hope in her heart and an inspiring purpose to her mind.  With Goethe and Carlyle she found in work for humanity the substitute for all faith and the cure for all doubt.  Faust finds for his life a purpose, and for the universe a solution, when he comes to labor for the practical improvement of humanity.  This was George Eliot’s own conclusion, that it is enough for us to see the world about us made a little better and more orderly by our efforts.  All her noblest characters find in altruism a substitute for religion, and they find there a moral anchorage.  She says very plainly in Middlemarch, that every doctrine is capable of “eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.”  To the same effect is her saying in Romola, that “with the sinking of the high human trust the dignity of life sinks too; we cease to believe in our own better self, since that also is a part of the common nature which is degraded in our thought; and all the finer impulses of the soul are dulled.”  In Janet’s Repentance she has finely presented this faith in sympathetic humanitarianism, showing how Janet found peace in the sick-room where all had been doubt and trial before.

Day after day, with only short intervals of rest, Janet kept her place in that sad chamber.  No wonder the sick-room and the lazaretto have so often been a refuge from the tossings of intellectual doubt—­a place of repose for the worn and wounded spirit.  Here is a duty about which all creeds and all philosophies are at one:—­here, at least, the conscience will not be dogged by doubt—­the benign impulse will not be checked by adverse theory:  here you may begin to act without settling one preliminary question.  To moisten the sufferer’s parched lips through the long night-watches, to bear up the drooping head, to lift the helpless limbs, to divine the want that can find no utterance beyond the feeble motion of the hand or beseeching glance of the eye—­these are offices that demand no self-questionings, no casuistry, no assent to propositions, no weighing of consequences.  Within the four walls where the stir and glare of the world are shut out, and every voice is subdued,—­where a human being lies prostrate, thrown on the tender mercies of his fellow,—­the moral relation of man to man is reduced to its utmost clearness and simplicity:  bigotry cannot confuse it, theory cannot pervert it, passion, awed into quiescence, can neither pollute nor perturb it.  As we bend over the sick-bed all the forces of our nature rush towards the channels of pity, of patience and of love, and sweep down the miserable choking drift of our quarrels, our debates, our would-be wisdom, and our clamorous, selfish desires.  This blessing of serene freedom from the importunities of opinion lies in all simple, direct acts of mercy, and is one source of that sweet calm which is often felt by the watcher in the sick-room, even when the duties there