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MR. Mil .L'S ESSAYS ON RELIGION.* IT is a little hard on Mr. John Stuart Mill that the school which Once treated him as an oracle, now turns round on him, because he has in many respects trangressed its very narrow limits, and speaks of him as little better than a crack-brained fanatic. As far as his worldly repute is concerned, he would have done much better to abide in those tents of Kedar in which he was brought up. The wider and wider flights which he indulged in round the centre of his hereditary philosophy,—a philosophy never really deserted, though he circled so far beyond its customs', boundaries that his brethren in the craft almost looked upon him as a renegade. and an adventurer, —never had the effect of convincing any fresh class of minds that lie was of their kith and kin, though these ex- cursions had the effect of exciting suspicion, jealousy, and contempt amongst his colleagues of the empirical school. And the result is that he has to some extent fallen between the two stools. The Millites of fifteen years ago know him no more. The believers in an Ethics that are something more than utility in disguise, and in a Religion which is something beyond a naked induction from the facts of human life, are disposed to claim him rather as an in- stance of a mind too great for the philosophy on which he was nourished, than as one great enough to throw off the trammels of its origin and grasp at the higher truth beyond. And no doubt this is the natural reward of Mr. Mill's candour, and of that expansion of his" intellectual apprehensions which his candour be- trayed. His step-daughter tells us, in the preface to these essays, that "whatever discrepancies may seem to remain after a really careful comparison between different passages" cannot properly be held to be really fundamental, since he himself was intending to publish the first essay,—that on "Nature,"—in the year 1873, after he had already completed the last of the three, and that which is most religious in tone, namely, that on "Theism." But in truth, by far the most striking discrepancy in view in these essays is not one between anything in the first essay and the third, but one between a passage in the second essay and the third,—f.e., between the essay on the "Utility of Religion" and that on "Theism." In the former of these, Mr. Mill expressly declares that an ideal religion,—i.e., a religion without any personal object, which consists solely in the cultivation of a particular class of ideal admirations and hopes in relation to humanity, is not only capable of fulfilling "every important function of religion, but would fulfil them better than any form whatever of super- naturalism. It is not only entitled to be called a, religion, it is a better religion than any of those which are ordinarily called by that title." It is true that even in the course of the same essay, he makes a great exception to this assertion. He admits that to give up the hope of reunion in another world with those who have gone before us in this, is a loss "neither to be denied nor ex- tenuated. La many cases, it is beyond the reach of comparison or • Nature, The Utility of Religion, and 27m. By him Stuart Mill. London : Longmans.
' estimate." But there Mr. Mill is speaking of a loss to the human heart, more than of one to the religious affections properly so called. In the final essay on "Theism;" he goes far beyond this, and deals a blow at the relative influence of mere religious idealisms of all kinds, as compared with that of religious supernaturalism properly so called. "It cannot be questioned," he says, "that the undoubt- ing belief of the real existence of a Being who realises our own best ideas of perfection, and of our being in the hands of that Being as the ruler of the universe, gives an increase of power to these feelings [aspirations towards goodness] beyond what they can receive from reference to a merely ideal concep- tion." That seems to us in direct contradiction of the assertion that the idealisation of human life is not only a religion, but a better religion than any which supernaturalism is capable of afford- ing us. In fact, it is evident that this progress of his mind from religious idealism towards religious realism, no less than its progress from something like pure indifference to Christianity to a genuine enthusiasm for Christ, shows Mr. Mill to have been unconsciously working his way out of the philosophical system in which he was cast, and so earning for himself the agreeable reputation of presenting to the world fruit "sour and cankere,d with a worm at its wasted core." For our own parts, Mr. Mill's progress from a narrow and barren set of word-bound notions into a true religion of what he himself calls "hope,"—though it was nothing more,—seems to show that he had a nature far richer than his intellect, and even an intellect capable of discerning in what direction the growth of his life was breaking down the barrier of his preconceived thoughts.
