Justified True Belief

(●) The philosopher who taught the modern world to defend liberty, and who would not call God good unless God was good in the way he meant the word. + Almost everyone alive in the English-speaking world has used an argument of John Stuart Mill’s without knowing whose it was. If you have ever said that the government has no business telling a grown adult what to do with his own body, you were quoting him. If you have ever said that a belief nobody is allowed to question soon stops meaning anything to the people who hold it, you were quoting him again. He is among the most quoted English philosophers of the nineteenth century, and most of the quoting is done by people who have never opened one of his books. He matters to Christian readers for a reason that has nothing to do with agreement. Mill was raised with no religion at all, by deliberate design, and he wrote one of the century’s most careful cases against the goodness of the God of Christendom. He also wrote, in one of the last things he finished, that the order of nature makes a creating intelligence genuinely more probable than not. Those two things are in the same man, and a reader who knows only one of them does not know him. Here is the fact about him that sticks. He learned Greek at three years old. By eight he had read Herodotus entire, six dialogues of Plato, and a good deal of Xenophon, all under his father’s eye, and all of it in Greek, the language his father gave him before Latin. At twenty the whole structure came down on him at once, and he spent the better part of a year unable to feel anything about anything.

(●) 1806 AD: Born in London and raised as an experiment, with no religion in it anywhere. + John Stuart Mill was born on 20 May 1806 in Pentonville, then a new suburb on the northern edge of London, the eldest of nine children of James Mill and Harriet Burrow. His father was a Scot who had trained for the ministry, lost his faith, made his way south to London, and made a living by his pen while writing a vast history of British India. He was also a disciple and neighbour of Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, the view that the rightness of an action is settled by how much happiness it produces. James Mill decided to find out how far a child could be taken if no time at all were wasted, and the schedule he drew up reads less like a childhood than like a timetable. Greek at three, or so the son was afterwards told, from vocabulary lists written out on cards. Aesop’s fables first, then Xenophon’s Anabasis, then Herodotus whole, then Plato. Latin came in his eighth year, and he was set to teach it to a younger sister as he went along, which is a tidy way of making sure a boy has understood what he has just been given. Logic followed in his twelfth year, and political economy, the study of how a country produces its wealth and divides it up, at thirteen. A good deal of this happened out of doors, on daily walks where his father questioned him about what he had read the day before and expected the answer there and then. He was kept away from other boys of his own age on purpose, so that he would not pick up their habits or their opinions. Religion was left out of the plan entirely, and Mill was clear afterwards that the omission was not neglect but conviction. His father, he wrote, 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. So the son grew up, in his own phrase, in a negative state with regard to religion: not a man who had lost a faith, a man who had never been given one. He said he was one of the very few in England of whom that was true, and he was probably right.

(●) 1823 AD: At seventeen he took a clerk’s desk at the East India Company and kept it for thirty-five years. + In May 1823 his father obtained him a post in the Examiner’s Office at East India House on Leadenhall Street, the London headquarters of the company that then governed much of India. The Examiner’s Office was the company’s writing room, and the work was exactly what that sounds like: official letters, drafted in London, carried out by ship, settling the affairs of places the writer had never seen. Mill started at the bottom of the list of clerks and stayed thirty-five years, drafting despatches to the Indian governments, mostly the correspondence with the native states. In 1856 he was promoted to Examiner of India Correspondence, the head of that office and the post his father had held before him. It is worth pausing on that, because it is not how people picture a philosopher’s life. Almost every book Mill wrote was written around a full working day at an office desk, in the early mornings and the evenings and on the month of leave a year that company practice allowed. He thought the arrangement suited him: paid work he could do well left his mind free, and he never had to write for money or trim an opinion to keep a publisher. The arrangement ended in 1858, when Parliament took the government of India out of the company’s hands after the rising of 1857 and placed it under the Crown. Mill wrote the company’s petitions against its own extinction and lost, then declined a seat on the new Council of India and retired on his pension. He was fifty-two, and the books he is now most read for were all still ahead of him.

