Middlemarch Compassion and Forgiveness Quotes

The narrator is reflecting on how Mr. Bulstrode, who is so hung up on his religion and belief in Christian doctrine, could have committed such terrible crimes in his earlier life. Instead of explaining it away by saying, "Mr. Bulstrode is a hypocrite," Eliot thinks more deeply about a universal trend: she says that religious belief in "general doctrine" can only go so far. Our "morality" is dependent on "direct fellow-feeling" – in other words, on sympathy. According to the narrator, if we're not able to sympathize or to feel compassion for "individual fellow-men," then it doesn't matter what your religious beliefs are, you're not going to treat others well.

This pretty much sums up the moral lesson of the novel. Dorothea is trying to persuade Lydgate to let her help him out of his financial, social, and marital troubles. Dorothea likes helping people, but Lydgate generally doesn't like being helped. Dorothea explains her impulse to help him, even though she doesn't know him all that well, by saying that it's some universal human impulse, something that "we" all "live for." This is another place where the first person plural ("we") seems to include the reader – "mak[ing] life less difficult to each other" is something that "we" all "live for." Or it's what we'd all live for if we were all Dorotheas, anyway.

Mr. Farebrother has only met Dorothea a few times when he says this. She has helped him out of his troubles by giving him a better job as a clergyman where he'll make more money, and now she has expressed to him her desire of making Lydgate's life easier, too. She wants to help the world! And so, like many other characters in the novel, Mr. Farebrother associates Dorothea with something divine or sacred (see Dorothea's "Character Analysis" for more on that).