“‘What dost say to that?’ said Mr. Poyser, throwing himself back and looking merrily at his wife. “‘Say!’ answered Mrs. Poyser, with dangerous fire kindling in her eye; ‘why, _I say as some folks’ tongues are like the clocks as run on strikin’, not to tell you the time o’ the day, but because there’s summat wrong i’ their own inside_.’ ...” The plot, as in Scott’s _Heart of Midlothian_, turns on a case of seduction and child murder, and the contrast between Effie and Jeannie Deans has its parallel in the stronger contrast between Hetty Sorrel and Dinah Morris. Hetty looked as if she were “made of roses”; but she was, in Mrs. Poyser’s phrase, “no better nor a cherry wi’ a hard stone inside it.” Dinah’s human beauty of face and voice was the true reflection of her inward life which “cast a beam on the outward shape, The unpolluted temple of the mind, And turned it by degrees to the soul’s essence.” The crisis of the book comes in the prison, where Dinah wrestles for the soul of Hetty—a scene as passionate and moving as any in fiction. Dinah triumphs, not by her own might, but by the sheer power and beauty of the Christian faith and love which she embodies. In George Eliot’s novels you will find some passages of stinging and well-merited satire on the semi-pagan, conventional religion of middle-class orthodoxy in England of the nineteenth century—“proud respectability in a gig of unfashionable build; worldliness without side-dishes”—read the chapter on “A Variation of Protestantism Unknown to Bossuet,” in _The Mill on the Floss_. But you will not find a single page or paragraph that would draw or drive the reader away from real Christianity. On the contrary, she has expressed the very secret of its appeal to the human heart through the words and conduct of some of her best characters. They do not argue; they utter and show the meaning of religion. On me the effect of her books is a deepened sense of the inevitable need of Christ and his gospel to sustain and nourish the high morality of courage and compassion, patience, and hope, which she so faithfully teaches. The truth is, George Eliot lived in the afterglow of Christian faith. Rare souls are capable of doing that. But mankind at large needs the sunrise.