The question may be raised by some of George Eliot’s readers whether it constitutes the best and completest ethical teaching that fiction can attain, to bring before its readers such high ideals of the possibilities of humanity—­of the aim and purpose of life toward which it should ever aspire.  Were the author’s canvas occupied with such portraitures alone—­with Romolas and Fedalmas, Dinah Morrises and Dorothea Brookes, Daniel Derondas and Adam Bedes, even Mr Tryans and Mr Gilfils—­the question might call for full discussion, and a contrast might be unfavourably drawn between the author and him whose emphatic praise it is that he “holds the mirror up to nature.”  But the great artist for all time brings before us not only an Iago and an Edmund, an Angelo and an Iachimo, a Regan and a Goneril, but a Miranda and an Imogen, an Isabella and a Viola, a Cordelia and a Desdemona, with every conceivable intermediate shade of human character and life; and in George Eliot we have the same clearly-defined contrasts and endless variety.  That a Becky Sharp and a Beatrix Castlewood are drawn with the consummate skill and force of the most perfect artist in his own special sphere our age has produced, few will be disposed to deny:  and that they have momentous lessons to teach us all,—­that they may by sheer antagonism rouse some from dreams of selfish vanity and corruption, and awaken within some germ of better and purer elements of life,—­will scarcely be disputed.  But it is not from these, or such as these, that the highest and noblest, the purest and most penetrative, the most extended and enduring teaching and elevation of the world has come.  That has come emphatically from Him whose self-chosen name, “the Son of Man,” designates Him the ideal of humanity on earth; Him who is at once the “Lamb of God” and “the Lion of the tribe of Judah,” the “Good Shepherd,” and the stern and fearless but ever-righteous Judge—­the concentration of all tender and holy love, and of divinest scorn of, and revulsion from, everything mean and false in humanity; Him who for the repentant sinner has no harsher word of rebuke than “Go and sin no more,” and who over the self-righteous, self-wrapt, all-despising Pharisees thundered back, to His own ultimate destruction, His terrible “Woe unto you hypocrites.”  He too stands out, not isolated or severed, but prominent, amid every conceivable phase and gradation of human character, from a John to a Judas; touches each and all at some point of living contact; meets them with tender sympathy, with gentle patience, and pitying love, over their weaknesses and falls.  Can the true artist err in aiming, according to his nature or to the purity and elevation of his genius, to approach in his portraitures such ideals as this great typical exemplar of our humanity, whose influence has for eighteen centuries been stealing down into the hearts and souls of men to elevate and refine, and who is now, and who is more and more becoming, the paramount factor in individual character, and in social and political relations?  Or can such ideals, presented before us, fail to arouse in some degree the better elements of our humanity, and to lead us to strive toward the realisation of these?