George Eliot’s religion is without God, without immortality, without a transcendent spiritual aim and duty.  It consists in a humble submission to the invariable laws of the universe, a profound love of humanity, a glorification of feeling and affection, and a renunciation of personal and selfish desires for an altruistic devotion to the good of the race.  Piety without God, renunciation without immortality, mysticism without the supernatural, everywhere finds eloquent presentation in her pages.  Offering that which she believes satisfies the spiritual wants of man, she yet rejects all the legitimate objects of spiritual desire.  Even when her characters hold to the most fervent faith, and use with the greatest enthusiasm the old expressions of piety, it is the human elements in that faith which are made to appear most prominently.  We are told that no radiant angel came across the gloom with a clear message for Romola in her moment of direst distress and need.  Then we are told that many such see no angels; and we are made to realize that angelic voices are to George Eliot the voices of her fellows.

In those times, as now, there were human beings who never saw angels or heard perfectly clear messages.  Such truth as came to them was brought confusedly in the voices and deeds of men not at all like the seraphs of unfailing wing and piercing vision—­men who believed falsities as well as truths, and did the wrong as well as the right.  The helping hands stretched out to them were the hands of men who stumbled and often saw dimly, so that these beings unvisited by angels had no other choice than to grasp that stumbling guidance along the path of reliance and action which is the path of life, or else to pause in loneliness and disbelief, which is no path, but the arrest of inaction and death.

The same thought is expressed in Silas Marner, that man is to expect no help and consolation except from his fellow-man.

In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction.  We see no white-winged angels now.  But yet men are led away from threatening destruction:  a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may he a little child’s.

Even more explicit in its rejection of all sources of help, except the human, is the motto to “The Lifted Veil.”

  Give me no light, great Heaven, but such as turns
  To energy of human fellowship;
  No powers beyond the growing heritage
  That makes completer manhood.

The purpose of this story is to show that supernatural knowledge is a curse to man.  The narrator of the story is gifted with the power of divining even the most secret thoughts of those about him, and of beholding coming events.  This knowledge brings him only evil and sorrow.  His spiritual insight did not save him from folly, and he is led to say,—­