HARRIET MARTINEAU. 491 disturbed, and she was glad that, in so critical a moment, she had been able to preserve her self-respect. During the greater part of her mature life she felt her- self compelled to embrace the unpopular side of most of the questions which deeply stirred the human mind. For some years she retained the faith of her parents, which was the Unitarian ; but, as her intelligence matured, she found the beliefs and usages of that sect less and less satisfactory, until she reached the settled conviction that all the creeds and religions of the earth were of purely human origin. She rejected the idea of a personal deity, and regarded the belief in immortality as an injurious delusion. It is a proof, at once, of the profound excel- lence of her character and the advanced catholicity of her generation, that these opinions, which she never con- cealed and never obtruded, estranged none of her friends, even those of the most pronounced orthodoxy. Miss Florence Nightingale, for example, a devoted member of the Church of England, wrote, on hearing of her death : " The shock of your tidings to me, of course, was great ; but, 0, I feel how delightful the surprise to her ! How much she must know now ! How much she must have enjoyed already ! I do not know what your opinions are about this ; I know what hers were, and for a long time, I have thought how great will be the surprise to her — a glorious surprise ! She served the Right, that is, God, all her life." In a similar strain wrote other friends, who were believers in immortal life. Miss Martineau died at her own house at Ambleside, in 1876, aged seventy-four years. She expressed the secret of her life in a sentence of her Autobiography. " The real and justifiable and honorable subject of interest to human beings, living and dying, is the welfare of their fellows, surrounding or surviving them."
