If Atheism is a folly, is not sin at the root of it? Not, it may be, a particular sinful practice, or conscious transgression, but a habit of feeling, which is wrong, and which spreads a film over the organ of spiritual perception. Can a man who reflects, as he ought, upon his own being, and deals honestly with himself as accountable and as convicted of unworthiness in his own. conscience, rest in Atheism? Why is it that to one mind the heavens declares the glory of God, while to another mind their starry surface is a blank page? It is because, in the one case, there is first a recognition of God within the soul; there is a glad acknowledgment of the Father of our Spirits, to whom consciousness and conscience alike testify. In the other case, there is darkness within.

And how important it is that all progress in knowledge should bring us closer to God! Alas, that the study of the works of God should ever be prosecuted in such a spirit that He is more and more removed out of sight! Alas, that the study of history should ever fail to confirm the scholar's faith in the God, of whose Providence history is the record! Vain, nay, worse than in vain, are all our studies, if they fail to deepen our faith in God. The student's daily prayer should be

-"what in me is dark

Illumine, what is low, raise and support."

Then will knowledge prove, indeed, a blessing.

"Let knowledge grow from more to more,

But more of reverence in us dwell;

That mind and soul, according well,

May make one music as before,

"But vaster."

ARTICLE V.-JOHN STUART MILL.

I.

NOTHING Could be more unpretending than Mr. Mill's esti mate of himself. Speaking of the extraordinary attainments of his childhood as within the reach of any boy or girl of average capacity, he says: "If I had been by nature extremely quick of apprehension, or had possessed a very accurate and retentive memory, or were of a remarkably active and energetic character, the trial would not be conclusive; but in all these natural gifts I am rather below than above par; . . . and if I have accomplished anything, I owe it, among other fortunate circumstances, to the fact that through the early training bestowed on me by my father, I started with an advantage of a quarter of a century over my contemporaries."* His latest and humblest acknowledgment is to his wife, as his first was to his father. "During the greater part of my literary life," he says "I have performed the office in relation to her, which from a rather early period I had considered as the most useful part that I was qualified to take in the domain of thought, that of an interpreter of original thinkers, and mediator between them and the public, for I had always a humble opinion of my own powers as an original thinker except in abstract science, but thought myself much superior to most of my contemporaries in willingness and ability to learn from anybody." The whole Autobiography testifies to the sincerity of this conviction that he was rather an inferior man in native endowment and superior only in what he had the good fortune to receive from abler men than himself. None of his admirers is likely to accept this estimate; nor indeed is it just. Mr. Mill is assuredly something less than an interpreter of Wordsworth and Plato, and more than an interpreter of his father, Jeremy Bentham, Comte, Bain, or Mrs. Mill. For he had, what he hesitates to credit himself with, a real if not a very distinct and decided personality of his own, and we get from him as from any orig+ Autobiography, p. 242.

* Autobiography, p. 30.

inal man, not only an interpretation of his teachers, but a new reaction upon old doctrines. Happily or unhappily the reaction was more aesthetic than rational, an affair of the temperament rather than of the understanding, so that what, even in so exact a paper as the Nation, is called Mr. Mill's "philosophy," is in fact an assemblage of discordant opinions from different quarters, all refracted through the turbid medium of Mr. Mill's sensibility. We have been occupied hitherto with varieties of the Empirical Philosophy which seem to be as indifferent to sentiment as they are to fact, in which the thinker is hid behind the thought and the universe behind the theory; wherein triumphant System suppresses whatever it cannot comprehend. There is no doubt a real Mr. Spencer living somewhere in a real world like the rest of us, but it would hardly be worth while to go to First Principles for either one or the other. Before taking leave of the subject we ask the reader's attention to au Empirical philosophy as innocent of system as it is possible for a philosophy to be; in which impulse and foreign influences reign supreme, and all things happen by the grace of God-or at any rate not according to the programme of the philosopher.

