at religion. Much of this change of view occurred as she translated philosophical works like those of Baruch Spinoza, David Strauss, and Ludwig Feuerbach.

Eliot sometimes took a satirical approach to organized religion. Indeed, some of her earlier works, such as Adam Bede, praise religion's moral standards while simultaneously satirizing its conventions.

Although she came to question and eventually reject the existence of God, calling God's existence "inconceivable," Eliot still saw the importance of religious expression. Eliot considered religion to be a positive outlet for human desires. It is a focus of morality even if it is not morality's source. In this sense, Eliot's agnosticism is not hostile to religion, although it does reject the notion of blind faith. In a letter to Sara Hennel, Eliot wrote:

The test of a higher religion might be, that it should enable the believer to do without the consolations that his egoism would demand.

As an author, Eliot extends this outlook to many of her characters. At times they fall short of moral goodness. Yet, Eliot does not criticize them for violating any sort of religious doctrine. Rather, she places their actions in the context of what it means to do right by one's own principles as well as by society at large. Her characters struggle with this, since her novels deal with themes of being humans in a world we cannot fully control or understand. Yet, people cannot wait for God or some metaphysical force to save them. As she puts it in chapter 14 of Silas Marner:

In the old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child’s.

This is well illustrated when Silas finally finds his salvation. It does not come from God or any supernatural force. Instead, Silas finds hope in a world he thought was not worthy of hope from Eppie. It is she who shows him that love comes not from some metaphysical or divine source, but from the people around us.

George Eliot (a.k.a. Mary Ann Evans) grew up in a Christian home but lost most of her religious faith as the years went by. Her novels reveal her agnostic humanism. Let's look at a few examples to get you started.

You might examine the novel Romola, which focuses on a morality apart from religion. Romola's husband is unfaithful, yet Romola cares for her husband's other wife and children, not out of any religious obligation but with some moral sense. The novel also explores the fate of Savonarola in Florence and focuses on Romola's shaken faith.

In Silas Marner, the title character loses his trust in God, and the salvation he finds in the end seems to have little to do with religious faith. He has created a life for himself that does not involve organized religion, and the novel shows the narrowness of some organized religions and their beliefs.

In The Mill on the Floss, you should pay close attention to Maggie. She has a spiritual awakening at one point, after reading The Imitation of Christ, but it does not last, and she turns to worldly pursuits instead, trying to find happiness there. Her devotion is depicted as dull and dry, while what she chooses next is shown as leading to greater satisfaction.

Finally, note the agnostic elements of Middlemarch. You should reflect on Fred's disdain for becoming a clergyman and Mary's condition that she will not marry him if he does. Dorothea has something of a spiritual life, but it is not well formed. She knows little of real spirituality. Mr. Bulstrode tends toward hypocrisy in some ways.

George Eliot was brought up to be a devout Christian. However, in 1841, she read and was deeply impressed by Charles C. Hennell’s An Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity, a skeptical work influenced by the German school of “Higher Criticism.” The purpose of this Higher Criticism was to subject the Bible to the same rigorous analysis as Latin and Greek literature, and the conclusions of the critics were often scathing. Hennell wrote of the Gospels:

Their authorship is far from certain; they were written from forty to seventy years after the events which they profess to record; the writers do not explain how they came by their information; two of them appear to have copied from the first; all the four contain notable discrepancies and manifest contradictions; they contain statements at variance with histories of acknowledged authority; some of them relate wonders which even many Christians are obliged to reject as fabulous.

Over the next few years, Eliot translated works of German Higher Criticism by David Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach, and arrived at the religious views that were to inform her novels: those of an agnostic atheist. There was, for Eliot, no conflict between agnosticism and atheism, since the former is an admission that the truth cannot be known, while the latter is a statement of belief or probability. Eliot, like Feuerbach, saw the best aspects of religion as a projection of human morality and spirituality into the heavens. She did not believe that any religious texts told literal truths, but thought that any text could aspire to moral truth and moral improvement. In "The Natural History of German Life," she argues:

The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. Appeals founded on generalisations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment.

In her novels, Eliot displays considerable certainty about how her characters ought to behave and how they fall short of their moral duties. In Daniel Deronda, for instance, she uses the authorial persona to scold Gwendolen and address the reader directly to excoriate her folly. However, she never hints at any supernatural or metaphysical rewards and punishments, and regards human agency as having replaced divine intervention in the modern world. As she wrote in Silas Marner:

In the old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child’s.