(●) 1826 AD: At twenty the whole structure collapsed, and a French memoir taught him how to feel again. + In the autumn of 1826, by his own account, Mill was in a dull state of nerves, the sort of mood in which what is usually pleasant goes flat. He put a question to himself, and the question is the most famous thing in his autobiography. Suppose every reform you are working for arrived this instant, and every institution and opinion you want changed were changed: would that be a great joy and happiness to you? Something in him answered, distinctly, "No!" His heart sank, he wrote, and the whole foundation on which his life was constructed fell down. Think for a moment about what that answer did to him. He was twenty years old, he had been trained from infancy to want exactly one thing, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and he had just found out that getting it would not make him happy. He told nobody. He went on walking to Leadenhall Street every morning and drafting despatches as usual, which is what most people in that condition do. For months the cloud thickened instead of lifting, and he privately doubted he could bear it beyond a year. What broke it was a book, and not a philosophical one. Reading the memoirs of the French writer Jean-François Marmontel, he came to the scene where Marmontel’s father dies, the family is left destitute, and the boy suddenly feels, and makes them feel, that he will be everything to them. Mill was moved to tears, and the tears were the point: he was not, after all, a stock or a stone. Afterwards he read Wordsworth’s poetry the way a thirsty man drinks, and he came out of the episode holding a conviction his father had never taught him, that feeling and imagination have to be cultivated in their own right and cannot be left to look after themselves.

(●) 1830 AD: He met Harriet Taylor, and a friendship of twenty years became the partnership behind his best books. + Mill was twenty-four and Harriet Taylor twenty-two when they were introduced in 1830. She was married to John Taylor, a wholesale druggist, and had children. What followed was one of the most talked-about arrangements in Victorian intellectual life: a friendship conducted in the open, in letters and long visits and journeys abroad, which scandalised both families and which both parties insisted was exactly what they said it was. Mill’s own circle largely dropped him over it, and he did not much care. John Taylor died in 1849, and Mill and Harriet married in April 1851. He spent the rest of his life saying that the books were hers as much as his. Of On Liberty he wrote that there was not a sentence in it that had not been gone through several times by the two of them together. Readers have argued ever since about how literally to take that, and the argument will not be settled; what is not in doubt is that he meant it, and that he said it in print at a time when saying it cost him credit. In November 1858, seven years into the marriage and months after his retirement, Harriet died at Avignon of a sudden congestion of the lungs, while the two of them were travelling south for the winter. Mill bought a cottage as near as he could to the cemetery where she was buried and lived there much of each year afterwards. Her memory, he wrote, was to him a religion.

(●) 1859 AD: He published On Liberty a year after her death and never altered a word of it. + The little book came out in 1859, dedicated to Harriet, and Mill declared that he would never make an alteration or an addition to it: it wanted the last touch of her hand, and no substitute for that touch would ever be attempted by his. He kept the promise. On Liberty is a short book that puts one principle and then defends it from every side. Society may interfere with an adult’s freedom of action for one reason only, to prevent harm to others; his own good, physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. The second chapter, on freedom of thought and discussion, is the part that outlived the rest, and it is not a plea for tolerance so much as an argument that suppressing an opinion robs everybody, including the people who were right. The decade that followed was the most productive of his life, as though everything the office desk had been holding back came out at once. Considerations on Representative Government came in 1861. Utilitarianism appeared in the same year as magazine articles, and then in 1863 as a book. The Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy followed in 1865. The Subjection of Women was written in 1861 too, and then left in a drawer, because Mill wanted it published at a moment when the country might actually listen; it came out in 1869.

