A Moral World without God—On the Religion of Humanity of George Eliot in

Among the Victorian writers, George Eliot deserves to be a unique one. Her male pseudonym, the impugnation of Christianity as well as her nonconformist marriage achieve this stellar female novelist in British literature. Ironically, Eliot was exactly famous for describing social religion and morality of the day. Eliot’s attitude toward Christianity is dichotomous: though deeply influenced by Christianity, she is full of suspicion of it; she doesn’t believe in the Christian God but keeps on spreading the religious and moral codes in her works; she can’t totally accept Christian belief, meanwhile she is unable to get rid of sympathy and understanding towards various religious feelings. Impugnation of Christianity and the dependence on Christianity coexist in her spiritual world. She is a skeptic of religion but by no means non-atheist. Eliot establishes a religious world of her own, a world without belief in God but in Man, that is, religion of humanity. Reviewing the forming background of Eliot’s religion of humanity as well as a close textual reading of Silas Marner, the article tentatively concludes the connotation as well as essence of Eliot’s religion of humanity and maintains that religion of humanity, in essence, is one of the ways in which Victorians like George Eliot come to remedy the loss of conventional religious faith; it exists as an innovation of Christianity, transferring the focus from divinity to secularity, from God to Man. Furthermore, the paper points out the realistic significance of examining Eliot’s religion of humanity in the material-oriented modern society.