condition of effective defence. The answer to the second question is supplied by the fact that the signatures to the royal deed of confirmation were appended in a full court, which must have been the Whitsuntide court. So, then, if Lanfranc's message about the Lombard masons was sent to Le Bec, as soon as possible after the execution of the royal deed of confirmation, and if Lanfranc had meanwhile fallen ill, he must have fallen ill within a few days, or at the utmost a few weeks, of the dissolution of the Whitsuntide gathering of the magnates regni. Now, it was within a few days, or at the utmost a few weeks, of that event that the letter of the new Pope reached England; and I suspect that the Pope's letter was the innocent cause of Lanfranc's illness.

For, certainly, that letter was all that was needed to set the already irate Prince in a blaze. His father had asserted, and he was bent upon asserting, four claims, unknown to England before the Conquest, upon ecclesiastical matters. One, and singularly enough, the first recorded by Eadmer, related to the recognition of a newly-appointed Pope; another, and that the second recorded by Eadmer, related to the receipt of Papal letters; the third, to ecclesiastical synods; and the fourth, to the excommunication of tenants-in-chief. On the third and fourth no casus belli could well have arisen at the time with which we are concerned, the June of 1088; but a difference might well have arisen upon the first and second. Urban's announcement of his succession reached Lanfranc between the middle and the end of June, and that announcement was as a spark to dry fuel. If Lanfranc read the letter without first showing it to the King, the second of the claims upon which, as the event showed, the King was resolved to stake his all, was infringed. And even if he showed it to the King before reading it, then, who and what was an Archbishop of Canterbury that he should presume to give advice to the Crown upon its contents? Otto, Bishop of Ostia, might be Pope, or Guibert, Archbishop of Ravenna, might be Pope; but the subject was one for him to decide, and not an Archbishop of Canterbury. It was thus that he spoke some years later to Anselm; and there can be no doubt that it was thus he claimed the right to speak, and little that it was thus he really spoke, to Lanfranc in the June of 1088.

On the whole, then, I suspect it was this letter of Urban's to Lanfranc that provoked the terrible ire of the despot. In which case, what better reply could Lanfranc make than remind the despot of his promise? "No man can keep all his promises," was the rejoinder.

Lanfranc was checkmated. It is hard to see what he could do. We know, taught by subsequent events of that dark and cruel

reign, that to have prolonged a discussion with such a man, and with such a man in such a temper, would have been worse than hopeless. What, then, was Lanfranc to do? Bowed down with incessant labours, and with a length of years which had surpassed by a decade the longer span of life assigned us by the Psalmist, the ancient prelate could but pray as he had prayed fifteen years before, when, dark as was the sky, it was brightness itself to the storm he now saw gathering, and await the desired end. He could but pray that, if it were God's will, he might be released from the prison-house of the flesh-de ergastulo hujus carnis animam meam in sui sancti nominis confessione educatand leave the rest to God. The one lever by which he had once hoped to repress the tyrant's omnipotence for mischief had snapped in his hands, and there was no mending it. He prayed as he had prayed; and by the next Whitsuntide the chair of St. Augustine, around which he had shed a new lustre, stood vacant in his own glorious basilica at Canterbury.

If, then, these surmises be correct, Lanfranc, so far from being disloyal to the See to which he owed his pallium and his jurisdiction, died in its cause; and, so dying, accomplished a career unique in its manifold splendour of unexampled intellectual activity, and unrivalled literary conquest; of self-surrender and self-sacrifice, complete and absolute; of exhaustless enterprise in all that might conduce to the refinement and elevation of his halfbarbarous contemporaries in Normandy and in England; of exquisite prudence in the adjustment of rival claims vast and conflicting, and of single-hearted devotion to duty and to Heaven. MARTIN RULE, M.A.

ART. VI.-THE RELIGION OF GEORGE ELIOT.*

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WENTY volumes comprise George Eliot's message to her generation; but among them she has not reckoned the first, as is publicly stated, of her literary undertakings. That book itself we have never seen, and there may be some mistake in ascribing it to her; or perhaps she did not suffer it to rank with her remaining and wholly original works lest they, in so startling a connection, should be seldom read. What was the book, then? Well, it appears that she first came forward with a translation in her hand:-the version of a significant and much

*The following paper was written mostly in March last, as an integral part of the article on "The Genius of George Eliot," to which it now forms a conclusion.

criticized essay, known as "The Life of Jesus," by Frederick Strauss. And as we are taking up again our parable concerning this dead great woman, it seems not undesirable to touch, at least, upon the possibility of such a fact: for it strikes, we may say, the fundamental chord of her Credo, that "deep andante, moving in a bass of sorrow" which rolls so mournfully through the music of her writing. We need hardly remark that Strauss, in that first edition of his, throws himself into the attitude of the Mythical School; and that its peculiarity lies in this :-it blows away, as dust of a summer threshing-floor, all that is divine, miraculous, and superhuman in the history of our Lord; but upholds His moral teaching so far as it offers to mankind a pattern of perfect conduct and principles shining by their own light. For, as George Eliot would tell us, there are such principles in the New Testament, "that want no candle to show them :" and we may adore the ethical beauty of the Beatitudes, though shrinking from the belief of His disciples that "the Mouth which spake them was Divine." Thus the New Religion has decreed, and George Eliot teaches.

