Not long ago, I reread George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

I’ll have more to say about this unforgettable novel about social change in the countryside at one of the great inflection points in British history. But these two quotations, I thought, merited attention by themselves:

On one point he may fairly claim approval at this particular stage of his career; he did not mean to imitate those philanthropic models who make a profit out of poisonous pickles to support themselves while they are exposing adulteration, or hold shares in a gambling-hell that they may have leisure to represent the cause of public morality.

George Eliot, Middlemarch [1872] (New York: Bantam Classics, 1985), p. 133.

[On going into a usurious pawnbroking business:] The business was established and had old roots; is it not one thing to set up a new gin-palace and another to accept an investment in an old one? The profits made out of lost souls – where can the line be drawn at which they begin in human transactions? Was it not even God’s way of saving his chosen?

George Eliot, Middlemarch [1872] (New York: Bantam Classics, 1985), p. 563.