George Eliot's Religion Of Humanity In Adam Bede And Silas Marner

George Eliot (1819-1880), a great Victorian writer, was famous for her profound thought about the religious and moral aspects of life in the nineteenth century England. Basing upon a redefinition of the essence of religion and a constructive criticism of the doctrine and practice of the traditional Christianity, she put forward in her works, especially the early ones, the religion of humanity, with an emphasis on such human virtues as love, sympathy and forgiveness, etc. As a mature and philosophically-minded intellectual with a rich and extraordinary personal experience behind her, she set upon herself the gigantic task to straighten the distorted religious or moral life of her time and to reconstruct an ideological basis for social cohesion without the help of God.This thesis is an attempt to study George Eliot's religion of humanity mainly through a close textual analysis of two of her early novels: Adam Bede and Silas Marner. Chapter One is an introduction to George Eliot. Chapter Two is an exposition of her religion of humanity through roughly tracing her change of religious belief and her relation with some important free thinkers of her age, who had, in a way, influenced her ideas of religion. Chapter Three is a detailed analysis of the major characters in her first novel Adam Bede. From them, we can find differences between the religion of humanity and the old religion, between the pernicious effect of the old religious practice upon its blind believers and the positive social function of the religion of humanity. Chapter Four is an analysis of her novel Silas Marner. A modern version of religious history-the loss and reestablishment of a Christian faith, is symbolically displayed in the two-part biography of Silas Marner. Chapter Five is the tentative comment on her efforts in reconstructing a "new" social ideology and in ameliorating the traditional western religion.