Page:Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs.djvu/79

 The peculiarity of the religious development which strikes one most prominently in reading the earlier letters is that, in advancing towards wider views than her earlier Calvinism, George Eliot still found objects for the religious emotion that moved her so strongly in her young days. She 'found religion,' as the ascetics say, in the later forms of her belief as in the earlier, and consecrated her life to the highest and the best equally in the days of Comtism and of Calvinism. This predominantly religious tone gives an emotional unity to her life which might be easily missed, but is really the key to its various seeming fluctuations. Beginning with the conventional expressions of self-conscious humility, 'Oh that I might be made as useful in my lowly and obscure station!' (i. 43) it is seen throughout life in her high ideal of her artistic mission, and finds a final utterance in her characteristic hymn., 'O may I join the choir invisible!' Even in the first revulsion from the old faith she felt the connection between that and the new, as the following passage shows:

'For my part, I wish to be among the ranks of that glorious crusade that is seeking to set Truth's Holy Sepulchre free from a usurped domination. We shall then see her resurrection! Meanwhile, although I cannot