But let us take heed how we fall in with a plausible misconception. It is often said that George Eliot and the multitude whose oracle she is in Literature, are, as to their moral teaching indeed, Christian, only not dogmatic or metaphysical :-that they distinguish the Words of Christ from the Person of Christ, and are willing to receive whatsoever He has taught concerning good and evil, and the sources of rectitude. But is the new Morality Christian? We fear it is not, either in the theory which it lays down or the practice which carries it out. Unless Quietism be Christian morality-the true teaching of our LordPositivism is not Christian either. For, in the strange revolutions of this dizzy world, the sublime, but absurd and impossible, aphorisms of Madame de Guyon, and the "Maximes des Saints," have found men and women to admire them, to make them the sum of morality, to set them above churches and councils and all former systems of religion or of law,--though these very men and women do not believe in God. Atheism and Quietism have met together in the so-called Utilitarian doctrine of Stuart Mill and the Altruism, the Religion of Sympathy, wrought out by George Eliot. Wonderful enough, and yet true! For the Quietist, believing in God, shaped his moral system in the mould of that one principle which he termed Pure Love, saying that we must love God simply and always and in every sense for His own sake, not in any sense for ours; that to act with a view to reward is something evil; and that moral goodness and moral perfection are the same. Other springs of human action, he said, there must be none but love. Now then, let us

imagine that the supreme object of morality is not God, is something widely different: let us imagine there is no God for whose sake we can act, but instead of God the Race to which we belong,Humanity, in its length and breadth, surely, it is clear that we may still exalt Love as the sole and absolute source of goodness; we may still condemn the motive that has mingled with it regard for self. Religion will exist without an Infinite Living God, if it can behold in His empty Throne the crowned figure of Humankind, itself immortal though its members are doomed to perish ;-as Apuleius said, "Singillatim mortales, cunctim perpetui:"-and then Religion will be reasonably anthropomorphic; Adoration will have become sympathy; and therein will be viewed the finest exhibition and exercise of feeling within reach of our spirit. Religion will be Morality, grounded on the permanent advantage of well-doing to us all, justified as Bentham would justify it, by its inevitable sequel of happiness to us all, and made glorious by the emotion it must needs evoke when the individual casts away his life or his treasure in the cause of good; for the maintaining and preserving of that great human society apart from which no individual can in fact exist. To what a height of enthusiasm will not he ascend, who is the willing martyr of Humanity? Will he not count it his gain to draw into the radiance, as it were, of one starry moment, all the scattered light-beams of happiness and enthusiasm that might have made beautiful the longest life? Or, if he is so noble, will he not exchange his pleasure and success, whatever he could dream or hope to call his own, for that better time which he shall never behold, for the good his example may make possible when himself is mingled with the dust, and only his memory survives?

We can fancy George Eliot arguing more passionately still, asking us, "Since the quality of mercy, in our poet's creed, is not strained, is not on compulsion, why should the quality of love, of benevolence, be strained either? Though I despair of an Hereafter for me, may not Pity subdue me to devise and compass an hour of joy for the unborn whom I shall never know? Cannot I forecast some gleam in a happier future, where all that is best of me may irradiate lives that were otherwise dim, troubled with clouds and sadness? Wise and tender is the great soul that fasts from man's meaner joy' to shape things lovable and helpful for its mortal fellows. If the house of clay must fall after a season into ruin, why complain, and not rather staunch the wounds that are now waiting for a brother's hand? Nature and Fate and Wisdom are one: things cannot come to the best, but they are made better when we love and cherish them. Let Optimism be a dream of the moralist, an impossible Ideal, like the Beauty which all artists worship and none have seen: but Meliorism, VOL. VI.-NO. II. [Third Series.]

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the presentiment of a better state, has for its irremovable basis the facts of History, which tell us that mankind have ever moved onward: that great faith

Is but the rushing and expanding stream

Of thought, of feeling, fed by all the past;
For finest hope is finest memory.

Are you not charmed, Reader? But, then, does it not seem to you, also, that you have listened ere now to the praises of love for the brethren and of the grandeur of martyrdom? Are not these the elder truths of that Christian message whereof George Eliot, we say it unwillingly, is not the herald, but the antagonist? Is her teaching the Old Gospel or a new delusion?

The answer we must seek in her writings. There she is ever touching, to loud or to whispering modulations, the chord of divine experience. Unless she can lay bare the soul she is not satisfied, searching always into its deep convictions in regard to that wide world on which, through mere sense and motion, dull lancet windows of the body, it has been condemned to look out. As her personages come into the story she bids us mark how they are affected towards that Infinite which is the presupposed prologue in Heaven of every tale; and, then, whether their own pulse beats with the great heart of Humanity, or no. Have they inherited or wrought for themselves a life "vivid and intense enough to create a wide fellow-feeling with all that is human?" She will praise them earnestly, as her manner of praising is apt to be. But should their life appear to her only a narrow channel of selfish desire? That she cannot forgive. All sin in her eyes is frailty, save want of love. Kindred should mean kindness: this is the form of her morality; and she counts all things akin that have the capacity of pain or pleasure implanted in their being. Herein, too, she finds the ideal unity of her various epical compositions-the centre and circumference of that modern world which is indeed the old, but has outgrown it.

For if that large Epic comes to utterance, whether in prose or verse, that we still are desiring in vain, it will need an atmosphere and medium suited to its nature, and will move about "in worlds not realized," if so be, but worlds that are ideally descried as the antitype of the age we live in the horizon of burning light and distant glory, which is the sea-line of our farthest aspirations. As the heroic dim universe of Homer grew into the all-ruling republic, Imperial Rome, which Virgil beheld extending her triumphs "supra Garamantas et Indos": as Rome herself yielded, in the words of Suetonius, to an unconquerable influence from Judæa, and became transfigured, whilst Europe consecrated its Christian unity by a succession of sacred wars, by