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Good morning. Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of George Eliot, widely believed to be our greatest novelist, especially for her major work, Middlemarch. She wrote under the name George Eliot but her real name was Mary Ann Evans. Her early years were spent in the West Midlands, not far from Coventry, and as a teenager there she had a fervent Christian faith. By the age of 22 however, this had been rejected. There were a number of reasons , but especially strong was her sense that the Christianity she had experienced was too narrow and judgemental and, moreover, it was quite possible to be good without religion. This was to be the dominant note in her later attitude. As she wrote “God, immortality, duty - how inconceivable the first, how unbelievable the second, how peremptory and absolute the third.” This deep moral seriousness was to be a characteristic of the Victorian age, whether people were agnostic or Christian. As another novelist, Rosemary Macauley, writing in the 20th century put it “The weaker they got on religion the stronger they got on morals~” adding ruefully, “which used to be the case more then than now”. The great strength of George Eliot as a novelist is her capacity to enter imaginatively into the lives of other people, however humdrum these might seem. I remember reading her novel Scenes from Clerical Life as a young ordinand and marvelling at the way she could enter with such feeling into the lives of some fairly ordinary clergyman whose beliefs she did not share. She once wrote “Surely the only one true knowledge of our fellow man is that which enables us to feel with him--which gives us a fine ear for the heart-pulses that are beating under the mere clothes of circumstance and opinion.” Not surprisingly, she believed that the great value of novels was the way they could extend our imaginations in this way. Perhaps she had an instinctive feeling for others. But whether she did or not, she was shaped by some famous words in the Hebrew Scriptures, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” (Leviticus 19, 18). These words were picked out by Jesus and linked with another command that we are to love God with all that we are, as the basis from which all true religion should flow. It is a command that has parallels in other major religious traditions as well. And that directive, to love our neighbour as ourself, begins with actually noticing the neighbour, truly seeing them and then extending the imagination to try to grasp what it might be like to be them, looking out at the world with their eyes, their hopes and fears. Of course we can’t do this anywhere near fully, but good art, and not least the novels of George Eliot, help us extend our range in that way.