(●) 1865 AD: Westminster elected him, and he asked the House of Commons to strike the word "man" out of the franchise. + Mill was returned as Member of Parliament for the City of Westminster in 1865 on terms no candidate would dare offer now. He refused to canvass, which is to say he would not go round asking anybody for a vote. He refused to spend his own money on the election. And he told the electors in writing that he could not undertake to give any of his time and labour to their local interests. At a meeting of working men an opponent held up a placard printing a sentence from his Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform, that the working classes of England, though differing from those of some other countries in being ashamed of lying, are yet generally liars, and asked whether he had written it. Mill answered, "I did," and the room broke into applause. They elected him anyway. On 20 May 1867, which happened to be his sixty-first birthday, he moved an amendment to the Reform Bill then before the House: strike out the words limiting the franchise to males, so that any woman who met the same property qualification as a male elector could vote. It was the first time the Commons had divided on the question. He lost, by 196 votes to 73, and he regarded the seventy-three as an astonishment and a beginning. He called the motion by far the most important, perhaps the only really important, public service he performed as a Member. He also chaired the Jamaica Committee, which for more than two years tried to bring Governor Edward Eyre before a criminal court for the killings and floggings that followed the Morant Bay rising of 1865. The attempt failed in every court it reached, and it cost Mill a great deal of popularity. He thought the question at stake was whether British subjects anywhere lived under the government of law or of military licence, by which he meant the state of affairs in which an official who has declared an emergency may kill and flog without afterwards answering to a court for it. Westminster turned him out at the next election, in 1868, and he went back to Avignon.

(●) 1873 AD: He died at Avignon, and the essays published after his death let the world hear him arguing with himself about God. + Mill died on 8 May 1873 at Avignon, of erysipelas, a skin infection that in an age without antibiotics could kill a healthy man in a week. He was sixty-six. He was buried beside Harriet in the cemetery of Saint-Véran, under the stone he had already written for her. His stepdaughter Helen Taylor, who had become his closest companion and collaborator after her mother’s death, brought out the Autobiography later that same year, and in 1874 the Three Essays on Religion. The essays were the surprise. Two of them, on nature and on the usefulness of religion, had been written in the 1850s and are as hard on Christianity as anything he wrote. The third, "Theism," was written between 1868 and 1870, at the very end, and it grants the argument from design a real balance of probability, weighs the possibility that Jesus of Nazareth was a man charged with a unique commission from God, and closes by recommending that a man try to live so that Christ would approve his life. Friends and enemies alike had to rearrange their picture of him. The freethinkers thought he had gone soft; the believers noticed how much he still withheld. Both were reading the same man, who had spent his life insisting that a question is not closed because the answer is unwelcome.

What He Taught

(T1) Actions are right as they promote happiness, and some kinds of happiness count for more than others. + Suppose a friend asks you to help her decide whether to take a job in another city. You will probably end up weighing things: the money, the work she would enjoy, the people she would leave, the parents she would be further from. You are doing arithmetic with happiness, and nobody thinks that strange. Utilitarianism is the claim that all moral reasoning is that arithmetic, all the way down. Jeremy Bentham, whose disciple Mill’s father was, put it as a principle: the right action is the one that produces the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and everybody’s happiness counts once. Bentham meant it flatly. Pleasure is pleasure, and if the game of push-pin gives as much of it as poetry does, then push-pin is as good as poetry. Push-pin was a children’s amusement of the period, played by pushing pins across a table and trying to cross your opponent’s, and Bentham chose it precisely because nobody could pretend it was anything but trivial. Mill could not swallow that, and the repair he made is the most discussed paragraph in the book. Some pleasures, he argued, are higher in kind and not merely in amount, and there is a test for which: ask the people who have honestly known both. Anyone who has known the pleasures of thought, feeling, and conscience, and also the pleasures of the body, will not trade down, even when trading down would make life easier. Notice what the repair costs him. Once you say that the competent judge’s preference settles the ranking, you have let something in that is not itself a quantity of pleasure: a judgment about what a human being is for. Critics have pressed that ever since, and Christian readers press it hardest, because the notion that a person is made for something is exactly what a purely calculating ethic has no room for. Mill also insisted, against the caricature, that the happiness in question is never the agent’s own but everyone’s, and that a utilitarian is bound to be as impartial between himself and a stranger as a disinterested onlooker would be. He thought that rule already existed, in the teaching of Jesus.

