dishonourable from which I formerly revolted.' Little children have the
seeds of all this within them; men and women are born with the inspiration
which starts these mysterious and direful changes; the fatal decadence
takes place in countless lives.

[Footnote 2: George Eliot.]

Before facts so horrifying--they are _within_ as well as everywhere around
us--our real need is not an intellectual explanation of why they are
permitted or whence this taint in the race arose. For, supposing that we
were capable of understanding this, the probability is that we might
become tolerant of the facts themselves, and, perceiving that cruelty and
sin had a necessary place in the universe, lose the mind to fight them.
Constituted as are the most of mankind, for them to discover a reason for
a fact is, if not to conceive a respect for it, at least to feel a
plausible excuse for their sluggishness and timidity in dealing with it.
Nay, the very study of sin for the purpose of acquainting ourselves with
its nature, too often either intoxicates the will, or paralyses it with
despair; and it is in recoil from the whole subject that we most surely
recover health to fight evil in ourselves and nerve to work for the
deliverance from it of others. The practical solution of our problem is to
remember how much else there is in the Universe, how much else that is
utterly away from and opposed to sin. We must engross ourselves in that,
we must exult in that. We must remember goodness, not only in the
countless scattered instances about us, but in its infinite resource in
the Power and Character of God Himself. We must feel that the Universe is
pervaded by this: that it is the atmosphere of life, and that the whole
visible framework of the world offers signals and sacraments of its real
presence. We may not, we shall not, be able to reconcile this goodness
with the cruel facts about us; but at least we shall have reduced these to