is brought at once face to face with scenes and persons that act as enchantment on him; and this complete absorption of interest never flags to the end.  The elements of this fascination, which is in itself so simple, natural and human, have been pointed out by various critics.  They are to be found in the homeliness, pathos and naturalness of the whole story from beginning to end.  Little as the critics have noted it, however, much of this fascination comes of the high and pure moral tone of the story, its grasp on the higher motives and interests of life, and its undertone of yearning after a religious motive and ideal adequate to all the problems of human destiny.  This religious motive is indeed more than a yearning, for it is a fixed and self-contained confidence in altruism, expressed in sympathy and feeling and pathos most tender and passionate.  This novel is full of an eager desire to realize to men their need of each other, and of longing to show them how much better and happier the world would be if we were more sympathetic and had more of fellow-feeling.  Life is full of suffering, and this can be lessened only as we help and love each other, only as we can make our feelings so truly tender as to feel the sorrows of others as our own, causing us to live for the good of those who suffer.  It is said of Adam Bede that—­

He had too little fellow-feeling with the weakness that errs in spite of foreseen consequences.  Without this fellow-feeling, how are we to get enough patience and charity toward our stumbling, falling companions in the long and changeful journey?  And there is but one way in which a strong determined soul can learn it—­by getting his heart-strings bound round the weak and erring, so that he must share not only the outward consequence of their error but their inward suffering.

This compassion for human suffering is conspicuous throughout, and it is regarded as the most effective means of binding men together in common sympathy and helpfulness.  Sorrow is regarded as the true means of man’s elevation, as that purifying agent which is indispensable to his true development.  This teaching is fully depicted in the chapter headed “The Hidden Dread,” and in which Hetty’s flight is described.  We are told in that chapter that this looks like a very bright world on the surface, but that as we look closer within man’s nature we find sorrow and pain untold.

What a glad world this looks like, as one drives or rides along the valleys and over the hills!  I have often thought so when, in foreign countries, where the fields and woods have looked to me like our English Loamshire:  the rich land tilled with just as much care, the woods rolling down the gentle slopes to the green meadows—­I have come on something by the roadside which has reminded me that I am not in Loamshire—­an image of a great agony—­the agony of the Cross.  It has stood, perhaps, by the clustering apple-blossoms, or in the broad sunshine by the