Despite her personal skepticism and predominantly secular outlook,1 we may regard George Eliot as a post-secularist. She was decidedly not a secularist of the Bradlaughian type. (See Chapter 3.) That is, she demonstrated a particular regard for religion and religious believers and generally acknowledged religion’s ongoing viability, its potential to contribute to individual, cultural, and national identity and the general weal. Eliot often figured religion as a tissue that extended throughout and within the organic social body, a kind of living integument providing cohesion and shape, sustaining it in health and order. Religion could offer metanarratives that afforded meaning and coherence, ordering the experience of the subject, while enlarging the sympathies and recommending the dedication of individuals to broad social objectives. Eliot even acknowledged the Anglican Church as an important ecclesiastical body for its role in providing structural coherence and service to the community. And unlike other novelists of her time — such as Dickens and Trollope, who mercilessly caricatured clerical figures for hypocrisy, sectarianism, and factionalism — Eliot generally demonstrated respect for clerics and the clerical function, especially the pastoral duty of parish ministers. We have the ‘saintly Mr. Tryan in Scenes of Clerical Life, “a powerful preacher, who was stirring the hearts of the people”; the eloquent and compassionate Methodist Dinah Morris in Adam Bede; the “wonderful preacher” Dr. Kenn in Mill on the Floss; the charismatic and increasingly self-deluded Savonarola in Romola; the learned and loquacious Dissenter Rufus Lyon in Felix Holt; and the affable Farebrother in Middlemarch’.2