Page:The Essays of George Eliot, ed. Sheppard, 1883.djvu/26

 pursuits, and might scatter it abroad in triviality—people who seemed to lie outside the path of remarkable providences?"

Bulstrode felt at times "that his action was unrighteous, but how could he go back? He had mental exercises calling himself naught, laid hold on redemption and went on in his course of instrumentality. He was "carrying on two distinct lives"—a religious one and a wicked one. "His religious activity could not be incompatible with his wicked business as soon as he had argued himself into not feeling it incompatible."

"The spiritual kind of rescue was a genuine need with him. There may be coarse hypocrites, who consciously affect beliefs and emotions for the sake of gulling the world, but Bulstrode was not one of them. He was simply a man whose desires had been stronger than his theoretic beliefs, and who had gradually explained the gratification of his desires into satisfactory agreement with those beliefs."

And now Providence seemed to be taking sides against him. "A threatening Providence—in other words, a public exposure—urged him to a kind of propitiation which was not a doctrinal transaction. The divine tribunal had changed its aspect to him. Self-prostration was no longer enough. He must bring restitution in his hand. By what sacrifice could he stay the rod? He believed that if he did something right God would stay the rod, and save him from the consequences of his wrong-doing." His religion was "the religion of personal fear," which "remains nearly at the level of the savage." The exposure comes, and the explosion. Society shudders with hypocritical horror, especially in the presence of poor Mrs. Bulstrode, who "should have some hint given her, that if she knew the truth she would have less complacency in her bonnet." Society when it is very candid, and very conscientious, and very scrupulous, cannot "allow a wife to remain ignorant long that the town holds a bad opinion of her husband." The photograph of the Middlemarch gossips sitting upon the case of Mrs. Bulstrode is taken accurately. Equally accurate, and far more impressive, is the narrative of circumstantial evidence