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Rh of one of her most distinguished friends, and she was impressed by Isaac Taylor's Ancient Christianity, allowing some drawback for his treatment of the Fathers. At this point, while still a trusted member of the Church, Miss Evans was introduced at Coventry to a family of busy and strenuous freethinkers.

The first visit to their house was early in November 1841, after which she speaks of being absorbed in momentous studies, and on the 1 3th of the same month she writes to her most intimate friend : "Think! is there any conceivable alteration in me that could prevent your coming to me at Christmas?" The obstacle announced in these words was a vital alteration in her religious principles. The revolution was sudden, but it was complete. For a time she continued to speak of eternal hope and a beneficent Creator ; in deference to her father she even consented, uneasily, to go to church. But from that momentous November until her death it would appear that no misgiving favourable to Christianity ever penetrated her mind or shook for an instant its settled unbelief. There was no wavering and no regret. And when George Eliot had become a consummate expert in the pathology of conscience, she abstained from displaying the tortures of doubt and the struggles of expiring faith.

The history of a soul is never fully told, even for edification. We learn that Miss Evans was initiated in the mysteries of scepticism at her first encounter with cultivated society ; and her early convictions, artlessly propped upon Young and Hannah More, yielded to the combined influence. Her new friend was the wife of Mr. Bray, who had written The Philosophy of Necessity, and sister to Mr. Hennell, the author of An Enquiry concerning the Origin of Christianity. The formal country schoolgirl, whose wondering companions called her "Little Mamma," who gathered them for prayer, who knew how to organise and to invigorate district work, and had dismissed her own brother for his High Church propensity, was fascinated and transformed by these surroundings. She pronounced Mrs. Bray the most religious person she knew, and Mr.