(Q) "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied." + Source: John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, chapter 2 (4th edition, 1871). The sentence answers the standing insult against Bentham’s system, that it is a philosophy fit for swine. Mill’s reply is that the insult assumes pleasure has only one flavour, and adds the line that gives him the argument: if the fool or the pig disagrees, that is because each of them knows only his own side of the question, while the other party knows both. In the same chapter he writes that in the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility (T1).

(T2) Society may coerce an adult for one reason only, to prevent harm to others. + A man drinks himself into ruin in his own house. A woman refuses the medicine that would save her. A neighbour holds an opinion the whole street finds disgusting and says so at dinner parties. In each case the question On Liberty asks is not whether these people are behaving well. It is whether anyone else is entitled to stop them by force, and Mill’s answer is no. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. Two things about the principle are usually missed. The first is that the force Mill has in mind is not only the policeman’s. He is at least as worried about the moral coercion of public opinion, the pressure of a respectable neighbourhood on the family that will not conform, which needs no law to do its work and against which there is no appeal. The second is that his defence of the principle is not a claim about rights at all. Mill will not appeal to any natural right of man, because he does not believe in one; he rests the whole case on utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being. Liberty earns its keep, on his account, because human beings are the kind of creature that only grows by choosing. That last step is where Christian readers usually reach for a pencil. If liberty has to earn its keep by results, then it can in principle be outbid by results, and Mill’s own century was full of people happy to do the bidding. The Christian tradition has generally wanted the protection to sit lower down, in what a human being is: a creature made in the image of God, whose conscience is answerable to God and therefore not finally the property of the magistrate or the neighbours. That is a stronger foundation for the same house, and a good deal of the house Mill built is one Christians have been glad to live in.

(Q) "That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant." + Source: John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, chapter 1 (1859). This is the harm principle, stated in the introductory chapter and argued for through the four chapters that follow. Mill introduces it as one very simple principle, and the simplicity is doing a great deal of work: almost every quarrel about it since has been a quarrel about what counts as harm (T2).

(T3) A belief that is never questioned dies in the mouths of the people who hold it. + Most defences of free speech assume the awkward case is the heretic who turns out to be right. Mill’s second chapter grants the opposite case and argues anyway. Suppose the received opinion is entirely true. Suppose the heretic is simply wrong. Even then, Mill says, silencing him ruins the truth for everybody else, because a truth held without ever having been tested is held the way a childhood superstition is held: as a prejudice, proof against argument, with no live sense of what it means. His phrase for the result is a dead dogma rather than a living truth, and the example he reaches for is Christianity. He describes the ordinary English believer of his day who assents to the Sermon on the Mount, could not tell you why, and would be genuinely surprised to hear that it makes any claim on his conduct on Monday. The doctrines, Mill says, have become an inheritance rather than a conviction, and the reason is that nobody in the man’s world has ever seriously put them in question where he could hear the answer. You might think, well, that is a strange kind of friendliness. It is, and it cut both ways in his own century: the argument was used to open English public life to unbelievers, and it was used just as hard by Christian apologists who wanted a hearing for the evidence rather than a polite assumption. Mill’s point stands on its own feet either way. He who knows only his own side of the case, he wrote a few pages later, knows little of that.

(Q) "However true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth." + Source: John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, chapter 2 (1859). The sentence opens the second branch of the chapter’s argument, where Mill sets aside the possibility that the received opinion might be false and asks what happens to a true opinion that is never contested. The same chapter contains his two examples of judicial murder, the condemnation of Socrates and the event which took place on Calvary rather more than eighteen hundred years ago, offered as evidence that the men who silence a teacher are usually not monsters but respectable people doing what their age expects (T3).

