The Ethics of George Eliots Works | Page 2

their expressions of the truth are all one-sided and
inadequate. But they did see, in direct antagonism alike to the popular
view and to the natural instinct of the animal man, that what is
ordinarily called happiness does not represent the highest capability in
humanity, or meet its indefinite aspirations; and that in degree as it is
consciously made so, life becomes animalised and degraded. The whole
scheme of Judaism, as first promulgated in all the stern simplicity of its
awful Theism, where the Divine is fundamentally and emphatically
represented as the Omnipotent and the Avenger, was an emphatic
protest against that self-isolation in which the man folds himself up like
a chrysalid in its cocoon whenever his individual happiness--the
so-called saving of his own soul--becomes the aim and aspiration of his
life. In one sense the Jew of Moses had no individual as apart from a
national existence. The secret sin of Achan, the vaunting pride of David,
call forth less individual than national calamity.
At last in the fulness of time there came forth One--whence and how
we do not stop to inquire--who gathered up into Himself all these
tangled, broken, often divergent threads; who gave to this truth, so far
as one very brief human life could give--at once its perfect and
exhaustive doctrinal expression, and its essentially perfect and

exhaustive practical exemplification, by life and by death. Endless
controversies have stormed and are still storming around that name
which He so significantly and emphatically appropriated--the "Son of
Man." But from amid all the controversy that veils it, one fact, clear,
sharp, and unchallenged, stands out as the very life and seal of His
human greatness--"He pleased not Himself." By every act He did,
every word He spoke, and every pain He bore, He put away from Him
happiness as the aim and end of man. He reduced it to its true position
of a possible accessory and issue of man's highest fulfilment of life--an
issue, the contemplation of which might be of some avail as the being
first awoke to its nobler capabilities, but which, the more the life went
on towards realisation, passed the more away from conscious regard.
Thenceforth the Cross, as the typical representation of this truth,
became a recognised power on the earth. Thenceforth every great
teacher of humanity within the pale of nominal Christendom, whatever
his apparent tenets or formal creed, has been, in degree as he was great
and true, explicitly or implicitly the expounder of this truth; every great
and worthy life, in degree as it assimilated to that ideal life, has been
the practical embodiment of it. "Endure hardness," said one of its
greatest apostles and martyrs, "as good soldiers of Christ." And to the
endurance of hardness; to the recognition of something in humanity to
which what we ordinarily call life and all its joys are of no account; to
the abnegation of mere happiness as aim or end,--to this the world of
Christendom thenceforth became pledged, if it would not deny its Head
and trample on His cross.
In no age has the truth been a popular one: when it becomes so, the
triumph of the Cross--and in it the practical redemption of
humanity--will be near at hand. Yet in no age--not the darkest and most
corrupt Christendom has yet seen--have God and His Christ been
without their witnesses to the higher truth,--witnesses, if not by speech
and doctrine, yet by life and death. Even monasticism, harshly as we
may now judge it, arose, in part at least, through the desire to "endure
hardness;" only it turned aside from the hardness appointed in the
world without, to choose, and ere long to make, a hardness of its own;
and then, self-seeking, and therefore anti-Christian, it fell. Amid all its

actual corruption the Church stands forth a living witness, by its ritual
and its sacraments, to this fundamental truth of the Cross; and ever and
anon from its deepest degradation there emerges clear and sharp some
figure bending under this noblest burden of our doom--some
Savonarola or St Francis charged with the one thought of truth and
right, of the highest truth and right, to be followed, if need were,
through the darkness of death and of hell.
Perhaps few ages have needed more than our own to have this
fundamental principle of Christian ethics--this doctrine of the
Cross--sharply and strongly proclaimed to it. Our vast advances in
physical science tend, in the first instance at least, to withdraw regard
from the higher requirements of life. Even the progress of commerce
and navigation, at once multiplying the means and extending the sphere
of physical and aesthetic enjoyment, aids to intensify the appetite for
these. Systems of so-called philosophy start undoubtingly with the
axiom that happiness is the one aim