 and Maggie - how it has acted on young natures in many generations, that in
the onward tendency of human things have risen above the mental level of the
generation before them, to which they have been nevertheless tied by the
strongest fibres of their hearts. The suffering, whether of martyr or victim,
which belongs to every historical advance of mankind, is represented in this way
in every town, and by hundreds of obscure hearths; and we need not shrink from
this comparison of small things with great; for does not science tell us that
its highest striving is after the ascertainment of a unity which shall bind the
smallest things with the greatest? In natural science, I have understood, there
is nothing petty to the mind that has a large vision of relations, and to which
every single object suggests a vast sum of conditions. It is surely the same
with the observation of human life.
    Certainly the religious and moral ideas of the Dodsons and Tullivers were of
too specific a kind to be arrived at deductively, from the statement that they
were part of the Protestant population of Great Britain. Their theory of life
had its core of soundness, as all theories must have on which decent and
prosperous families have been reared and have flourished; but it had the very
slightest tincture of theology. If, in the maiden days of the Dodson sisters,
their Bibles opened more easily at some parts than others, it was because of
dried tulip-petals, which had been distributed quite impartially, without
preference for the historical, devotional, or doctrinal. Their religion was of a
simple, semi-pagan kind, but there was no heresy in it - if heresy properly
means choice - for they didn't know there was any other religion, except that of
chapel-goers, which appeared to run in families, like asthma. How should they
know? The vicar of their pleasant rural parish was not a controversialist, but a
good hand at whist, and one who had a joke always ready for a blooming female
parishioner. The religion of the Dodsons consisted in revering whatever was
customary and respectable: it was necessary to be baptised, else one could not
be buried in the churchyard, and to take the sacrament before death as a
security against more dimly understood perils; but it was of equal necessity to
have the proper pall-bearers and well-cured hams at one's funeral, and to leave
an unimpeachable will. A Dodson would not be taxed with the omission of anything
that was becoming, or that belonged to that eternal fitness of things which was
plainly indicated in the practice of
