The lesson comes to us in the quiet unselfish love, the sweet hourly self-devotion of the “Milly” of Amos Barton, so touchingly free and full that it never recognises itself as self-devotion at all.  In “Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story” we have it taught affirmatively through the deep unselfishness of Mr Gilfil’s love to Tina, and his willingness to offer up even this, the one hope and joy of his life, upon the altar of duty; negatively, through the hard, cold, callous, self-pleasing of Captain Wybrow—­a type of character which, never repeated, is reproduced with endless variations and modifications in nearly all the author’s subsequent works.  It is, however, in “Janet’s Repentance” that the power of the author is put most strongly forth, and also that what we conceive to be the vital aim of her works is most definitely and firmly pronounced.  Here also we have illustrated that breadth of nature, that power of discerning the true and good under whatsoever external form it may wear, which is almost a necessary adjunct of the author’s true and large ideal of the Christian life.  She goes, it might almost seem, out of her way to select, from that theological school with which her whole nature is most entirely at dissonance, one of her most touching illustrations of a life struggling on towards its highest through contempt, sorrow, and death.  That narrowest of all sectarianisms, which arrogates to itself the name Evangelical, and which holds up as the first aim to every man the saving of his own individual soul, has furnished to her Mr Tryan, whose life is based on the principle laid down by the one great Evangelist, “He that loveth his soul shall lose it; he that hateth his soul shall keep it unto life eternal.” {15}

Mr Tryan, as first represented to us, is not an engaging figure.  Narrow and sectarian, full of many uncharities, to a great extent vain and self-conscious, glad to be flattered and idolised by men and women by no means of large calibre or lofty standard—­it might well seem impossible to invest such a figure with one heroic element.  Yet it is before this man we are constrained to bow down in reverence, as before one truer, greater, nobler than ourselves; and as we stand with Janet Dempster beside the closing grave, we may well feel that one is gone from among us whose mere presence made it less hard to fight our battle against “the world, the flesh, and the devil.”  The explanation of the paradox is not far to seek.  The principle which animated the life now withdrawn from sight—­which raised it above all its littlenesses and made it a witness for God and His Christ, constraining even the scoffers to feel the presence of “Him who is invisible”—­this principle was self-sacrifice.  So at least the imperfections of human speech lead us to call that which stands in antagonism to self-pleasing; but before Him to whom all things are open, what we so call is the purification and exaltation of that self in us which is the highest created reflex of His image—­the growing up of it into His likeness for ever.