(T4) The legal subjection of women is wrong in itself and one of the chief hindrances to human improvement. + Consider what a woman in the England of 1869 signed away at the altar. She could not own property in her own name. She could not sue in her own name. She had no legal claim on her own children, and she had no vote. The common law treated husband and wife as one person, and the one person was the husband. Mill thought this the last surviving piece of the law of the strongest, a relic sitting in the middle of a society that had abolished slavery and, centuries earlier, villeinage, the old bondage that tied a peasant to the land he worked and to the lord who owned it, and that prided itself on having done both. He anticipated the obvious reply and spent most of the book on it. Everyone said that women were by nature suited to the position they held. Mill’s answer is that nobody is in a position to say what women are by nature, because no one has ever seen a woman formed outside the arrangement in question. What men call the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing, the product of forced repression in some directions and unnatural stimulation in others. He was equally direct about the private cost: a household run on inequality trains both parties in it, and the boy who grows up seeing it learns that superiority comes with birth rather than desert. The closing argument is the one he cared most about. The gain from the change would not be chiefly to women; it would be the doubling of the mental resources available to humanity, and the improvement of the relation that most people spend most of their lives inside. Christians reading this now should notice how much of it the church had already said and had not acted on. Scripture puts the image of God on male and female together (Genesis 1:27), and Paul writes that in Christ there is no male and female (Galatians 3:28). Mill, who had no use for the Bible, was pressing a point his Christian contemporaries had every reason to have made first, and some of them, William Wilberforce’s heirs in the anti-slavery societies among them, went on to make it.

(Q) "That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes, the legal subordination of one sex to the other, is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement." + Source: John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, chapter 1 (1869). The thesis clause of the book’s long opening sentence, where Mill states an opinion he says he has held since he was old enough to hold one on social or political matters at all. He adds that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other. The book was written in 1861 and kept back for eight years until he judged the country ready to hear it (T4).

(T5) The order of nature makes a designing intelligence probable, and makes his goodness and his omnipotence improbable. + "Theism," written at the very end of his life, is the essay nobody expected. He takes the arguments of natural theology one at a time, meaning the arguments that try to reach God from the world rather than from Scripture, and he throws most of them out. The first cause argument he judges inconclusive. The argument from the general consent of mankind he dismisses. Then he comes to the argument from design, the reasoning William Paley made famous with the watch found on a heath, and he does not throw it out. The adaptations in nature, he concludes, afford a large balance of probability in favour of creation by intelligence. He is careful about what he has granted, and just as careful about what he has not. It is a probability and not a proof. He also adds a warning that is remarkably even-handed for a man writing in 1870, when Darwin was still fighting for a hearing: Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, if it were admitted, would be in no way whatever inconsistent with creation, but it must be acknowledged that it would greatly attenuate the evidence for it. To attenuate is to thin something out, to leave it standing but weaker, and that single sentence is a fair statement of the ground much of the argument has been fought over ever since. Then comes the turn, and it is the most original thing in the essay. Mill argues that the very feature of the world that makes design visible is a feature that tells against omnipotence. Start with the ordinary observation underneath it. Contrivance, the fitting of means to an end, is what anybody does when he cannot get the end by simply willing it. A man does not use machinery to move his arms, because his arms answer to him directly; he uses machinery to move a piano across a floor, because the piano does not. Now apply that. If the Author of nature got his purposes by contriving an eye out of light-sensitive tissue over long ages, fitting part to part until the thing could see, then he was working under conditions he had not himself laid down, and the more skilful the contrivance, the plainer the limitation. Set that beside the earlier essay "Nature," where Mill lays out in cold detail that nearly all the things men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another are nature’s everyday performances, and his conclusion follows without much trouble. The evidence, as he reads it, points to a maker of great but limited power, of great and perhaps unlimited intelligence, who pays some regard to the happiness of his creatures and plainly has other purposes he cares more about.

(Q) "I think it must be allowed that, in the present state of our knowledge, the adaptations in Nature afford a large balance of probability in favour of creation by intelligence." + Source: John Stuart Mill, Three Essays on Religion, "Theism," part I, the argument from marks of design in nature, published posthumously in 1874. Mill has just finished considering whether the eye and comparable organs could have arisen without design, and has said that the speculation is not so absurd as it looks. The concession follows immediately, and so does the limit: this is no more than a probability, and the other arguments of natural theology add nothing to its force. In the same essay he states the net result as a Being of great but limited power, how or by what limited we cannot even conjecture (T5).

