ear is deaf to the work of God that has been since their time.  What has your dead wisdom done for you, my daughter?  It has left you without a heart for the neighbors among whom you dwell, without care for the great work by which Florence is to be regenerated and the world made holy; it has left you without a share in the Divine life which quenches the sense of suffering self in the ardors of an ever-growing love.  And now, when the sword has pierced your soul, you say, ’I will go away; I cannot bear my sorrow.’  And you think nothing of the sorrow and the wrong that are within the walls of the city where you dwell; you would leave your place empty, when it ought to be filled with your pity and your labor.  If there is wickedness in the streets, your steps should shine with the light of purity; if there is a cry of anguish, you, my daughter, because you know the meaning of the cry, should be there to still it.  My beloved daughter, sorrow has come to teach you a new worship; the sign of it hangs before you.”

This teaching of renunciation is no less distinctly presented in The Mill on the Floss, the chief ethical aim of which is its inculcation.  It is also there associated with the Catholic form of its expression, through Maggie’s reading of The Imitation of Christ, a book which was George Eliot’s constant companion, and was found by her bedside after her death.  It was the spirit of that book which attracted George Eliot, not its doctrines.  Its lofty spirit of submission and renunciation she admired; and she believed that altruism can be made real only through tradition, only as associated with past heroisms and strivings and ideals.  As an embodiment of man’s craving for perfect union with humanity, for full and joyous submission to his lot, the old forms of faith are sacred.  They carry the hopes of ages; they are a pictured poem of man’s inward strivings.  To break away from these memories is to forsake one’s home, is to repudiate one’s mother.  We cannot intellectually accept them, we cannot assent to the dogmas associated with them; but the forms are the spontaneous expressions of the heart, while the dogmas are an after-thought of the inquiring intellect.  The real meaning of the cross of Christ is self-sacrifice for humanity’s sake; that was its inspiration, that has ever been its true import.  It was this view of the subject which made George Eliot so continuously associate her new teachings with the old expressions of faith.

In altruism she believes is to be found the hope of the world, the cure of every private pain and grief.  Altruism means living for and in the race, as a willing member of the social organic life of humanity, as desiring not one’s own good but the welfare of others.  That doctrine she applies to Maggie’s case.  This young girl was dissatisfied with her life, out of harmony with her surroundings, and could not accept the theories of life given her.