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294 and she contracted a great liking for the solemn services of the Catholic churches. Lewes saw no harm in these tastes, and he even bought her a Bible. But he did not like to hear of it. He was a boisterous iconoclast, with little confidence in disinterested belief and a positive aversion for Christianity. Even Bach, he said, was too Protestant for him. George Eliot's interest in the religious life was therefore kept up under resistance to adverse pressure.

If Lewes did not debase her standard of rectitude, he enlarged her tolerance of error. Having elected to be subject for life to a man still encumbered with his youth, she became indulgent towards sentiments she disapproved, and appreciated the reason and the strength of opinions repugnant to her. Lewes had detached her from the former associations, and she did not accept his views. Step by step, for good or evil, the process of her life had brought her to a supreme point of solitude and neutrality that would have been chilling and fatal to a feebler mind, but gave her the privilege of almost unexampled independence and mental integrity. Her secluded life had important literary consequences. It estranged her from general society and from religious people.

The breach with zealous Churchmen was not new, but it was now irreparable. She knew their ways from the old books and early recollections ; but in the active religious work and movement of her time she shows no more concern than in Plato or Leibnitz. There is no trace of solicitude about Christian Socialism, although Parson Lot's letter furnished forth a speech for Felix Holt. Neither Lamennais nor Gioberti is mentioned, although three volumes are occupied with the protomartyr of Liberal Catholicism. The literature of ethics and psychology, so far as it touched religion, dropped out of her sight, and she renounced intercourse with half the talent in the world. The most eminent of the men who pursued like problems in her lifetime, among the most eminent who have thought about them at any time, were Vinet and Rothe. Both were admirable in their lives, and still