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THE CONGRESS OE WOMEN.
and does nothing but what is graceful. The real heroes of God’s making are quite different; they have their natural heritages of love and conscience, which they drew in with their mothers’ milk; they know one or two of those deep spiritual truths which are only to be won by long wrestling with their own sins and their own sorrows; they have earnest faith and strength so far as they have done genuine work, but the rest is dry, barren theory, blank prejudice, vague hearsay.”
In her fictitious world the heroes and heroines grow by a series of misfortunes and mistakes to know their weaknesses and conquer them. “ No man is matriculated to the art of life till he has been well tempted.” Heroism consists in facing the results of mistakes, not succumbing to them.
George Eliot’s princes of darkness are not intrinsically bad, but are fallen angels like Tito Melema, Hetty Poyser and Rosamond Vincy—fallen through a persistent course of self-indulgence.
But, as Mr. Farebrother says, “You have not only got the old Adam within yourself against you, but you have got all those descendants of the original Adam, who form the society about you.” How to conquer the external Adam is the problem of social regeneration. In solving this problem the positivists have deduced from experience the same law that the Christians have by revelation, that self-interests must be sacrificed where they interfere with the interests of all. We are too closely bound together to have separate interests. “ So deeply inherent is it in this life of ours that men have to suffer for each other’s sins; so inevitably diffusive is human suffering that even justice makes its victims, and we can conceive no retribution that does not spread beyond its mark in pulsation of unmerited pain.”
Our duty, however, is not to extol nor condemn this religion of humanity; simply to ascertain as accurately as we can its place and value as a regenerator. The general theory of monotheism is that there is a Divine being, a God, who created the universe and man. Man is dual, consisting of an earthly or bodily life connecting him with the material universe, and a spiritual or soul life connecting him with his Creator. The generally accepted religion of the Western World—Christianity—has two laws, love thy God and love thy neighbor. These two were meant to be equally binding, but gradually, in the course of centuries, the second fell into disuse. The church imagined it was fulfilling the first law, but it is hard to love a being of whom one has no immediate knowledge. The idea of God became more and more indistinct. Theologians created gods from their own minds, whom they set up for worship, and these became the deities of the Christian Church. This error would have been avoided if the second law had been rigorously obeyed; for man was originally created in his Maker’s image, and the love of one’s neighbor, and the self-denial necessary thereto, would have taught man some of the most important attributes of divinity. The spark of divinity which God had placed in man—the soul—was smoldering for lack of fuel, and that once out man would be forever alienated from his Creator. Man had lost faith in the divinity within him, and was by his theology putting his God further and further away. Since the time of Luther there had been no widespread reformation among Christian nations, and they had reached such a state of religious torpor that one was necessary. The reformation of the nineteenth century has been to revivify the second commandment, “Love thy neighbor.” The folly lay in ignoring the first law, love thy God. Dogmatism said, “ There is a God;” and skepticism, reacting from that, said, “ How do you know? We know nothing but what we can prove.” They denied in toto the Divine authority of both commandments, but deduced the second from human experience.
God has two means of revelation—his material creation and the spiritual nature of his creature, man. Communicating through the spiritual natures of the first races of men, he had by inspiration, so-called, produced a Bible or written law, and afterward, through his special prophet Christ, a more advanced Gospel. This had been accepted by the church as sole authority, and its correlative nature had been ignored. Without this key or safeguard against misinterpretation, God’s written law became a