and of a mind freely open to new theories.  She wrote a Physiology for Schools and a school-book on Duties to Animals, which have been well received by the public and used as text books in the schools of the Midland counties.  In 1882 she published a little book on the Elements of Morality, consisting of a series of easy lessons for Unitarian Sunday schools and for home teaching.  To the Brays, Marian Evans owed much in the way of sympathy, culture and direct influence.  Perhaps more than any other persons they gave tone and direction to her mind.  One who knew them has said, “Besides being a practical as well as theoretical philanthropist, Mr. Bray was also a courageous impugner of the dogmas which form the basis of the popular theology.  Mrs. Bray shared in this general largeness of thought, while perhaps more in sympathy with the fairer aspects of Christianity.”

A brother and a sister of Mrs. Bray’s, Charles C. Hennell and Sara S. Hennell, also had a large influence on Marian Evans during this period.  It was Charles Hennell who induced her to translate Strauss, and it was Sara Hennell to whom she wrote about her aunt after the publication of Adam Bede.  Hennell’s Inquiry concerning the origin of Christianity was published in 1838, and appeared in a second edition in 1841.  In the latter year the book was read by Marian Evans, after a faithful perusal of the Bible as a preparation for it, and quickly re-read, and with great interest and delight.  She then pronounced it “the most interesting book she had ever read,” dating from it a new birth to her mind.  The book was translated into German, Strauss writing a preface for it, and that interpreter of Christianity praised it highly.  Hennell rejected all supernaturalism and the miraculous, regarding Christianity as a slow and natural development out of Judaism, aided by Platonism and other outside influences.  He finds the sources of Jesus’ teachings in the Jewish tendencies of the time, while the cause of the supremacy of the man Jesus was laid in a long course of events which had swelled to a crisis at the time of his appearance, and bore him aloft to a height whence his personal qualities told with a power derived from the accumulated force of many generations.  Jesus was an enthusiast who believed himself the predicted king of the Jews, and he was a revolutionist expecting to establish an earthly kingdom for the supremacy of Judaism.  Jesus was largely influenced by the Essenes, but he rejected their austerity.  Hennell found a mixture of truth and error in the Gospels, and believed that many mythical elements entered into the accounts given of Jesus.  A thorough rationalist, he claimed to accept the spiritual essence of Christianity, and to value highly the moral teachings of Jesus.  In a later work on Christian Theism he finds an argument for belief in God mainly in nature.  In his conclusions he is not far from F.W.  Newman and Theodore Parker; but he does not give the credit to intuition and the religious faculty they do, though he is an earnest believer in God, and inclined to accept Christianity as the highest expression of religion.