Many other illustrations might be given from our noblest and truest
poetry--from the works of the Brownings, the "Saints' Tragedy" of Charles
Kingsley, the dramatic poems of Henry Taylor--of the extent to which it
is vitally, even where not formally Christian; the extent to which the
truth of the Cross has transfused it, and become one chief source of its
depth and power. But we must hasten on to our more immediate object in
these remarks.
Those who read works of fiction merely for amusement, may be surprised
that it should be thought possible they could be vehicles for conveying
to us the deepest practical truth of Christianity,--that the highest life
of man only begins when he begins to accept and to bear the Cross; and
that the conscious pursuit of happiness as his highest aim tends
inevitably to degrade and enslave him. Even those who read novels more
thoughtfully, who recognise in them a great moral force acting for good
or evil on the age, may be startled to find George Eliot put forward as
the representative of this higher-toned fiction, and as entitled to take
place beside any of those we have named for the depth and force, the
consistency and persistence, with which she has laboured to set before us
the Christian, and therefore the only exhaustively true, ideal of life.
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