Still, though these essays contain ample evidence of a growing mind, it would be impossible to say that the great subjects treated in them are treated with the fullness and care exhibited in Mr. Mill's earlier works. They are rather outlines than dissertations, outlines which require filling up to produce their full effect on the reader. There are writers, as there are artists, with whom the rough sketch is even more than the finished work,—whose first designs are more fruitful of impression and suggestion than the elaborately executed picture. But Mr. Mill was never one of that class. Execution and elaboration were his forte ; he exerted half his influence through the fidelity of his detail, and essays like these, which are mere rough outlines, do not produce the characteristic effect of painstaking exhaustiveness which we find in his "Logic," or his" Examination of Sir William Hamilton." Consider, for instance, how exceedingly faint and imperfect is his exposition here of the most remarkable and characteristic idea of this work. That idea we take to be that the existence of pain, and evil, and even of contrivance and design, in the Universe, is in itself ample evidence that the Creator of it, if there be a Creator, is either greatly limited in power, or morally imperfect, or both. This is the idea running through all the essays. To Mr. Mill, the Creator, if there be one, must be the Demiurgus of the Gnostics, hampered by the obstructions of some intractable material, not the Omnipotent being of Christian theology. Here are fair specimens of his mode of supporting his view :-
"If there are any marks at all of special design in creation, one of the things most evidently designed is that a large proportion of all animals should pass their existence in tormenting and devouring other animals. They have been lavishly fitted out with the instruments necessary for that purpose ; their strongest instincts impel them to it, and many of them seem to have been constructed incapable of support- ing themselves by any other food. If a tenth part of the pains which have been expended in finding benevolent adaptations in all nature had been employed in collecting evidence to blacken the character of the Creator, what scope for comment would not have been found in the entire existence of the lower animals, divided, with scarcely an excep- tion, into devourers and devoured, and a prey to a thousand ills from which they are denied the faculties necessary for protecting themselves ! If we are not obliged to believe the animal creation to be the work of a demon, it is because we need not suppose
it to have been made by a Being of infinite power It is not too much to say that every indication of Design in the Kosmos is so much evidence against the Omnipotence of the Designer. For what is meant by Design? Contrivance : the adaptation of means to an end. But the necessity for contrivance—the need of employing means—is a consequence of the limitation of power. Who would have recourse to means, if to attain his end his mere word was sufficient ? The very idea of means implies that the means have an efficacy which the direct action of the being who employs them has not. Otherwise they are not means, but an ineumbranee. A man does not use machinery to move his arms. If he did, it could only be when paralysis had deprived him of the power of moving them by volition. But if the employment of contrivance is in itself a sign of limited power, how much more so is the careful and skilful choice of contrivances ? Can any wisdom be shown in the selection of means, when the means have no efficacy but what is given them by the will of him who employs them, and when his will could have bestowed the same efficacy on any other means ? Wisdom and contrivance are shown in overcoming difficulties, and there is no room for them in a Being for whom no difficulties exist, The evidences, therefore, of Natural Theology distinctly imply that the author of the Kosmos worked under limitations ; that he was obliged to adapt himself to conditions independent of his will, and to attain his ends by such arrangements as thoso conditions admitted of."
Now, in these and many other passages, Mr. Mill has assumed that Omnipotence is a perfectly intelligible conception to finite minds, the absence of which, or else the absence of perfect good- ness, it is perfectly possible for us to prove, by merely producing evidence of pain or evil, and reasoning that if God were both perfectly good in the human sense, and could have removed such pain or evil, he must have done so ;—therefore, either he is not omnipotent, or he is not perfectly good. But this seems to us to be mere groping in the dark. No doubt, good- ness must mean, in an infinite being, the same quality which it means in a finite one, or it can mean nothing at all to us. But it does not in the least follow that because it must mean the -same quality, it must involve, to an omniscient Creator, the same actions. When we, who never have any but the most strictly conditioned and minute power, come to lay down the laws regu- lating the exercise of his power by a being of infinite power, we are wholly out of our depth. Is, for instance, Omnipotence, or infinitude of power, better shown by the production of an in- finitude of grades, and scales, and modes of moral being, or by- the production of only one,—the perfect mode ? Is it more an evidence of Omnipotence to exhibit a world of power and joy growing within the very heart of weakness and suffering, or to limit itself to the creation of beings in whom there are no para- doxes? Are a number of true gaps,—of really dark lines,—in the moral spectrum of existence, greater proofs of power, than the discovery that;within these dark lines themselves there are a host of previously unsuspected bright lines, the light of which is only the brighter and tenderer by the contrast with the darkness? The truth is, that we no sooner• come to try the idea of Omnipo- tence, than we see how utterly impossible it is for such a creature as man to say what is, and what is not, consistent with Omnipotence. Mr. Mill lays it down very peremptorily that an Omnipotent Being who permits the existence of a moral imperfection or a sensitive pain, cannot be a perfect Being. But what if the very idea of the maximum of moral being, positively includes, as it well may, the existence of relations between moral perfection and moral progression (which last implies, of course, moral imperfection) ? What if a universe consisting exclusively of perfect beings would be a smaller and poorer moral universe than one consisting both of perfect and of imperfect beings, with a real relation between the two ? What if the world of pain, as treated by God, includes secrets of moral glory and beauty, of which a world without pain would be incapable? Mr. Mill would apparently reply,—" That only means that God is not Omnipotent. If he were, he could do as muCh without pain, which is in itself an evil, as with it. And if he cannot, he works under conditions which exclude Omnipo- tence." Such we understand, for instance, to be the drift of the following passage :—
"It is usual to dispose of arguments of this description by the easy answer, that we do not know what wise reasons the Omniscient may have had for leaving undone things which he had the power to do. It is not perceived that this plea itself implies a limit to Omnipotence. When a thing is obviously good and obviously in accordance with what all the evidences of creation imply to have been the Creator's design, and we say we do not know what good reason he may have had for not doing it, we mean that we do not know to what other, still better object —to what object still more completely in the line of his purposes—he may have stien fit to postpone it. But the necessity of postponing one thing to another belongs only to limited power. Omnipotence could have made the objects compatible. Omnipotence does not need to weigh one consideration against another. If the Creator, like a human ruler, had to adapt himself to a set of conditions which he did no make, it is as unphilosophical as presumptuous in us to call him to account for any imperfections in his work ; to complain that he left anything in it contrary to what, if the indications of design prove anything, he must have intended. He must at least know more than we know, and we cannot judge what greater good would have had to be sacrificed, or what greater evil incurred, if he had decided to remove this particular blot. Not so if he be omnipotent. If he be that, he must himself have willed that the two desirable objects should be incompatible; he must himself have willed that the obstacle to his supposed design should be insuperable. It cannot therefore be his design. It will not do to say that it was, but that he had other designs which interfered with it ; for no one purpose imposes necessary limitations on another in the case of a Being not restricted by conditions of possibility."
