The later works of George Eliot were extremely successful in a pecuniary way. She received but fifteen hundred dollars for Scenes of Clerical Life. But Middlemarch brought her forty thousand dollars, and Daniel Deronda nearly as much more. Only one other female author has rivaled George Eliot as regards financial rewards of her work-Mrs. Humphry Ward. Upon the death of Mr. Lewes, after a year and a half of virtual widowhood, George Eliot was married May 6, 1880, at St. George's, Hanover Square, London, to Mr. John Walter Cross. Mr. Cross was much younger than his bride, and had long been a valued and esteemed friend of both herself and Mr. Lewes. Says Locker-Lampson of the new union :

George Eliot's more transcendental friends never forgave her for marrying. In a morally immoral manner they washed their virtuous hands of her. I could not help thinking it was the most natural thing for the poor woman to do. She was a heavily laden but interesting derelict, tossing among the breakers, without oars or rudder, and all at once the brave Cross arrives, throws her a rope, and gallantly tows her into harbor.

A little more than seven months after her marriage with Mr. Cross George Eliot passed into that realm where Time himself "shall furl his wings and cease to be." The funeral of Mr. Lewes had been held in the mortuary chapel in Highgate Cemetery, and there the funeral of George Eliot was also held. It was a day of snow and slush, and a bitter wind was blowing, "but still," avers an eyewitness, "there was a remarkable gathering from all parts of England." Of her burial place a writer in the London Chronicle says:

When you get to the top of Swain's Lane you see two gates; take the one on the right and, entering, keep to the left. The path sweeps round a little hillock, and in a few steps you see in front of you a great block of buildings. This is St. Pancras Infirmary. You keep straight on until you come to the last turning to the left; take that, and after ten yards you come on a plain gray granite obelisk and pedestal, together not more than ten feet high. Without your attention being called to this quiet memorial, amid so many elaborate commemorations of sorrow, you would pass it unnoted. But stop a moment and read. This is what you see:

"Of those immortal dead who live again

In minds made better by their presence."

Here lies the Body of
"George Eliot,"
Mary Ann Cross.

Born 22 November, 1819;

Died 22 December, 1880.

That is the simple yet eloquent inscription cut on the granite pedestal in severely plain letters of gold. The Spartan brevity and simplicity of it is in keeping with the great writer's life and philosophy. And the inevitableness of the "common lot" is unconsciously emphasized by the fact that on her right is a monument more ornate than her own, chronicling the death of an unknown family. Here, facing the east and the rising sun, lies the ashes of one who bore a proud name in the brilliant roll of English literature, resting after a busy life of earnest purpose and much great work accomplished. Many may regret that a more conspicuous, a more elaborate monument does not mark the Friedensheim of the author of Middlemarch, Felix Holt, Adam Bede, and Romola. These have to be reminded that George Eliot's most "enduring brass" is to be found in her works and the memory of her life.

The attainments of George Eliot were remarkably extensive. She was a classical scholar, and to her familiarity with the principal modern languages she added an acquaintance with Russian and modern Greek. She was widely learned in the physical sciences, the arts and philosophies, and was a profound student in the history of human thought and investigation. The pe. culiar characteristics of her mind were acute analysis, unerring perception of fitness and relation, a luxuriant but chastened fancy, and a rare and delightful energy of expression. Her style is a compound of classicism and didacticism, of scientific technicality and broad colloquialism. Not one of her countrywomen of this or any former period, excepting Mrs. Browning, can compare with her in expressive ability, keenness of discrimination, and forceful and elegant English. Among female writers what Mrs. Browning is in poetry George Eliot is in prose. Though not so much given to the use of the incisive and vigorous Saxon words with which our language abounds as Mrs. Browning was, yet she fully equaled her in knowledge of the delicate shades of difference in nearly synonymous terms, while she easily surpassed her in methods of technical utterance and the fullness of her vocabulary. The mantle of highpriestess of British novelists, the peeress of Dickens and Thackeray, and the greatest of that trio of great female story writers, Jane Austin, Charlotte Bronté, and George Eliot, lies where she dropped it. Who shall be worthy to wear it after

her?

James B. Kenyon.

ART. VI.-RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IN ENGLAND BETWEEN PURITAN AND METHODIST.

THE period between Puritan and Methodist began, in England, with one reaction and ended with another. The first reaction was against extreme Puritanism, the other against extreme deism. The first reaction began with the return of a king to his kingdom, the other with the entrance of a Christian scholar into the religious world. Charles II and John Wesley mark the limits of the latest period of English irreligion.

The Cromwells had died. The Commonwealth had passed away, not so much for a lack of Cromwells as for a lapse of the old Puritan spirit, which sought by means of armaments and parliaments to institute a "kingdom of God" on earth. Puritanism had made godliness the standard, but Puritanism was without a standard godliness, inasmuch as, in spite of its nobleness of purpose and strength of will and strenuousness of effort, Puritanism was limited by her narrowness and weakened by her pettiness, and in the name of godliness soon exhibited the tyranny of spirit it had condemned under the name of king. Puritanism had stood for religion, but religion had be come politics, and politics had narrowed the nobler idea to the confines of a limiting theory.

