I have no controversy with the faith that cries out and clings from the depths of man’s need.  I only long, if it were possible to me, to help in satisfying the need of those who want a reason for living in the absence of what has been called consolatory belief.  But all the while I gather a sort of strength from the certainty that there must be limits or negations in my own moral powers and life experience which may screen from me many possibilities of blessedness for our suffering human nature.  The most melancholy thought surely would be that we in our own persons had measured and exhausted the sources of spiritual good.  But we know the poor help the poor.

These words seem to be uttered in quite another tone than that in which she asserted the unbelievableness of immortality, though they do not indicate anything more than a tender yearning for human good and a belief that she could not herself measure all the possibilities of such good.  The consolation of which she writes, comes only of human sympathy and helpfulness.  In writing to a friend suffering under the anguish of a recent bereavement, she said,—­

For the first sharp pangs there is no comfort;—­whatever goodness may surround us, darkness and silence still hang about our pain.  But slowly the clinging companionship with the dead is linked with our living affections and duties, and we begin to feel our sorrow as a solemn initiation preparing us for that sense of loving, pitying fellowship with the fullest human lot which, I must think, no one who has tasted it will deny to be the chief blessedness of our life.  And especially to know what the last parting is, seems needful to give the utmost sanctity of tenderness to our relations with each other.  It is that above all which gives us new sensibilities to “the web of human things, birth and the grave, that are not as they were.”  And by that faith we come to find for ourselves the truth of the old declaration, that there is a difference between the ease of pleasure and blessedness, as the fullest good possible to us wondrously mixed mortals.

In these words she suggests that sorrow for the dead is a solemn initiation into that full measure of human sympathy and tenderness which best fits us to be men.  Looking upon all human experience through feeling, she regarded death as one of the most powerful of all the shaping agents of man’s destiny in this world.  She speaks of death, in Adam Bede, as “the great reconciler” which unites us to those who have passed away from us.  In the closing scenes of The Mill on the Floss it is presented as such a reconciler, and as the only means of restoring Maggie to the affections of those she had wronged.  It is in The Legend of Jubal, however, that George Eliot has expressed her thought of what death has been in the individual and social evolution of mankind.  The descendants of Cain

                in glad idlesse throve,
  Nor hunted prey, nor with each other strove;