But this kind of reasoning seems to 11B purely verbal. Even Mr. Mill can hardly include in his idea of Omnipotence the power to make a thing both be and not be at the same time. All we can mean by Omnipotence is the power to do anything not self-con- tradictory. Now the power both to create the joy appropriate to the heart of pain, —what Mr. Arnold calls "the secret of Jesus," —and to keep all pain itself out of existence, is a power to reconcile contradictions. Mr. Mill might have said, perhaps, that in a strict sense, Omnipotence would imply the power to prevent any association between joy and pain, to keep all the highest joys pure and independent of self-abnegation or sorrow of any kind. Possibly. But as we really cannot conceive Omnipotence, and yet can compare together two different degrees of power, is it not the more instructive for us to compare the power which brings a divine joy out of pain and self-surrender, with the power which keeps joy quite aloof from pain ; and if we do so, will not the former exercise of power seem much the greater of the two ? The truth is, Mr. Mill evidently never gave himself the trouble to compare relative degrees of power, or he would have seen at once that a universe containing absolute perfection in an infinite variety of relations with imperfection is a universe which would it once impress us as one of larger scope and power, than one containing only the former. And this is really all man can do towards judging of Omnipotence. We are utterly unable to conceive the absolute attribute. But we are able to say whether a power that has created, and is always creating, all shades and degrees and varieties of pro- gressive life, as well as perfect life, is greater or less than one which produces and sustains perfection only. It seems to us perfectly obvious that though moral goodness in man and in God must be of the same kind, it is childish to say that actions which are wicked in man, in whom they imply one kind of motive, must be evil in God, who sees the whole scope of what he is doing, and in whom they may imply a totally different kind of motive. You might much more reasonably identify capital punish- ment with murder, than identify, as Mr. Mill does, the infliction of death by the imposition of natural laws, with murder. Yet this confusion between the moral evil involved in the rash actions of ignorant and finite beings, and the same when proceeding from utterly different motives in an omniscient Being, pervades the whole of Mr. Mill's essay on "Nature."
Such is a characteristic specimen of the feebleness of thought and execution visible in these Essays. It will be replied, no doubt, that even if Mr. Mill were hazy in conceiving, or rather, in his disinclination to test his own power of conceiving, what is meant by Divine Omnipotence, he was not bound to attempt to appre- hend an idea which is purely abstract to man, and one over the positive contents of which, as we have ourselves admitted, man can have no command. If we cannot approximate to the meaning of Omnipotence, what business has such a notion in Religion at all, whether Natural or Revealed ? To this we can only reply that the idealising faculty, of which even Mr. Mill thinks so highly as the foundation of a religion which is purely aspiration, blends itself so inevitably with the conviction that there is some real Power in communication with man, and one infinitely superior to him in knowledge, goodness, might, and life generally, that it becomes an effort, and an exceedingly unnatural effort, to dis- entangle the two lines of thought, and maintain that while our ideal faculty leads us to imagine One infinite in knowledge, good- ness, and power, and our actual experience to believe in One in- finitely above ourselves in all these qualities, the two modes of thought have no right to coalesce and blend into an actual faith in a God infinite in wisdom, power, and goodness. That such an effort of discrimination is conceivable enough, no one can deny. But we must say we think Mr. Mill has signally failed in his attempt to prove that if God were both perfect morally and also omnipotent, the state of the world could not be what it is. Were the fragment of the universe we see all, his case might be better ; for it will be found that his implicit assumption throughout is, that the world of which we are cognisant is, morally speaking, the whole, instead of (probably) an infinitely small part. Now, it is quite beyond us to affirm that infinite goodness and power must at once annihilate moral evil and misery in all portions of the universe, when we know, as a matter of fact, that the highest pinnacles of goodness and power of which we have any personal knowledge are reached in the struggle with moral evil and misery, and that the absolute exclusion of such evil and misery would have involved the absolute exclusion also of the brightest summits of divine love. On the whole, Mr. Mill's chief endeavour,—his attempt to prove that God, if he exists, —which, as we understand him (though his language wavers), Mr. Mill thought more probable than not,—is either a being of considerable, but very limited power, or not a good being, appears to collapse utterly. But Mr. Mill was precluded by his philosophy from taking note at all of the attestation of God's goodness by the human conscience, and on this side also his essays seem to us deplorably defective for the purpose to which he intended them to contribute.
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