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J.
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arguments to sermons." The writer asserts that weaknesses abound in
the contemporary elevation of scientific thought; religious thinkers
should articulate their faith while concurrently exposing the inconsis–
tencies in their opponents' arguments.
George Eliot's agnosticism designates her as a religious skeptic, to say
the least. One would expect her to be at the forefront of the battle pro–
claiming science's rationalist victory over religion. But her complicated
personal relationship with belief culminates in the production of her
final novel
Daniel Deronda
(1876).
As Frederick Karl notes in his biog–
raphy, Mary Anne Evans grew up educated in the Anglican tradition,
but at the age of fourteen became "caught up by the religious swirl" of
the Oxford Movement and evangelicalism . She was an avid, if not stern,
believer in Calvinistic Christian doctrine and often energetically led
prayer meetings at the Franklin's School. But from
1834
until
1842,
her
faith gradually shifted from enthusiastic belief to significant doubt
about the morality of organized religion. Through readings of secular
literature, religious documents, and the Old and New Testaments,
among other books, she began to adopt a more philosophical view
about questions of faith, resulting in an attraction to various explana–
tions of spiritual practice outside of the guidance of a church.
Eliot never stopped exploring issues of faith and religion. Karl sum–
marizes her later conflicted spiritual beliefs as they appeared in
1873,
shortly before she published
Daniel Deronda:
But as she approached her final long fiction, she was still attempt–
ing to find some middle path through all the minefields of nine–
teenth-century beliefs: Comtean and Harisonian positivism,
religious orthodoxy of one kind or another, utilitarianism (Ben–
tham's or John Stuart Mill's), Huxley's agnosticism, Darwin's evo–
lutionism and determinism, Spencer's social Darwinism, and
Marxism and its various offshoots.
For one reason or another, she found each "system" lacking. She
wanted to embrace a philosophy that substantiated her ethics of giving
without absolutely compromising the possibility of divinity. In a late
J
877
letter to Frederic Myers, Eliot responded to Myers's sense that he
had a universal experience of "love and woe" through mourning. She
says, "you express that spiritual result which seems to me the fount of
real betterment for poor mankind." Further down, she adds "the most
melancholy thought surely would be that we in our own persons had
