HIS RELIGION. 



77 



could not rest on his mind, but must 

 be thrown up, as a great relief to 

 himself, and a positive nuisance to 

 others. But in his case, he skulked 

 through life like a thief, a conspira- 

 tor, or an assassin, afraid of being 

 apprehended by every one he met 

 with, and only after his death, left 

 his secret to the world. Fortunate- 

 ly, he had no knowledge of poison- 

 ing as one of the fine arts, for he has 

 presented his drug in such a form 

 and quantity, that both palate and 

 stomach will reject it, to say nothing 

 of its being correctly labeled. 



John Stuart Mill, however, had a 

 religion, or rather two religions, al- 

 though he does not say that he had 

 them at the same time. The first 

 one he acquired by reading the 

 Traite de Legislation, and it is thus 

 described : 



" I now had opinions ; a creed, a doc- 

 trine, a philosophy ; in one among the 

 best senses of the word, a religion ; the 

 inculcation and diffusion of which could 

 be made the principal outward purpose 

 of a life. And I had a grand [Utopian] 

 conception laid before me of changes to 

 be effected in the condition of mankind 

 through that doctrine " (p. 67). 



All of * which, as we shall see, 

 " went by the board " when he fell 

 into the dumps, and was like to 

 have made away with himself. 



He makes several allusions, in 

 very indefinite language, to religion 

 among freethinkers, the best of them 

 being " more genuinely religious, in 

 the best sense of the word religion, 

 than those who exclusively arrogate 

 to themselves the title " (p. 46) ; 

 such religion standing "for any 

 graces of character, and not for 

 mere dogma" (as if any one asserted 

 that religion consisted in ' mere 

 dogma'), and being "an ideal con- 

 ception of a perfect being to which 

 they habitually refer as the guide of 

 their conscience " ; who is neither 

 the creator, preserver, nor governor 

 of the world, whose habitation is 

 nowhere imagined, whose attributes 

 are not conceivable in detail, who 



exercises no control over man, and 

 who, in short, has no existence but 

 in the imagination of the creature, 

 whose ideal will vary with its own 

 personal peculiarities. But this is 

 said only of the best class of un- 

 believers, and is not advanced as 

 his own religion. When reviewing 

 Comte, he expatiated on it in this 

 manner : 



" Candid persons of all creeds may 

 be willing to admit [which they certainly 

 do not] that if a person has an ideal 

 object [as Mill had in Mrs. Taylor, be- 

 fore and after she became his wife], his 

 attachment and sense of duty towards 

 which are able to control and discipline 

 all his other sentiments and propensities, 

 and prescribe to him a rule of life, that 

 person has a religion ; and though every 

 one naturally prefers his own religion to 

 any other, all must admit, that if the 

 object of his attachment, and of this 

 feeling of duty, is the aggregate of our 

 fellow - creatures [Bentham's dogma, 

 ' the greatest happiness of the greatest 

 number '], this religion of the infidel 

 cannot in honesty and conscience be 

 called an intrinsically bad one " [for the 

 simple reason that, having no reference 

 to the Creator, it is no religion at all]. 



Mill's other religion sprung from 

 the death of Mrs. Taylor, who be- 

 came his wife after a friendship of 

 twenty-one years, while the wife of 

 another man, and of whom we shall 

 have something further to say. It is 

 thus described : 



" Her memory is to me a religion, and 

 her approbation the standard by which, 

 summing up as it does all worthiness, I 

 endeavour to regulate my life " (p. 251) 



He does not say that she had any 

 religion beyond the very indefinite 

 and untrustworthy one, that may 

 mean anything, of a 



" Complete emancipation from every 

 kind of superstition [such as ?] (includ- 

 ing that which attributes a pretended 

 perfection to the order of nature and 

 the universe), and an earnest protest 

 against many things [what were they ?] 

 which are still part of the established 

 constitution of society, . . . with a 

 highly reverential nature" (p. 186). 



