inherent fitness and mutual attraction, tended to bring women into more
intelligent sympathy with men, and to heighten and complicate their
share in the political drama. The quiescence and security of the
conjugal relation are, doubtless, favorable to the manifestation of the
highest qualities by persons who have already attained a high standard
of culture, but rarely foster a passion sufficient to rouse all the
faculties to aid in winning or retaining its beloved object--to convert
indolence into activity, indifference into ardent partisanship, dulness
into perspicuity.

Her conception of marriage may have been affected by that presented by
Feuerbach in his _Essence of Christianity_. In words translated into
English by herself, Feuerbach says, "that alone is a religious marriage
which is a true marriage, which corresponds to the essence of
marriage--love." Again, he says that marriage is only sacred when it is an
inward attraction confirmed by social and personal obligations; "for a
marriage the bond of which is merely an external restriction, not the
voluntary, contented self-restriction of love--in short, a marriage which
is not spontaneously concluded, spontaneously willed, self-sufficing--is
not a true marriage, and therefore not a truly moral marriage." As a moral
and social obligation, marriage is to be held sacred; its sacredness grows
out of its profound human elements of helpfulness, nurture and emotional
satisfaction, while its obligation rises from its primary social
functions. It does not consist in any legal form, but in compliance with
deep moral and social responsibilities. Some such conception of marriage
as this she seems to have accepted, which found its obligation in the
satisfaction it gives to the inner nature, and in the fulfilment of social
responsibilities. The influence of Compte may also have been felt in the
case of both Lewes and Marian Evans; they saw in the marriage form a
fulfilment of human, not of legal, requirements.