HIS RELIGION 



73 



seen, that he " was brought up from 

 the first without any religious be- 

 lief, in the ordinary acceptation of the 

 term " (p. 38), which qualification 

 had evidently no meaning, as he 

 afterwards said he never had any (p. 

 43). This is supported by what he 

 says when he speaks of 



" A view of religion which I hold to 

 be profoundly immoral that it is our 

 duty to bow down in worship before a Be- 

 ing whose moral attributes are affirmed 

 to be unknowable by us, and to be per- 

 haps extremely different from those 

 which, when we are speaking of our 

 fellow-creatures, we call by the same 

 name " (p. 275).* 



He was well drilled by his father, 

 who seems to have made it a matter 

 of conscience to do so, for he says : 



" It would have been wholly incon- 

 sistent with my father's ideas of duty 

 to allow me to acquire impressions 

 contrary to his convictions and feelings 

 respecting religion " (p. 42). 



Doubtless he treated with " scornful 

 disapprobation " and " stern repre- 

 hension," and positively prohibited, 

 any attempt of the poor mother, 

 whom he kept in absolute subjec- 

 tion, to teach any of her large 

 family to even lisp a prayer. There 

 must be a reason for Mill not even 

 mentioning her, or any of his bro- 

 thers or sisters, beyond the trouble 

 he had in teaching them ; and it 

 would be interesting to know how 

 they turned out in regard to reli- 

 gion. His own history shows that 

 it is possible to " breed and raise " 

 practical atheists-f It may be that 



* This is strange language to come 

 from a man who said that he " never had 

 any religious belief." Of course, it would 

 have been out of the question to have 

 asked him to give us a " view of religion" 

 that was " profoundly moral," or state 

 where he found his ideas of morality on 

 that or any other subject. 



f There was something horrible in 

 James Mill's course in this respect, if we 

 judge him by his class, irrespective of its 

 shades of unbelief; for such often, if not 

 generally, teach the children nothing in 

 regard to religion (and would sometimes 



his father, looking on him as " the 

 apple of his eye," the heir and suc- 

 cessor of himself and creed, or 

 rather want of a creed, let the rest of 

 the family " run " in the matter of 

 the important question of religion ; 

 about which Mill, with apparent 

 want of candour, says nothing. And 

 yet we might have expected him to 

 have informed us on that point, 

 since he dwelt on the subject at 

 such length, returning again and 

 again to it. The conclusion to be 

 drawn from his father so jealously 

 preventing him being taught any- 

 thing on the subject of religion by 

 others would be, that the rest of 

 the family were brought up in the 

 same way. The father " rejected all 

 that is called religious belief" (p. 

 39). "He regarded it with the 

 feeling due not to a mere mental 

 delusion, but to a great moral evil. 

 He looked upon it as the greatest 

 enemy to morality," and as " radi- 

 cally vitiating the standard of 

 morals " (p. 40) ; without saying 

 what that standard of morals is, or 

 where it is to be found, or how it 

 can be made binding on men. 



" He was supremely indifferent in 

 opinion (though his indifference did not 

 show itself in personal conduct) to all 

 those doctrines of the common morality 

 which he thought had no foundation 

 but in asceticism and priestcraft " (p. 

 107). " And thus [says his son] morality 

 continues a matter of blind tradition [!], 

 with no consistent principle, nor even 

 any consistent feeling, to guide it " (p. 

 42), [like Maurice's] "worthless heap 

 of received opinions on the great sub- 

 jects of thought " (p. 153).* 



wish that they rather were religious) but 

 leave that question to the mother, or let 

 the children pick up a creed of any kind, 

 or in any way acquired. Often, when 

 closely pressed, they will say that their 

 soul is like the dove that could find no 

 rest for the sole of its foot. 



* The reader will feel it difficult, or 

 rather impossible, to put a meaning on 

 the language quoted. Take the last six 

 commandments in the Decalogue, for 

 our negative morality, and the many in- 

 junctions, both negative and positive, 

 scattered through the New Testament, 



