In the same novel the effect of wrong-doing is regarded as an inward and subduing fear of the consequences of our conduct.  This dread so commonly felt, and made a most effective motive by all religions, George Eliot regards as the soul’s testimony to the great law of retribution.  Experience that moral causes produce moral effects, as that law is every day taught us, takes hold of feeling, and becomes a nameless dread of the avenging powers.

Having once begun to explain away Baldassarre’s claim, Tito’s thought showed itself as active as a virulent acid, eating its rapid way through all the tissues of sentiment.  His mind was destitute of that dread which has been erroneously decried as if it were nothing higher than a man’s animal care for his own skin; that awe of the divine Nemesis which was felt by religious pagans, and, though it took a more positive form under Christianity, is still felt by the mass of mankind simply as a vague fear at anything which is called wrong-doing.  Such terror of the unseen is so far above mere sensual cowardice that it will annihilate that cowardice:  it is the initial recognition of a moral law restraining desire, and checks the hard bold scrutiny of imperfect thought into obligations which can never be proved to have any sanctity in the absence of feeling.  “It is good,” sing the old Eumenides, in Aeschylus, “that fear should sit as the guardian of the soul, forcing it into wisdom—­good that men should carry a threatening shadow in their hearts under the full sunshine; else how shall they learn to revere the light?” That guardianship may become needless; but only when all outward law has become needless—­only when duty and love have united in one stream and made a common force. [Footnote:  Chapter XI.]

Another form in which Nemesis punishes us is described in the essay on “A Half-Breed” in The Impressions of Theophrastus Such.  Mixtus was a man with noble aims, but he was fascinated by Scintilla, and realized none of his ideals.  He was captivated by her prettiness, liveliness and music, and then he was captured on his worldly side.  She did not believe in “notions” and reforms, and he succumbed to her wishes.  As a result, his life was crippled, he was always unsatisfied with himself.  Of this form of retribution George Eliot says,—­

An early deep-seated love to which we become faithless has its unfailing Nemesis, if only in that division of soul which narrows all newer joys by the intrusion of regret and the established presentiment of change.  I refer not merely to the love of a person, but to the love of ideas, practical beliefs and social habits.  And faithlessness here means not a gradual conversion dependent on enlarged knowledge, but a yielding to seductive circumstance; not a conviction that the original choice was a mistake, but a subjection to incidents that flatter