morals, making it consist in doing the will of a being, on whom, indeed, it lavishes all the phrases of adulation, but whom, in sober truth, it depicts as eminently hateful.  I have a hundred times heard him say that all ages and nations have represented their gods as wicked in a constantly increasing progression; that mankind had gone on adding trait after trait, till they reached the most perfect expression of wickedness which the human mind can devise, and have called this God, and prostrated themselves before it.  The ne plus ultra of wickedness he considered to be embodied in what is commonly presented to mankind as the creed of Christianity.  Think (he used to say) of a being who would make a hell—­who would create the human race with the infallible foreknowledge, and therefore with the intention, that the great majority of them, should be consigned to horrible and everlasting torment.’ James Mill, adds his son, knew quite well that Christians were not, in fact, as demoralised by this monstrous creed as, if they were logically consistent, they ought to be. ’The same slovenliness of thought (he said) and subjection of the reason to fears, wishes, and affections, which enable them to accept a theory involving a contradiction in terms, prevent them from perceiving the logical consequence of the theory.’

Now, in spite of its coarse and exaggerated acrimony, this passage doubtless expresses a great truth, which presently I shall go on to consider.  But it contains also a very characteristic falsehood, of which we must first divest it.  God is here represented as making a hell, with the express intention of forcibly putting men into it, and His main hatefulness consists in this capricious and wanton cruelty.  Such a representation is, however, an essentially false one.  It is not only not true to the true Christian teaching, but it is absolutely opposed to it.  The God of Christianity does not make hell; still less does He deliberately put men into it.  It is made by men themselves; the essence of its torment consists in the loss of God; and those that lose Him, lose Him by their own act, from having deliberately made themselves incapable of loving Him.  God never wills the death of the sinner.  It is to the sinner’s own will that the sinner’s death is due.

All this rhetoric, therefore, about God’s malevolence and wickedness is entirely beside the point, nor does it even touch the difficulty that, in his heart, James Mill is aiming at.  His main difficulty is nothing more than this:  How can an infinite will that rules everywhere, find room for a finite will not in harmony with itself?  Whilst the only farther perplexity that the passage indicates, is the existence of those evil conditions by which the finite will, already so weak and wavering, is yet farther hampered.

Now these difficulties are doubtless quite as great as James Mill thought they were; but we must observe this, that they are not of the same kind.  They are merely intellectual difficulties.  They are not moral difficulties at all.  Mill truly says that they involve a contradiction in terms.  But why?  Not, as Mill says, because a wicked God is set up as the object of moral worship, but because, in spite of all the wickedness existing, the Author of all existences is affirmed not to be wicked.