relations, or, in other words, the developing and perfecting in him of that Divine image in which he is made,—all things else, joy, beauty, life itself, are of account only to the degree in which they are consciously used to subserve that higher life.  His ultimate standard of value to which everything, alike in art and in social and political relations, is referred, is—not success, not enjoyment, whether sensuous, sentimental, or æsthetic, but—the measure in which may thereby be trained up that higher life of humanity.  Art is to him God’s minister, not when she is simply true to nature, but solely when true to nature in such forms and phases as shall tend to bring man nearer to moral truth, beauty, and purity.  The Ios and Ariadnes of the debased Italian schools, the boors of Teniers, the Madonnas of Guido, are truer to one phase of nature than are Fra Angelico’s angels, or Tintoret’s Crucifixion.  But that nature is humanity as degraded by sense; and therefore the measure of their truthfulness is for him also the measure of their debasement.

In poetry, the key-note so firmly struck by Wordsworth in his noble “Ode to Duty” has been as firmly and more delicately caught up by other singers; who,

moreover, have seen more clearly than Wordsworth did, that it is for faith, not for sight, that duty wears

“The Godhead’s most benignant grace;”

for the path along which she leads is inevitably on earth steep, rugged, and toilsome.  Take almost any one of Tennyson’s more serious poems, and it will be found pervaded by the thought of life as to be fulfilled and perfected only through moral endurance and struggle.  “Ulysses” is no restless aimless wanderer; he is driven forth from inaction and security by that necessity which impels the higher life, once begun within, to press on toward its perfecting this all-possible sorrow, peril, and fear.  “The Lotos-eaters” are no mere legendary myth: they shadow forth what the lower instincts of our humanity are ever urging us all to seek—ease and release from the ceaseless struggle against wrong, the ceaseless straining on toward right.  “In Memoriam” is the record of love “making perfect through suffering:” struggling on through the valley of the shadow of death toward the far-off, faith-seen light “behind the veil.”  “The Vision of Sin” portrays to us humanity choosing enjoyment as its only aim; and of necessity sinking into degradation so profound, that even the large heart and clear eye of the poet can but breathe out in sad bewilderment, “Is there any hope?”—can but dimly see, far off over the darkness, “God make Himself an awful rose of dawn.”  In one of the most profound of all His creations

—“The Palace of Art”—we have presented to us the soul surrounding itself with everything fair and glad, and in itself pure, not primarily to the eye, but to the mind: attempting to achieve its destiny and to fulfil its life in the perfections of intellectual beauty and æsthetic delight.  But the palace of art, made the palace of the soul, becomes its dungeon-house, self-generating and filling fast with all loathsome and deathly shapes; and the heaven of intellectual joy becomes at last a more penetrative and intenser hell.  The “Idylls of the King” are but exquisite variations on the one note—that the only true and high life of humanity is the life of full and free obedience; and that such life on earth becomes of necessity one of struggle, sorrow, outward loss and apparent failure.  In “Vivien”—the most remarkable of them all for the subtlety of its conception and the delicacy of its execution,—the picture is perhaps the darkest and saddest time can show—that of a nature rich to the utmost in all lower wisdom of the mind, struggling long and apparently truly against the flesh, yet all the while dallying with the foul temptation, till the flesh prevails; and in a moment, swift and sure as the lightning, moral and spiritual death swoops down, and we see the lost one no more.

Many other illustrations might be given from our noblest and truest poetry—from the works of the Brownings, the “Saints’ Tragedy” of Charles Kingsley, the dramatic poems of Henry Taylor—of the

extent to which it is vitally, even where not formally Christian; the extent to which the truth of the Cross has transfused it, and become one chief source of its depth and power.  But we must hasten on to our more immediate object in these remarks.

Those who read works of fiction merely for amusement, may be surprised that it should be thought possible they could be vehicles for conveying to us the deepest practical truth of Christianity,—that the highest life of man only begins when he begins to accept and to bear the Cross; and that the conscious pursuit of happiness as his highest aim tends inevitably to degrade and enslave him.  Even those who read novels more thoughtfully, who recognise in them a great moral force acting for good or evil on the age, may be startled to find George Eliot put forward as the representative of this higher-toned fiction, and as entitled to take place beside any of those we have named for the depth and force, the consistency and persistence, with which she has laboured to set before us the Christian, and therefore the only exhaustively true, ideal of life.

Yet a careful examination will, we are satisfied, show that from her first appearance before the public, this thought, and the specific purpose of this teaching, have never been absent from the writer’s mind; that it may be defined as the central aim of all her works: and that it gathers in force, condensation, and power throughout the series.  Other qualities George Eliot

has, that would of themselves entitle her to a very high place among the teachers of the time.  In largeness of Christian charity, in breadth of human sympathy, in tenderness toward all human frailty that is not vitally base and self-seeking, in subtle power of finding “a soul of goodness even in things apparently evil,” she has not many equals, certainly no superior, among the writers of the day.  Throughout all her works we shall look in vain for one trace of the fierce self-opinionative arrogance of Carlyle, or the narrow dogmatic intolerance of Ruskin: though we shall look as vainly for one word or sign that shall, on the mere ground of intellectual power, energy, and ultimate success, condone the unprincipled ambition of a Frederick, so-called the Great, and exalt him into a hero; or find in the cold heart and mean sordid soul of a Turner an ideal, because one of those strange physiological freaks that now and then startle the world, the artist’s temperament and artist’s skill, were his beyond those of any man of his age.  But as our object here is to attempt placing her before the reader as asserting and illustrating the highest life of humanity, as a true preacher of the doctrine of the Cross, even when least formally so, we leave these features, as well as her position as an artist, untouched on, the rather that they have all been already discussed by previous critics.

The ‘Scenes of Clerical Life,’ delicately outlined as they are, still profess to be but sketches.  In them,

however, what we have assumed to be the great moral aim of the writer comes distinctly out; and even within the series itself gathers in clearness and power.  Self-sacrifice as the Divine law of life, and its only true fulfilment; self-sacrifice, not in some ideal sphere sought out for ourselves in the vain spirit of self-pleasing, but wherever God has placed us, amid homely, petty anxieties, loves, and