Hennell a perfect model of manly excellence. She read his Enquiry twice through, and found it more interesting than any book she had seen. It represented in its day the antepenultimate stage of Biblical study ; and Strauss, swathing his German criticism in politer Latin, said that it was written Britannis, Britannice. Mr. Hennell's reading of Gospel history was not the outcome of untried method or hypothesis, and those whom he convinced were tempted to conclude that arguments so specious and acceptable to themselves ought in fairness to satisfy others. They impressed Miss Evans, and at the critical moment she met with some unfavourable specimen ot the Christian advocate. "These dear orthodox people talk so simply sometimes, that one cannot help fancying them satirists of their own doctrines and fears." Endowed with many virtues which go to constitute the ideal of the Christian character, with self-knowledge, unflinching sincerity, and an ardent devotion to the good of others, she became impatient of minds that could not keep pace with her own, and learnt during a portion of her life to reckon prejudice, fallacious reasoning, and wilful blindness among the properties of orthodoxy.
Strauss himself never made so important a proselyte. He provoked a reaction which nearly balanced his direct influence, and the Leben Jesu had already become, like the Génie du Christianisme and the Sermon on National Apostasy, the signal of a religious revival. Between Hennell's Enquiry and George Eliot's answer there is no proportion. His views need not have implied condemnation of all foreign and American Churches. She was more thorough in her rejection of the Gospels, and she at once rejected far more than the Gospels. For some years her mind travelled in search of rest, and, like most students of German thought before the middle of the century, she paid a passing tribute to pantheism. But from Jonathan Edwards to Spinoza she went over at one step. The abrupt transition may be accounted for by the probable action of Kant, who had not then become a buttress of Christianity. Out of ten Englishmen, if