The earliest and much the most influential of Mr. Mill's teachers was his father, Mr. James Mill. Were the artist anybody but the son, we should be tempted to suspect the remarkable portrait at the beginning of the Autobiography of caricature. Mr. James Mill was the son of a small tradesman in the county of Angus, Scotland, and was sent to the University of Edinburg on a charitable fund to be educated for the Scottish church. He finished his studies and was licensed as a preacher, but never followed his profession; having satisfied himself that he could not believe the doctrines of that or any other church; an appropriate consequence of offensive charities anywhere. However, the turning-point of his mind upon the subject was the argument of Butler's Analogy that there is no greater difficulty in believing that the Old and New Testaments proceed from a perfectly wise and good being than in believing that the universe does. To the unfortunate demonstration that Christianity is no more unreasonable and immoral than nature is, Mr. Mill replied that both are bad. "He found

it impossible to believe that a world so full of evil was the work of an Author combining infinite power with perfect goodness and righteousness." After this rejection of Christianity and Deism it is somewhat puzzling to learn that Mr. Mill was not an atheist. Dogmatic atheism-the assertion that there is no God-he considered absurd; but finding dogmatic deismthe assertion that there is one-equally absurd, "he remained for a time in a state of perplexity, until he yielded to the conviction that concerning the origin of things nothing can be known;" which means that nobody knows whether there be any God or no, or if there be one whether he is not the devil. This is the state of mind which Mr. Leslie Stephen has recently dignified with the title of Agnosticism and which he has put in a plea for as a most reasonable state of mind. We say nothing to the contrary, but it is evident that it must be extremely unreasonable unless the state of the heart corresponds with the state of the mind. If a man's intelligence is perplexed and in suspense, it is quite unbecoming in him to let loose his pas sions; since to do so is really to decide the question and to make up one's mind. This is the sentimental non-sequitur which Mr. James Mill fell into. His fierce antipathy to the deity of Christendom as the "ne plus ultra of wickedness" is an effectual renunciation of Agnosticism, for it involves the assertion that the most conspicuous of all the pretenders to the dignity in question either is not, or is not the good and wise and strong being he says he is. Equally gnostic, or knowing, is his impatience with the deity of Natural Religion. "His intellect spurned the subtleties by which men blind themselves to the open contradiction" between the evil which fills the world and the character given of its author by the deists. That is, to the dogma that the author of this evil world is not the God of the church (although the "ne plus ultra of wickedness" might very well be the author of this evil world), Mr. Mill added the larger dogma that he is not a being who "combines infinite power with perfect goodness and righteousness." This may be nescience; but then what is knowledge? If Mr. Mill had been content to dismiss the Deity from the universe with the distinguished consideration of Mr. Spencer, or the pensive regret of Prof. Tyndall, or the tranquil unconcern of Mr. Lewes,

room might still have been found for a not inconsequent profession of Agnosticism; the ceremony might have been disguised under the amiable pretence of consigning the Unknown to the limbo of the Unknowable. But to add vituperation to dismissal; not so much to ignore a pretender as to depose the reigning sovereign, because his character is so bad and the empire so full of evil-this is to profess a very large and exact knowledge of the universe and of its origin.

Mr. Mill's notion of life followed his notion of the universe. He was a Stoic and a Cynic in the ancient sense of the words.* "He thought human life a poor thing at best, after the freshness of youth and unsatisfied curiosity had gone by. It was a topic on which he did not often speak; but when he did it was with an air of settled and profound conviction. He would sometimes say that if life were made what it might be by good gov ernment and good education, it would be worth having: but he never spoke with anything like enthusiasm even of that possibility;" not, observe, because the possibility is so remote, but because life even when worth having at all is not worth much, "being but a poor thing at best." That ideal life which good government and good education might procure is not so much better than the miserable reality that we need be enthusiastic about it. For Mr. Mill had scarcely any belief in pleasure. He was not insensible to pleasures, but "he deemed very few of them worth the price which must be paid for them." Of these few he rated intellectual pleasures above all others, and, apparently, the pleasures of the benevolent affections next. But for extremes of pleasure, and for passionate emotions of all sorts, and for whatever has been said or sung in praise of them, he professed the greatest contempt. They seemed to him to be a sort of madness. "He regarded as an aberration of the moral standard of modern times, the great stress laid upon feeling. Feelings, as such, he considered to be no proper subjects of praise or blame. Right and wrong; good and bad, he regarded as qualities solely of conduct-of acts and omis sions." Briefly, life as it is, is not worth having: the only emotions strong enough to interrupt our misery are madness; and

* Autobiography, p. 47.