God is love indeed,
    And love Creation’s final law,
    Though Nature, red in tooth and claw
  With ravin, shrieks against his creed.

In the second essay Mr. Mill undertakes to prove the uselessness and harmfulness of supernatural religion both to society and individuals, and the sufficiency of human authority, of education and public opinion to accomplish all the beneficial results usually accredited to faith in a Divine Being.  “Religion,” he says, “by its intrinsic force, ... without the sanction superadded by public opinion, ... has never, save in exceptional characters or in peculiar moods of mind, exercised a very potent influence after the time had gone by in which Divine agency was supposed habitually to employ temporal rewards and punishments.”  Whatever application this statement may have to other religions claiming a divine origin, it is entirely false of Christianity.  In its origin, it certainly held out no temporal bribes of any character.  Its Founder expressly said to His disciples, “In this world ye shall have tribulation.”  “Behold,” He says, “I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves”; “ye shall be hated of all men for My sake”; “if any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me.”  His own life was one of unparalleled contumely, and He told them they must not expect to fare better than their Master.  Nor did they.  The majority of the apostles met cruel deaths after lives of suffering.  Paul, describing his experience, speaks of his beatings and his perils among his countrymen and the heathen, of his hunger and thirst and his cold and nakedness.  And his was only an extreme example of the common lot of the early generations of Christians.  Yet in the face of the hostility of the whole Roman and Jewish world, manifested in the most cruel persecutions, Christianity rapidly grew, gaining its most signal triumphs, laying hold of the consciences and transforming the lives of men.  It was only when it came under the patronage of the civil government, and the public opinion of the world was thrown in its favor, and its peculiar doctrines became diluted with worldly policy, that it began to lose its reforming influence—­a fact which Mr. Mill himself alludes to in his essay On Liberty.  This experience has been frequently repeated since the days of Constantine; so that history fairly proves that Christianity does its peculiar work more effectually when it is dissociated from all human sanctions, and left to act solely by its intrinsic force.  This is true not only of the Church at large, but of individuals.  Paul, Luther, a Kempis drew their inspiration from the simple words of Christ, and owed next to nothing to the opinions of the world about them.  It has always been direct contact with the life and precepts of the Founder of Christianity that has fired the hearts and braced the spiritual energies of the noblest Christians, who have been the reformers of their times, braving the enmity of the world to instill a purer and a loftier morality.