“There is no short cut, no patent tram-road to wisdom.  After all the centuries of invention, the soul’s path lies through the thorny wilderness, which must be still trodden in solitude, with bleeding feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old time.”

He also discourses of the gain which it is to man that the future is hidden from his knowledge,

“So absolute is our soul’s need of something hidden and uncertain for the maintenance of that doubt and hope and effort which are the breath of its life, that if the whole future were laid bare to us beyond to-day, the interest of all mankind would be bent on the hours that lie between; we should pant after the uncertainties of our one morning and our one afternoon; we should rush fiercely to the exchange for our last possibility of speculation, of success, of disappointment; we should have a glut of political prophets foretelling a crisis or a no-crisis within the only twenty-four hours left open to prophecy.  Conceive the condition of the human mind if all propositions whatsoever were self-evident except one, which was to become self-evident at the close of a summer’s day, but in the mean time might be the subject of question, of hypothesis, of debate.  Art and philosophy, literature and science, would fasten like bees on that one proposition that had the honey of probability in it, and be the more eager because their enjoyment would end with sunset.  Our impulses, our spiritual activities, no more adjust themselves to the idea of their future reality than the beating of our heart, or the irritability of our muscles.”

All is hidden from man that does not grow out of human experience, and it is better so.  Such is George Eliot’s method of dealing with our craving for a higher wisdom and a direct revelation.  Such wisdom and such revelation are not to be had, and they would not help man if he had them.  The mystery of existence rouses his curiosity, stimulates his powers, develops art, religion, sympathy, and all that is best in human life.  In her presentations of the men and women most affected by religious motives she adheres to this theory, and represents them as impelled, not by the sense of God’s presence, but by purely human considerations.  She makes Dorothea Brooke say,—­

“I have always been thinking of the different ways in which Christianity is taught, and whenever I find one way that makes it a wider blessing than any other, I cling to that as the truest—­I mean that which takes in the most good of all kinds, and brings in the most people as sharers in it.”

Of the same character is the belief which comforts Dorothea, and takes the place to her of prayer.

“That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are a part of the divine power against evil—­widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.”

Mr. Tryan, in Janet’s Repentance, is a most ardent disciple of Evangelicalism, and accepts all its doctrines; but George Eliot contrives to show throughout the book, that all the value of his work and religion consisted in the humanitarian spirit of renunciation he awakened.