Mrs. Proudie herself is above all a politician, and justifies her existence by turning her religious bigotry into the channel of ecclesiastical polity, a procedure that well might cause the gentle bishop to quake:[400] “When Mrs. Proudie began to talk about the souls of the people he always shook in his shoes. She had an eloquent way of raising her voice over the word souls that was qualified to make any ordinary man shake in his shoes.” She rejoices in an opportunity to condone with a member of the Clerical Opposition over a disappointment she has done her best to bring upon it:[401] “‘For, after all, Mrs. Arabin, what are the things of this world?--dust beneath our feet, ashes between our teeth, grass cut for the oven, vanity, vexation, and nothing more!’--well pleased with which variety of Christian metaphors, Mrs. Proudie walked on, still muttering, however, something about worms and grubs, by which she intended to signify her own species and the Dumbello and Grantly sects of it in particular.” George Eliot’s zealots,--Dinah Morris, Savonarola, Felix Holt, Daniel Deronda, are not ridiculed, except for some sarcastic repartee put into the mouths of Mrs. Poyser and Esther Lyon. Nor is the pseudo-scholar Casaubon, though he is described as having a soul that “went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying,” and on a certain occasion, as slipping “again into the library, to chew a cud of erudite mistake about Cush and Mizraim.” Of all fanatics, those who are obsessed by an educational theory are perhaps the most dangerous, as they impose their systems on flexible youth, the result being often an orchard of lamentably bent twigs. Two exponents of opposite divisions of this type are Gradgrind, who aimed at the elimination of the imagination, and Feverel, who proposed to circumvent the element of original sin in human composition, by the policy of watchful waiting and absolute dictation. Both come to grief through the failure of facts to support their philosophies; but Dickens in his optimism makes Gradgrind a wiser man through being a sadder, while Meredith in his realism keeps Feverel blandly unconscious and untaught by a lesson that would have pierced any heart protected by a less impervious pericardium.