wrong accomplished;--these may well seem things irreconcilable with any
true fulfilment of that Christian life whose great law is love. Yet,
examined more narrowly, they approve themselves as nearly associated with
the larger fulness of that life. They are born of the same spirit which
said of old, "Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!"
fulfilments, howsoever imperfect, of that true and deep "law of
resentment" which modern sentimentalism has all but expunged from the
Christian code. The hardness is essentially against the wrong-doing, not
against the doer of it; and against it rather as it affects others than
as it burdens, worries, or overshadows his own life. It subsists in and
springs from the intensity with which, in a nature robust and energetic
in no ordinary degree, right and wrong have asserted themselves as the
realities of existence. Even Seth can be more tolerant than Adam,
because the gentle, placid moral beauty of his nature is, so far as this
may ever be, the result of temperament; while in Adam whatever has been
attained has been won through inward struggle and self-conquest.

In the 'Mill on the Floss,' the moral interest of the whole drama is
concentrated to a very great degree on Maggie Tulliver; and in her is
also mainly concentrated the representative struggle between good and
evil, the spirit of the Cross and that of the world; for Stephen Guest is
little more than the objective form under which the latent evil of her
own humanity assails her. Her life is the field upon which we see the
great conflict waging between the elements of spiritual life and
spiritual death; swaying amid heart-struggle and pain, now toward
victory, now toward defeat, till at last all seems lost. Then at one
rebound the strong brave spirit recovers itself, and takes up the full
burden of its cross; sees and accepts the present right though the heart
is breaking; and the end is victory crowned and sealed by death.