THE BISHOP OF ST. DAVID'S ON MR. MILL'S HERESY. To
THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."
June 12, 1865. very seldom hear anything of the sayings and doings of The Record, except when they happen to attract the notice of some of its contemporaries, and it is only through your recent article
• Too use of the term in England, of late years at least. has beau determined by it; application to the class of " pearnut proprietors" in Norway, Belgium, Switzerl.md, and Tuscauy, with which Mr. J. 8. Mill's great book has male the world so familia:. To none of those will our correspondent's notion of it hare any correct application.
that I have become acquiinted with its attack on Mr. Mill, and several distinguished persons who have done honour to him and to themselves by their political support. I have nothing to add to your exposure of The Record's argument, but I entirely acquit it of intentional misrepresentation. I believe it to be an honest exhibition of intellectual and moral incapacity, as worthy of The Record and its satellite as it would have been impossible for any journal which had the smallest title to respect as a guide of reli- gious opinion. Perhaps it might have been safely predicted that, if there was a passage in Mr. Mill's work which The Record would select for condemnation and would denounce as " Satanic," it would be that which breathes the purest spirit of Christian morality. I do not envy the man who could read it without being thrilled by a sense of the ethical sublime. But yet I must say that it is apparently open to objection on a different, indeed an entirely opposite, ground. It sounds as if Mr. Mill laid claim to a degree of heroic virtue hitherto without example, unless as a pure idea,—as if he believed himself capable of making a sacrifice to duty in comparison with which the agonies of all the martyrs who have ever suffered for truth and justice concentrated in a single victim would be as nothing, —nay, as if such a sacrifice would cost him little effort. I am persuaded that Mr. Mill did not really mean to lift himself so far above not only the common level of humanity, but the highest examples of moral greatness and Christian fortitude. I believe that if he had been conscious of such almost superhuman strength of will—which he could not be until it was put to the test—he would have shrunk from the seem- ing arrogance of asserting it for himself, and that in fact he never thought of doing so. I understand the declaration "To hell I will go " simply as an emphatic form of expression for that which he knows would be his duty in the case supposed. It probably never occurred to him to imagine that it could be interpreted otherwise, still less that it might expose him to the charge of atheism. He may well be indifferent to any damage which it is in the power of The Record to inflict on him, and it would have been vain to take precautions against its faculty of misconception ; but for the sake of readers of a different class, it might have been better if, while he laid down the principle of virtuous conduct, he had qualified the announcement of his stoical resolve by some ac- knowledgment of his share in our common infirmity.—I am, Sir,
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