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THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

was an outgrowth of the system of investigation and method of thought used by Dar­win and his scientific contempories. It has been also a great impetus to the growth of the materialistic, as opposed to the spiritualistic, theory of the origin of man. A belief in the law of evolution does not now necessarily imply a disbelief in a Divine Creator, but for a long time it did. The fallacy lay in the supposition that law was itself a creator, and not a method of action. The scientists of the century have done a missionary work in discovering and explaining laws of nature; but they have made the mistake of deifying law, as the positivists have man.

A third pebble was John Henry Newman, and the Oxford movement. The Tractarian gospel was a protest against the formalism of the Established Church. It wished to convince churchmen that they did not belong to a mere national institution, but to a living branch of that great Catholic Church which Christ had founded eight­een centuries ago. They wished to make the dry bones live, to turn formal devotions into joyous acts of faith and piety. Coleridge had partly paved the way for this movement in calling attention to the writings of the earlier Anglican divines and in his transcendental philosophy. Both Newman and Coleridge were as far as possi­ble from the materialists in most points; they only agreed in opposition to the old dogmatism, and belief in a divine element in man. They differed on the source of this divinity—Coleridge and Newman deriving it from God, the materialists from nature. Coleridge, being more of a philosopher, turned to Unitarianism; Newman, a devotionist, to Roman Catholicism. The apparent result of Tractarianism was the rise of Ritualism, and a great revival in the charities which had become a neglected fringe upon the garment of the church. The practical outcome of Positivism and Ritualism was the same—a greater devotion to the needs of humanity.

Another pebble in the pool of English thought was the iconoclast, Thomas Carlyle. He was not the founder of any philosophy, but as a fearless disciple of truth he demolished many idols of dogmatism. He might be called the grand Eng­lish skeptic. If, like a reckless pioneer, he sometimes blazed the wrong tree, yet he most effectively cleared out the underbrush, and gave those who came after him a chance to see his mistakes and avoid them. He carried with him a healthful mental breeze that has cleared the fogs from the brain of many a young student.

To this period, skeptical in religion, scientific in method, philosophical in thought, fond of prose, drama and the novel in literature, belongs George Eliot. We now wish to show that in antecedents, education, temperament, and in her writings, she repre­sents the mass of her contemporaries—is a type of her era.

Her birthplace was in the Midlands, where the good, old-fashioned agricultural and Tory element was just beginning to feel the encroachments of the manufacturing towns, but had not yet lost the rural characteristics. Mr. Gross says of her: “ Her roots were down in the pre-railroad, pre-telegraphic period—the fine old days of leisure—but the fruit was found during an era of extraordinary activity in scientific and mechanical discovery.”

Her father was a Tory of the best type—conscientious in his business, thorough in his work, and naturally conservative. She has represented him in Adam Bede and Caleb Garth. And what she says of Caleb Garth was no doubt true of her father: “Though he had never regarded himself as other than an orthodox Christian, and would argue on prevenient grace, if the subject were proposed to him, I think his vir­tual divinities were good practical schemes, accurate work, and the faithful comple­tion of undertakings; his prince of darkness was a slack workman.” Her mother was a shrewd, practical woman of much natural force, and with a dash of Mrs. Poyser’s wit.

This love of old and aversion to change, link her with her countrymen. The average Englishman of the middle of the century had his origin in such communities as those described in Adam Bede, Silas Marner, Felix Holt and Mill on the Floss. To fully understand the average man of the century, we must know not only the French influences that worked upon him, but the good English soil from which he sprung; not only the liberal thought of his later life, but the narrow conventionalism of his childhood.