a duty, to make accessible any book that required to be read; and though undoubtedly she was satisfied that the Leben Jesu required to be read in England, it would be difficult to imagine a temper more naturally antipathetic to her than that of its author; and critics who talk about the ‘Strauss and Feuerbach period’ should be careful to explain that the phrase covers no implication that she was at anytime an admirer or a disciple of Strauss.  There are extremes not only too remote but too disparate to be included in the same life.”

Marian Evans did not become an admirer or disciple of Strauss, probably because she preferred Charles Hennell’s interpretation of Christianity, It is certain, however, that she was greatly affected by Feuerbach, and that his influence was ever after strongly marked in her thinking.  The teachings of Charles Bray and Charles Hennell had prepared her for the reception of those of Feuerbach, and he in turn made her mind responsive to the more systematic philosophy of Comte.  Bray had taught her, along with Kant, to regard all knowledge as subjective, while Hennell and her other friends had shown her the objective falsity of Christianity.  Thus her mind was made ready for Feuerbach’s leading principle, that all religion is a product of the mind and has no outward reality corresponding to its doctrines.  According to Feuerbach, the mind creates for itself objective images corresponding to its subjective states, reproduces its feelings in the outward world.  In reality there is no objective fact corresponding to these subjective ideas, but what the mind conceives to exist is a necessary product of its own activity.  The mind necessarily believes in God, which is man’s way of conceiving his species and realizing to himself the perfect type of his own nature.  God does not exist, and yet he is a true picture of man’s soul, a necessary product of his feeling and consciousness.  All religious ideas are true subjectively, and Christianity especially corresponds to the inward wants and aspirations of the soul.  To Feuerbach it is true as a poetic interpretation of feeling and sentiment, and to him it gives the noblest and truest conception of what the soul needs for its inward satisfaction.

The influence of Feuerbach is to be seen in the profound interest which Marian Evans ever took in the subject of religion.  That influence alone explains how it was possible for one who did not accept any religious doctrines as true, who did not believe in God or immortality, and who rejected Christianity as a historic or dogmatic faith, to accept so much as she did of the better spirit of religion and to be so keenly in sympathy with it.  It was from the general scepticism and rationalism of the times she learned to reject all religion as false to truth and as not giving a just interpretation of life and its facts.  It was from Feuerbach she learned how great is the influence of religion, how necessary it is to man’s welfare,