So deeply inherent is it in this life of ours that men have to suffer for each other’s sins, so inevitably diffusive is human suffering, that even justice makes its victims, and we can conceive no retribution that does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain.

In Adam Bede, Parson Irwine says to Arthur,—­

    Consequences are unpitying.  Our deeds carry their terrible consequences
    quite apart from any fluctuations that went before—­consequences that
    are hardly ever confined to ourselves.

Yet wrong-doing does not go unpunished, for the law of moral cause and effect ever holds good.  This is the teaching of the first chapter of Felix Holt.

There is seldom any wrong-doing which does not carry along with it some downfall of blindly climbing hopes, some hard entail of suffering, some quickly satiated desire that survives, with the life in death of old paralytic vice, to see itself cursed by its woeful progeny—­some tragic mark of kinship in the one brief life to the far-stretching life that went before, and to the life that is to come after, such as has raised the pity and terror of men ever since they began to discern between will and destiny.  But these things are often unknown to the world, for there is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence.  There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman forever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer—­committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears.  Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.

In the same novel we are told, that—­

    To the end of men’s struggles a penalty will remain for those who sink
    from the ranks of the heroes into the crowd for whom the heroes fight
    and die.

The same teaching is to be found in the motto of Daniel Deronda, where we are bidden to fear the evil tendencies of our own souls.

  Let thy chief terror be of thine own soul: 
  There, ’mid the throng of hurrying desires
  That trample o’er the dead to seize their spoil,
  Lurks vengeance, footless, irresistible
  As exhalations laden with slow death,
  And o’er the fairest troop of captured joys
  Breathes pallid pestilence.

The manner in which George Eliot believes Nemesis works out her results has already been indicated.  Her effects do not appear in any outward and palpable results, necessarily; her method is often unknown to men, hidden even from the keenest eyes.  Evil causes produce evil results, that is all; and these are shown in the most subtle and secret results of what life is.  One of her methods is indicated in Adam Bede.