Mr. Mill never tires of calling Christianity a selfish religion, and glorifies his substitute as free from this defect.  But Mr. Fitzjames Stephen, in his work entitled Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, has clearly pointed out that Mr. Mill has only succeeded in duping himself on this point.  A man cannot free himself from self-consideration.  Christianity indeed appeals to the innate desire of happiness, but condemns the overweening and blind self-regard which cannot see that the highest happiness of self flows from a just respect to the selfhood of others and from the cultivation of the spiritual nature.  Love your neighbor as yourself is the Christian precept; and it has the advantage of being practicable, which Mr. Mill’s has not.

Mr. Mill considerately says he will forbear to urge the moral difficulties and perversions of the Christian revelation, “the recognition, for example, of the object of highest worship in a being who could make a hell.”  “Is it possible,” he asks, “to adore such a one without a frightful distortion of the standard of right and wrong?” “Any other of the outrages to the most ordinary justice and humanity involved in the common Christian conception of the moral character of God sinks into insignificance beside this dreadful idealization of wickedness.  Most of them, too, are happily not so unequivocally deducible from the very words of Christ.”  Yet this very Personage, who, Mr. Mill says, implicitly believed and taught this awful doctrine, presents, he confesses, the highest type of pure morality the world has ever seen.  Arguing from this phenomenon, the more hideous the creed and the more torpid or sophisticated the intellect, the higher the morality is likely to be.

In the last essay, On Theism, Mr. Mill examines the evidences in Nature for the existence of God and for the immortality of the soul.  The argument from design he thinks establishes the probability of the existence of an intelligent Creator of limited power; for “who,” he asks, “would have recourse to means if to attain his end his mere word were sufficient?” It may be replied to this that it is as open to an omnipotent being to accomplish his will through a long chain of causes as by a fiat acting immediately.  The recourse to intermediate means does not of necessity prove a limitation of power.  If the means actually chosen are defective or bad, it may imply limitation of wisdom or moral obliquity just as much as defect of power, and any choice between these alternatives is entirely arbitrary from a logical standpoint.