ward bounds;"1 but the whole effect of his argument is to prescribe to imagination a holiday on the loose, out of sight of the castle, every time, so to speak, that the horses are disengaged. Surely men are prone enough to put guess and inclination above science without being thus strangely encouraged to it in the name of science itself. Every purpose that Mill professed to have in view could be met by the cherishing of hopes of an ideal future for humanity in this world ; and he gratuitously, nay, treasonably, gave away that motive power in the professed service of humanity.

And if he is illogical in his general scheme of philosophical culture for the feelings, he is worse than illogical, he is inexcusably heedless, in his treatment of the claims of the religion which in his own community professes both to train the feelings and inform the reason, His eulogy of the Jesus of the Gospels, and his unwarrantable and fallacious defence of the historic actuality of that figure, have been picked out of the mass of rhetorical empiricism that makes up the essay on Theism, and brandished in the faces of rationalists as a complete admission that Jesus lived and spoke as he is said to have done; that Jesus was perfect ; that nobody else had such ideas; and that he really may have had a special message from God-for to this extremity of unreasoning hypothesis Mill actually proceeds, though for some unexplained reason he will not accept the doctrine of the Incarnation. The whole exposition is arbitrary and illogical to the last degree. Professing to argue the question whether Jesus existed, and to show that he must have done, Mill contends that this is clear because nobody else could have said the things he says in the synoptics. It is the most scandalous case of begging the question that I can remember. You ask : Is the teaching Jesus of the Gospels a true historical figure, or are not his professed teachings a compilation of many current at that and a later period? Answer, No: because we know that Jesus existed and taught such: things, and nobody else was capable of inventing them. That is :the thing to be proved is taken for granted. If Mill had ever paid the least critical attention to New

а

Testament criticism, however fallaciously he might continue to reason, he could scarcely bave played fast and loose with the matter to the extent he did. But we know from Professor Bain, that “he scarcely ever read a theological book. . . He is not even well read in the sceptics that preceded him."1 He has no notion of the application of analytic historical criticism to the records. He talks of “the fishermen of Galilee,” as if he knew all about them; and it has apparently never struck him that Paul shows

2 no sign of having ever heard of any teachings of Jesus whatever, save in the dubious matter of the Last Supper. He speaks generally of the life and sayings of Jesus as having a “stamp of personal originality combined with profundity of insight;" and he does not cite a single saying to exhibit that profundity. He pronounces the matter special to the Fourth Gospel to be “poor stuff,” of which there was any amount to be had in the East; and he does not attempt in a single line to show where the sayings of the synoptics are more profound than those. In point of fact, it is the Fourth Gospel that above all has gone to build up the traditional conception of Jesus as a marvellous teacher; and it will continue to do so, and would do so even if such matters as the Sermon on the Mount had not been shown to be pre- e-Christian. The most independent of all the teachings attributed to Jesus (and even that cannot have been original) is that in the story of the woman taken in adultery, which occurs only in the Fourth Gospel, and which is now rejected by the Revisers as an interpolation, though ignorant Christians—and others—continue to lay stress on it as a proof of Jesus' moral exaltation. Mill, after alleging his profundity, without giving any example of it, calls him “probably the greatest moral reformer who ever existed upou

earth,” when in point of fact there is not one valid moral doctrine - attributed to Jesus which had not been laid down long before him,

and when he not only passed over in absolute silence one of the worst social crimes of all ages, that of slavery, but is represented in the First Gospel as giving special endorsement to the evil doctrine of national exclusiveness, telling his disciples to enter not

into any city of the Samaritans. And Mill himself had in the previous essay on the Utility of Religion pointed out that the Christ of the Gospels bases right action on the hope of a heavenly reward, and endorses the doctrine of hell punishment, which last Mill admits to be a drawback “of so flagrant a character as almost to outweigh all the beauty and benignity and moral greatness which so eminently distinguish the sayings and character of Christ.”. At the end he seems to have got over this drawback.

VII.