From the death of the first Cromwell, in 1658, to the return of the exile King Charles, in 1660, a whole age seemed to pass over England. The sober dress of the Puritan was changed to the gaudy dress of the cavalier; the holy twang was displaced by ribaldry of speech and flippancy of utterance; the demeanor of life passed from a too severe seriousness to a most detestable levity. In Parliament, where the stern-faced Puritans had sat in their gloomy righteousness, now gathered cavaliers whose passions, suppressed by the events of the last two decades, found issue in statutes more revolutionary than the mandates of Cromwell. The official body which had removed the crown, and the head with it, from Charles I now placed the scepter more firmly in the hand of Charles II.

Ecclesiastically, Puritanism was exchanged for episcopacy; morally, pleasure, too base to be called frivolous, displaced austere gravity of manners; religiously, the revolution in charac

38-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. XIII.

ter was attended by a revolution in thought, and these changes passed to such an extreme that the second reaction was expressed in the greatest revival in religion the world has known. The Pentecostal revival soon lost its power in the baseness of Rome, but modern evangelism is reaching and vivifying the entire world.

The moral purpose of the period was to find a basis for ethics independent of revelation. It is noticeable, however, that men who would free themselves from the strictures of superhuman authority seek such freedom by a method which will protect them against such an authority should it unexpectedly exist. Hence, between Puritan and Methodist, religion must be retained; for its necessity was admitted, though its divine sanctions must be removed, as their inconvenience was manifest. Men assented to the existence of objective truth, to which the mind might reach upward from below, but which could not be imparted from above. A universal human scholarship not a divine inspiration seemed possible.

The human mind, therefore, must seek its religion, since none could be revealed. The method the mind should adopt, the direction in which it should seek, and the inspiration of the quest were determined by the intellectual elements of the age, expressing themselves in ethics, in philosophy, and in science. In ethics five men are representative. Hobbes, deriving morality from self-interest and finding moral sanction in the royal will; Cudworth, deriving morality from reason; Shaftesbury, from good will; Hutcheson, from good taste; and Bolingbroke, from pleasure, good or bad, indicate the progress of the ethical thought of England during the period under review. Hobbes had set the pace, and it was in vain that Cudworth and Shaftesbury and Hutcheson emphasized æsthetic morality; the nation, with God undeified, passed beyond such influences to an age whose moralist was Bolingbroke. The Puritan had cut clean to the bedrock of moral obligation, and in such an age only as thin a blade as his could cut so deep. When ethical thought dulled its edge on moral theory devoid of divine sanction the foundations were not uncovered, and vice and crime sprang up amid the ruins of an effete morality. Life without the inspiration of God soon lacked, also, the aspirations of man. Philosophy, too, added her ingredient to the character of the

thought of the time. The voice of Francis Bacon calling men to the study of nature, and of Descartes calling men to the study of man, were heard; Locke, inquiring into the origin of knowledge, taught men that religious knowledge, also, might be uncertain; while Spinoza, critically examining the scriptural writings, cast a shadow upon the authority it had been assumed the Scriptures possessed. The nation was accustomed to change; they had seen political and social changes innumerable; old things had been rapidly passing away; new things had been speedily displaced by newer things; a transition in religion was compatible with the experience of the times.

The transition began with a destructive process. In the earlier part of the period Lord Herbert, Blount, and Hobbes had viewed religion from a political standpoint, and had found it inimical to the political spirit. But with the opening of the eighteenth century the lead of Locke was followed by Toland and Shaftesbury, who examined the first principles of religion, while Collins and Woolston, following the guidance of Spinoza, critically attacked the miracles of Christ and the prophecies of the Old Testament as evidences of Christianity. The constructive! process followed. Even beneath the attacks of the destructive writers lurked a half-expressed consciousness of deity; the defenders of Christianity, also, impressed the thought of the time with the religious sense, while the religious sense itself could not be satisfied with the negations of the earlier writers. But whither should men turn to find that God whose existence and character revelation had not revealed? Man must have a God; the spirit of the age, making its appeal to reason, sought a solution of the mystery of the divine existence in the nature which that God had made, and which reason was revealing. The world was being brought into the light of human knowledge. The discoveries of science had revealed the wideness of the universe and the uniformity of creation and the reign of law. As men turned away from the old, which was depreciated by the new criticism, they instinctively laid hold of the new, just rising clear and attractive from a long neglect. Nature, forgotten during the long process of speculative thought, offered an attractive source from which might be drawn what the soul of man instinctively felt must be possessed, a sense of divine relationship. Natural religion was to take the place of re