(Q) "Nor, even now, would it be easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete, than to endeavour so to live that Christ would approve our life." + Source: John Stuart Mill, Three Essays on Religion, "Theism," part V ("General Result"), published posthumously in 1874. The last pages of the last essay. Mill has argued that the character in the Gospels could not have been invented by the fishermen of Galilee or by Paul, that about the life and sayings of Jesus there is a stamp of personal originality combined with profundity of insight, and that this places the Prophet of Nazareth in the very first rank of men of sublime genius even in the estimation of those who have no belief in his inspiration. He then allows, as a standing possibility for the rational sceptic, that Christ was what he supposed himself to be: not God, Mill says, but a man charged with a special, express and unique commission from God to lead mankind to truth and virtue.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The sharpest Victorian answer to On Liberty came from James Fitzjames Stephen, a criminal lawyer who thought Mill had left himself nothing to stand on. + In March 1873, two months before Mill died, James Fitzjames Stephen published Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, a book he had begun on the voyage home from India, where he had spent two and a half years drafting law codes for a subcontinent. Stephen was a working criminal lawyer and later a High Court judge, and he came at the book from the courtroom rather than the study. His case has three parts, and a reader who has ever had to keep order in a classroom will recognise the first of them. - Compulsion is how people are made. No society has ever raised decent human beings without it, and law and custom are teachers whether we care for the fact or not. Almost every human being, Stephen wrote, needs some coercion and restraint to be brought up to the greatest power he is capable of, and habitual exertion under that pressure is the best invigorator of character there is. - The harm principle cannot draw the line it promises to draw. Mill wants a fence between the conduct that concerns only oneself and the conduct that touches other people. Stephen answers that every act a man does either affects other people or may come to, so sorting conduct into the two kinds is like sorting it into acts that happen in time and acts that happen in space. - The Religion of Humanity is a shadow too. This is the part that tells most for a Christian reader, and it is not the objection people expect. Mill had offered devotion to the welfare of mankind in place of the worship of God. Stephen’s complaint is not that such a devotion asks too much of a man; it is that there is nobody there to ask him. Humanity, he wrote, is only I writ large, and love for Humanity generally means zeal for my notions as to what men should be and how they should live. He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, Stephen adds, drily borrowing the apostle’s sentence (1 John 4:20), is peculiarly apt to suppose that he loves his distant cousin whom he hath not seen and never will see. Of the substitute Stephen will say only that Humanity is as thin a shadow to him as any God can be to others. The chapters had already run as twenty letters in the Pall Mall Gazette between November 1872 and January 1873, so the attack was public for half a year before Mill died, and he never answered a word of it. Stephen answered the critics who did reply, Frederic Harrison and John Morley among them, in a long preface to the second edition of 1874. The exchange set the shape of the argument for a century: whether a liberal order can be maintained on the moral capital of a faith it no longer holds.

(†) His concession on design is the shape Christian natural theology took afterwards. + Before Mill, the argument from design was usually offered as something close to a demonstration. Paley’s watch on the heath, the most famous version, invites you to conclude that a designer exists, full stop. After Mill, defenders of the argument almost always speak the way he did: in the currency of probability, of how much more likely the evidence makes the conclusion, rather than of proof. That was not a retreat forced on them by an enemy; it was a better description of what the argument had always been doing. Joseph Butler, later Bishop of Durham, had already said in his Analogy of Religion of 1736 that to us probability is the very guide of life, and the modern development runs straight through Mill’s formula. Richard Swinburne’s The Existence of God (1979) sets out the case for theism as a cumulative probabilistic argument, weighing how much more expected the order of the universe is if God exists than if he does not. A cumulative case, in the sense apologists now use the phrase, is one where no single strand carries the weight and the strands together do, the way a jury reaches a verdict. Mill also handed on the objection that any such case has to answer. His warning that natural selection would greatly attenuate the evidence for design, thinning it without contradicting it, written before Darwin’s theory had won its argument, is the honest form of the modern challenge, and it is the reason the design case now rests more often on fine-tuning than on the eye itself. Fine-tuning is the observation that the basic constants of physics, the strength of gravity and the rest, sit in the narrow range that permits a universe with chemistry and stars and living things in it at all. Change them slightly and there is no world for natural selection to work in, so the question Mill raised about the eye reappears one floor down, where the eye’s own explanation cannot reach it.