Of these salient intellectual shortcomings we can only say that they give staggering proof of the laxity of Mill's mind in the application of his own logical principles to the discovery of truth in regard to the constitution of the universe and the history of religion. But if we are right in saying that these intellectual weaknesses were correlative with his sympathetic qualities, they finally serve to give us a more vivid idea of the strength of the element of benevolent feeling in his character. These unhappy reasonings on Theism, that headlong deliverance as to the character and actuality of the Jesus of the Gospels, were on this view partly the outcome of his wish to preserve for his fellows every possible comfort and consolation from their old religious beliefs, every vestige of their old devotions, that seemed tenable without injury to good morals. If he miscalculated on the last head, at least the aim was good. And at worst, even if we attribute his fallacy not wholly to pure altruism but partly to intellectual infirmity, hereditary or acquired, in himself, still no one who has studied him ever harboured a doubt as to his integrity in debate, or his readiness to listen to criticism when it came. Had he lived, the essay on Theism would certainly have been revised, if he had ever seen fit to publish it.

What is more to the purpose, we shall see, in dealing with his social doctrines, that though there too his inclinations and

1 Essay on Utility of Religion, pp. 111-113.

sympathies could warp his reasoning, they rarely led to his advancing an injurious doctrine, just because his desires were so essentially benevolent and his practical sympathies so just. For once that he reasoned to the detriment of right policy, he was ten times the advocate of right policy in the face of extreme discouragement; and the sympathies and aspirations which sometimes made his doctrines inconsistent were always potent to lead him past his inconsistencies to new doctrine and new beneficent activity. May we all have as fortunate an antidote to the errors of reasoning which, with possibly worse origins, we are at least sure to commit as he.

VIII.

After what we have seen of Mill's way of thinking and reasoning about the matters of popular religious belief, there is nothing surprising in the fact that throughout his lifetime he kept silence in the main on those points in which he thought that belief irrational and immoral. Dr. Bain tells? of a conversational episode between Carlyle and Mill when he was in their company, in regard to the proclamation of heterodox opinions. The party were walking together, and Carlyle was "denouncing our religion and all its accessories. Mill struck in with the remark, ‘Now, you are just the very man to tell the public your whole mind upon that subject. This was not exactly what Carlyle fancied. He gave, with his peculiar grunt, the exclamation 'Ho,' and added, it is someone like Frederick the Great that should do that.'» Well, Frederick the Great did indicate his opinions on these subjects pretty freely, but Frederick’s biographer, on that particular point, was rather more circumspect; and he seems to have been very frigid to Mr. Froude, at their first meeting, because that gentleman, then young and imperfectly Carlylean, had been publishing his views on religious subjects. When it came to speaking out on these matters, Carlyle shuffled his pack of principles, and

for the trump card, “speak the truth," substituted that other, burn

your own smoke." But why, one asks, did Mill practise the same reticence ? Ho apparently cannot have felt on the subject in his youth, when he urged Carlyle to speak out, as he did in later life when he wrote the essay on Theism; but he never assailed religious unreason and immorality as he did the subjection of women and the restriction of freedom of thought in general; and even the essay on Theism, like those with which it is published, avows opinions thoroughly opposed to those of the majority. Apparently he thought that in his time it was still expedient to maintain silence, as it had been in his father's time. He tells in the Autobiography how thoroughly anti-religious were his father's opinions, and how they were imbibed by himself.

“I am thus,” he wrote, “one of the very few examples, in this country, of one who has, not thrown off religious belief, but never had it: I grew up in a negative state with regard to it. I looked upon the modern exactly as I did upon the ancient religion, as something which in no way con. cerned me.

It did not seem to me more strange that English people should believe what I did not, than that the men I read of in Herodotus should have done so. History had made the variety of opinions among mankind a fact familiar to me, and this was but a prolongation of that fact. This point in my early education had, however, incidentally one bad conse. quence deserving notice. In giving me an opinion contrary to that of the world, my father thought it necessary to give it as one which could not be prudently avowed to the world. This lesson of keeping my thoughts to myself at that early age was attended with some moral disadvantages ; though my limited intercourse with strangers, especially such as were likely to speak to me on religion, prevented me from being placed in the alternative of avowal or hypocrisy."

Twice, he says, he discussed religious matters with other boys; so the moral disadvantages would seem to have attached to his later life. But he goes on :

“ The great advance in liberty of discussion, which is one of the most important differences between the present time and that of my childhood, has greatly altered the moralities of this question ; and I think that few men of my father's intellect and public spirit, holding with such intensity