If stable character is based upon a coherent view of the world, then the clergyman protagonists of Scenes of Clerical Life, living in English provincial society during the first half of the nineteenth century, are at risk. They all embody radical discontinuities in communities which are themselves seriously divided. These gaps are ultimately bridged not by religious faith in any orthodox sense but by faith redirected to certain human continuities. The cost, however, is high: new life only emerges from pain, suffering, and death. That final discontinuity has to be experienced in each case before coherence in character and community can be achieved. These are George Eliot's most theological stories, engaged as they are in questioning, displacing, and then recovering the language of biblical hermeneutics for her own humanistic purposes.

‘Amos Barton’ is a bleak story whose bleakness is a reflection of its pervasive fragmentariness. It begins with the description of a gap of twenty-five years. On the far side of the gap is Shepperton church as it was in all its old quaintness and heterogeneity; on this side is the efficiently renovated church of the present. The crucial feature of the old church was the mysteriousness of the statues and the escutcheons, and the drama of the church service. To the imagination of the narrator's childhood self they provided ‘inexhaustible possibilities of meaning’ because, though more or less unintelligible, they allowed all kinds of emotions to be acted out through their traditional communal forms. On this side of the gap is the world of the mature narrator and the reader, the world created by the modern ‘well-regulated mind’.