George Eliot | Page 6

in a cottage near her father's
house. Up to the age of eighteen she was a most devoted believer in
Christianity, and her zeal was so great that Evangelicalism came to
represent her mode of thought and feeling. She was a somewhat rigid
Calvinist and full of pious enthusiasm. After her removal to Coventry,
where her reading was of a wider range and her circle of friends
increased, doubts gradually sprang up in her mind. In a letter written to
Miss Sara Hennell she gave a brief account of her religious experiences
at this period. In it she described an aunt, Mrs. Elizabeth Evans, who
was a Methodist preacher, and the original of Dinah Morris in Adam
Bede.
There was hardly any intercourse between my father's family, resident

in Derbyshire and Staffordshire, and our family--few and far-between
visits of (to my childish feeling) strange uncles and aunts and cousins
from my father's far-off native country, and once a journey of my own,
as a little child, with my father and mother, to see my uncle William (a
rich builder) in Staffordshire--but not my uncle and aunt Samuel, so far
as I can recall the dim outline of things--are what I remember of
northerly relatives in my childhood.
But when I was seventeen or more--after my sister was married and I
was mistress of the house--my father took a journey into Derbyshire, in
which, visiting my uncle and aunt Samuel, who were very poor, and
lived in a humble cottage at Wirksworth, he found my aunt in a very
delicate state of health after a serious illness, and, to do her bodily good,
he persuaded her to return with him, telling her that I should be very,
very happy to have her with me for a few weeks. I was then strongly
under the influence of Evangelical belief, and earnestly endeavoring to
shape this anomalous English-Christian life of ours into some
consistency with the spirit and simple verbal tenor of the New
Testament. I was delighted to see my aunt. Although I had only heard
her spoken of as a strange person, given to a fanatical vehemence of
exhortation in private as well as public, I believed that I should find
sympathy between us. She was then an old woman--about sixty--and, I
believe, had for a good many years given up preaching. A tiny little
woman, with bright, small, dark eyes, and hair that had been black, I
imagine, but was now gray--a pretty woman in her youth, but of a
totally different physical type from Dinah. The difference--as you will
believe--was not simply physical; no difference is. She was a woman of
strong natural excitability, which I know, from the description I have
heard my father and half-sister give, prevented her from the exercise of
discretion under the promptings of her zeal. But this vehemence was
now subdued by age and sickness; she was very gentle and quiet in her
manners--very loving--and (what she must have been from the very
first) a truly religious soul, in whom the love of God and the love of
man were fused together. There was nothing highly distinctive in her
religious conversation. I had had much intercourse with pious
Dissenters before; the only freshness I found, in our talk, came from the
fact that she had been the greater part of her life a Wesleyan, and

though she left the society when women were no longer allowed to
preach, and joined the New Wesleyans, she retained the character of
thought that belongs to the genuine old Wesleyan. I had never talked
with a Wesleyan before, and we used to have little debates about
predestination, for I was then a strong Calvinist. Here her superiority
came out, and I remember now, with loving admiration, one thing
which at the time I disapproved; it was not strictly a consequence of her
Arminian belief, and at first sight might seem opposed to it, yet it came
from the spirit of love which clings to the bad logic of Arminianism.
When my uncle came to fetch her, after she had been with us a
fortnight or three weeks, he was speaking of a deceased minister, once
greatly respected, who from the action of trouble upon him had taken to
small tippling, though otherwise not culpable. "But I hope the good
man's in heaven, for all that," said my uncle. "Oh, yes," said my aunt,
with a deep inward groan of joyful conviction, "Mr. A's in
heaven--that's sure." This was at the time an offence to my stern,
ascetic, hard views--how beautiful it is to me now!
One who has been permitted to read the letters of Marian Evans written
to this aunt, has given the following account of them, which throws
much light on her religious attitude at this period: