That doctrine was not George Eliot’s.  Christianity bids men renounce the world for the sake of a perfect union with God; George Eliot desires men to renounce selfishness for the sake of humanity.  The Christian idea includes the renunciation of all self-seeking, it bids us give ourselves for others, it even teaches us that others are to be preferred to ourselves.  Yet all this is to be done, not merely for the sake of the present, but in view of an eternal destiny, and because we can thus only fulfil God’s will and attain to holy oneness with him.  George Eliot did, however, throughout her writings, identify the altruist impulse to live for others with the Christian doctrine of the cross.  To her, the life of devotion to humanity, which she has so beautifully presented in the poem, “O may I join the Choir Invisible,” was the true interpretation of the Christian doctrine of self-sacrifice.  She accepted this world-old religious belief, consecrated with all the tears and sacrifices and martyrdoms of the world, as a true expression of a want of the soul, as the poetic expression of emotions and aspirations which ever live in man.  It is a beautiful symbolism of that need of his fellows man ever has, of the conviction which is growing stronger, that man must live for the race and not for himself.  The individual is nothing except as he identifies himself with the corporate body of humanity; the true fulfilment of life comes only to those who in some way recognize this fact, and give themselves for the good of the world.  George Eliot even goes so far in her willingness to renounce self that she says in Theophrastus Such, “I am really at the point of finding that this world would be worth living in without any lot of one’s own.  Is it not possible for me to enjoy the scenery of earth without saying to myself, I have a cabbage-garden in it?”

The relations of the individual to the past and the present of the race make duties and burdens and woes for him which he has not created, but which are given him to bear.  The sins of others bring pain and sorrow to us; we are a part of all the good and evil of the world.  The present is determined by the past; we must accept the lot created for us by those who have gone before us.  “He felt the hard pressure of our common lot, the yoke of that mighty, resistless destiny laid upon us by the past of other men.” says George Eliot of one of her characters.  The past brings us burdens and sorrows difficult to bear; it also brings us duties.  We owe to it many things; our debt to the race is an immense one.  That debt can only be discharged by a life of devotion and loyalty, by doing what we can to make humanity better.  The Christian idea of a debt owed to God, which we can only repay by perfect loyalty and self-abnegation, becomes to George Eliot a debt owed to humanity, which we can only repay in the purest altruistic spirit.