^[ In a letter that she wrote in 1873 to Mr. J. W. Cross, whom she married after the death of George Henry Lewes, George Eliot showed how strong her feeling for religion and her craving for spiritual fellowship had become. " All the great religions of the world," she writes, "historically considered, are rightly the objects of deep reverence and sympathy. They are the record of 1 W. Bradfield, Personality and Fellowship, 174.
478 THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE SAINTS
spiritual struggles, which are the types of our own. This is to me pre-eminently true of Hebrewism and Christianity, on which my own youth was nourished. And in this sense I have no antagon- ism towards any religious belief, but a strong overflow of sympathy. Every community, met to worship the highest good (which is understood to be expressed by God) carries me along with its current ; and if there were not reasons against my following such an inclination, I should go to church or chapel constantly, for the sake of the delightful emotions of fellowship which come over me in religious assemblies — the very nature of such assemblies being the recognition of a binding belief or spiritual law which is to lift us into a willing obedience and save us from the slavery of un- regulated passion or impulse." *■
"[} The last of his Church Congress papers, that on The Com- munion of Saints, seems peculiarly associated with Peterborough, and is published in a volume of Peterborough Sermons. The subject, too, is one so very dear to himself. He had an extra- ordinary power of realizing this Communion. It was his delight to be alone at night in the great Cathedral, for there he could meditate and pray in full sympathy with all that was good and great in the past. I have been with him there on a moonlight evening when the vast building was haunted with strange lights and shades, and the ticking of the great clock sounded like some giant's footsteps in the deep silence. Then he had always abundant company. Once a daughter in later years met him returning from one of his customary meditations in the solitary darkness of the chapel at Auckland Castle, and she said to him, " I expect you do not feel alone ? " " Oh no," he said, " it is full," and as he spoke his face shone with one of his beautiful smiles.2
1 Life of George Eliot, by J. W. Cross, ii. 365.
2 A. Westcott, Life and Letters of Brooke Foss Westcott, i. 312.
Religious Conversation.
479
Literature.
Arnold (T.) Sermons, i. 181, 190.
„ (T. K.), Sermons Preached in a Country Village, 143. Bell (C. D.), The Name above Every Name, 85. Blackwood (A.), Christian Service, 127. Brown (J. B.), The Sunday Afternoon, 20, 29. Burrows (H. W.), Parochial Sermons, iii. 241. De Quetteville (P. W.), Short Studies on Vital Subjects, 122. Jacob (E.), in Oxford University Sermons, 368. Little (H. W.), Arrows for the King's Archers, No. 44. Macaskill (M.), A Highland Pulpit, 15. Merson (D.), Words of Life, 289.
Moule (H. C. G.), Thoughts for the Sundays of the Year, 117. Parker (J.), Sermons (Cavendish Pulpit), No. 18. Pierson (A. T.), The Making of a Sermon, 167. Punshon (W. M.), Sermons, ii. 267. Randolph (B. W.), The Threshold of the Sanctuary, 43. Robertson (F. W.), Sermons, iv. 200. Thomas (J.), Myrtle Street Pulpit, iv. 81. Vaughan (C. J.), Memorials of Harrow Sundays, 324.
„ (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), New Ser., xvii. (1879), No. 1099. Christian World Pulpit, lxiv. 33 (J. G. Greenhough). Literary Churchman, xxxii. (1886) 376 (E. J. Hardy).
4««
Religious Conversation.
They that feared the Lord spake one with another: and the Lord hearkened, and heard, and a book of remembrance was written before him, for them that feared the Lord, and that thought upon his name.— Mai. iii. 16.
It is the tendency of our time to decry what is called religious conversation. It is in great disrepute with those who desire to be thought sensible men ; and, as a matter of fact, it has become almost extinct, except in certain narrow circles, where it survives (for the most part) in a form by no means calculated to attract others towards it.
I.
The Opportunities.
Many of those who must fail in making religious conversa- tion profitable have yet a good object in view in their attempts to cherish it. They have felt that it is a strange thing, and one not altogether seemly, that people who are bent upon the same pursuit — truth, holiness, and salvation, their own and that of others — should never give the slightest indication to each other in word that this is so ; should never allude, in the presence of their best and nearest friends, to that which is their chief hope and highest interest ; should be content to talk as if this chief concern had no existence for them, and be as much ashamed of having its existence in them discovered as if it were something discreditable or degrading. They have felt that there must be a fault some- where, if this state of things is unavoidable and irremediable. They have observed how different was the conduct, in this respect, of the early Christians ; how they, in their briefest letters upon the commonest subjects, and much more therefore in their private oral communications with those who shared in the same feeling, could not refrain from constant allusions to things spiritual and jer.-mal. — 31