THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
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blind guide. In the course of time man so tortured its meaning, so overlaid it with his own misconceptions, that church Christianity became null as a means of regeneration to the average man. The reformers very naturally took the other extreme, and, ignoring God’s written law, exalted his natural law. They would believe only in such a good as they could learn from nature. As far as it goes, nature is a more accurate expositor of God than the revealed word, but it is incomplete, since it cannot reveal man’s spiritual nature nor its own origin. The Bible and nature were meant to be complements, and by adopting one and denying the other the reformers made themselves liable to error. The natural scientists were the more liable because their investigations ceased at animal nature, and it was easier there to deny a Creator than for the sociologists, who carried their studies on to man’s social and higher nature. Thus arose materialism, which would naturally become popular with a large class of people who were ready to accept any religion that released them from obedience to a spiritual law.
Each new thinker in this new movement took a step in advance, and we shall now see how George Eliot advanced upon Comte. She belonged to the class of investigators who were studying the higher nature of man. She believed in its spiritual existence, and in studying and expounding its laws she drew nearer the truth that it must have a Divine origin. She believed in a Divine element in man that had its own laws and could live at least partly independent of material. “Justice is like the kingdom of God—it is not without us as a fact, it is within us as a great yearning.”
George Eliot not only had faith in the Divine element in man to help him make this decision: “ You must have it inside you that your plan is right;” but she believed in its partial independence of material causes; in this she advanced upon Comte. She believed, also, that this divinity grew 7 , and by its growth became human regeneration. The method of its growth w 7 as by sorrow 7 and by love. “ It w 7 ould not be well for us to overleap one grade of joy or suffering; our life would soon lose its completeness and beauty.”
She believed in the self-regenerating pow-er of love, not to the recipient, but to the lover. With Romola, Dorothea and Milly Barton, to love was a “ Divine necessity;” they had a “ sublime capacity ” for it. Dempster’s love for his mother w r as the only hope of regeneration in his degraded nature.
The love of the best we know is Carlyle’s idea of hero-w 7 orship: “We needs must love the highest when we see it.” Through the best human love, Browming leads his men up to a Divine love. And George Eliot also, in Adam Bebe, says: “ Our love at its highest flood rushes beyond its object and loses itself in the sense of Divine mystery! ” And: “The growth of higher feeling w-ithin us is like the grow'th of faculty, bringing with it a sense of added strength; we can no more wish to return to a narrower sympathy than a painter or musician can wish to return to his cruder manner, or a philosopher to his less complete formula! ”
This belief in the power of human beings, to save each other from soul destruction by leading them to a Divine love, is a great advance upon Comte, because it implies a God and His direct communication with at least some of His creatures. There comes a time in the life of all when the human helpers fail. Janet’s last temptation came when she was alone, and it w r as an impulse rather than a resolution that finally caused her to dash the brandy bottle dowrn. Romola, after she lost faith in Savonarola, fled again from duty, until some unseen pow 7 er floated her to the pestilence-stricken village, and she learned God’s love afresh. To what then has George Eliot’s conscientious study of humanity led her, and how 7 far from the materialists and Comte? To a belief in the divinity in man that is directly dependent on a Divine source. That she does not altogether believe her own conclusions seems to be proven by her life. That she had learned to depend on human love, without looking sufficiently at the Divine love beyond, seems to be the secret of her marriage to Mr. Cross. She dreaded loneliness. She felt no companionship with an unseen power, though she might believe in its existence. She had worked out her problem carefully and slowly, but in doing