"I was broiijjht np from the first without any relij,'iou8 belief, in the ordinary acceptation of the term. My fa- ther, educated in the creed of Scotch PiesUyteriaiiitim, had by his own studies and reflections been early led to reject not only tlie belief in revehition, but al>o the foun- dations of what is commonly culled Natural Ueligion. . . . Finding no halting-place in deism, he remained in a state of perplexity until, doubtless after nnuiy struggles, he yielded to tlie conviction that concerniwi the origin of things nrithiini irhat>ivr ran be kmncn. This is the only correct statnociit .ilMiis opinion, for dogmatic atheism he looked upon as .ili-urd : as most ofthose wli 'ui the world has considiMi'd atheists have always done. These jjartic- lllars arc important, l)ecause thev show that inv father's rejection of all that is ealleil religious belief was not, as many might siijipose, iirimarily a matter ol' lo'.,'ie and evi- dence: tfu^ grounds of it were inoral still more than in- tellectual, lie found it impossible to Iwlieve that a world 60 fall of evil was the work of an Anth or ( iliinim,' in- finite power with perfect wisdom and ri_lieoM-iii~>. . . . His aversion to religion, in the sense iisnally aiiarhed to the term, was of the same kind with thai of Liierelius: he reirarded it with tlic feelings due not to a mere mental delusion, but to a great moral evil. He looked upon it as the greatest enemy of morality: first, by setting up ficti- tious excellences— belief in creeds, (ievotioiial feelin<;s, and ceremonies, not connected with the i.'ood of the hu- man race — and causiiiL; them to be accepie(l as sul)siitutes for genuine virtues; btil, above all, by railimllv vitiating the standard of morals, making' ii eon-i-i in dom- the will of a being on whom it lavishc's all tlie plira-es of ,i,l- nlation, but whom in sober trnMi it ilepiri- .is eniimnily hateful. I have a hundred times heard him say thai ail ages and nations have represented their gods a"s wicked j in a constantly iiicreasin<; progresRion ; that mankind have gone on adding trait after trait till they reached the | most perfect conception of wickedness which the hitman miud can devise, and have called this God, ami pro-irate. 1 themselves before it. This ,„• j,h,.-< u/lrd of wi( kcilne-s he considered to be embodied in what is eommc)iilv iire<ent- ed to mankind as the creed of Christianity. 'I'hiidv (he used to say) of a being who would make a hell — who ■would create the hitman rtice with tlie infallible fore- knowledge, and therefore with the intention, thtit tlie great majority of them were to be consigned to horrible and everlasting torment 1"
It does not .seem to have occurred to James Mill to in- quire whether what was presented as the creed of Chris- tianity by the Kirk and its divines really was the only lesson to be learned from the religion of the Gospel and the idea of God. 15ut, holding this entirely negative belief, essentially and directly, as was well said by Browne before the Christian Evidence .Society, because he did not ailmit the freedom of the will, he based the education of his son ujion it. Hence wc are not aston- ished when a little after the passage quoted above we find John Stuart Jlill writing:
"It would have been wholly inconsistent with my fa- ther's ideas of duty to allow me to acquire impressions contrary to his convictions and feelings respecting reli<_'- jon; and he impressed upon me from the first tliat the manner in which the world came into existence was a subject on which nothing was known ; that the question. 'Wlio mtidc me?' cannot lie answered, heiMiise we liave no experience or authentic inforMiaiion from which to answer it ; and that any answer only throws the difiiculty a step further buck, since the question immediately pre- sents itself, ' Wlio made God y' "
That is to say, because he could not solve the problem of the origin of evil, he took refuge in a cheerless nes- cience, and denied the possibility of knowing anything relative to the origin or the destiny of mankind, denied the authority of conscience, and substitulc<l tlie princi- ple of utility for any intuitive standard of right and wrong. In his own life tliis dismal jdiilosopliy had al- ready borne its bitter fruit, and his son writes that
"He deemed very few pleasures worth the price paid for them ; he thought human life a poor thing after the
freshness of youth and of unsatisfied curiosity had gone by. He would sometimes say that if life were made what it might be by good government and good education, it would be worth having; but he never spoke with any entliusiasm even of that possibility. He ussd to say he had never known a happy old man, except those who were able to live over again u\ the pleasures of the young."