(†) Christians took his argument for open discussion and turned it on his own conclusions. + The second chapter of On Liberty was written partly as a diagnosis of English Christianity, and English Christians have quoted it against themselves ever since. A faith held as an inheritance, never examined, never seriously attacked in the hearing of the person who holds it, is a faith that will not survive the first hard question its owner meets at eighteen. Anybody who has watched that happen knows Mill was describing something real. The instinct he named is older than he was and is in the book he did not read as Scripture. The Bereans are commended for exactly it: they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so (Acts 17:11). Paul tells a church to test everything and hold fast what is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Peter tells ordinary Christians to be ready to give a reasoned answer to anyone who asks (1 Peter 3:15), which assumes there will be people asking and that the asking is legitimate. Apologetics as a discipline exists on that assumption. So the appropriation is not a borrowing from an opponent so much as a recovery. Where Mill and the church divide is not over whether to allow the question but over what the answer is, and the second chapter of On Liberty is one of the few places where a Victorian unbeliever hands his opponents a weapon and tells them to use it.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: the measure of goodness, the ground of duty, the size of God, and a Christ without his own claims. + Mill deserves the other column of the ledger stated at full strength, because he stated his own side at full strength. - The measure of goodness. Mill’s most quoted sentence about religion is a refusal: he will call no being good who is not what he means when he applies that word to his fellow creatures, and if such a being can sentence him to hell for not so calling him, to hell he will go. Christians should concede more of this than they usually do. Scripture does not use "good" of God in some unknown sense: Abraham argues with God on exactly Mill’s ground, "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?" (Genesis 18:25), and the question is treated as a fair one. What Scripture denies is the next step, that a creature’s reading of the evidence is the final court (Romans 9:20; Job 38). The difference between the two positions is not whether God’s goodness means anything but whether we are yet in a position to audit it. - The ground of duty. Utility makes right and wrong depend on a sum of consequences that nobody can complete, and it will in principle license anything that the sum favours. Paul records the objection in the form his critics threw at him, "And why not do evil that good may come?" and answers it in four words: their condemnation is just (Romans 3:8). Christian ethics grounds obligation in the character and command of God rather than in a forecast, which is why it can tell a man what to do on a Tuesday when the arithmetic is unknowable. - The size of God. Mill’s Author of nature works under conditions he did not make, like a sculptor limited by his marble. The God of Scripture makes the conditions: he is the Creator of the ends of the earth, and his understanding is unsearchable (Isaiah 40:28); in him all things hold together (Colossians 1:17). Mill’s limited deity does buy an easy answer to the problem of evil, and it pays for it by having no power to finish the story. The Christian answer is harder and goes the other way: the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption (Romans 8:20–21). That is a claim about a wrecked world being repaired by the one who made it, and it stands or falls with an empty tomb rather than with a survey of nature. - A Christ without his own claims. The most moving passage Mill wrote about religion is also the one with the hole in it. He will allow that Christ was a man with a unique commission from God, and he adds that Christ never made the smallest pretension to being God. The Gospels do not leave that open. The charge that got Jesus killed was blasphemy, and it was laid because he forgave sins on his own authority: "Who can forgive sins but God alone?" (Mark 2:7). He said, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6). Mill wanted the rule of virtue translated into a person and found the translation in Christ. The person he chose made claims that make admiration an unstable place to stop. None of this cancels what he got right. A man raised with no religion, who owed the church nothing and expected nothing from it, spent his last years weighing the evidence for a Creator and ended by telling his readers to live as though Christ were watching. That is not a conversion, and it should not be dressed up as one. It is a great mind refusing to close a question, which is the one thing he asked of everybody else.