ABSTRACT
Over the past 200 years, as traditional religious belief has declined, many people have said that although they are not Christian and not religious, they retain the same values as religious believers. George Eliot, as reported by the Cambridge don Frederic Myers,
taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of men – the words God, Immortality, Duty – pronounced, with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third.1
