and if England had the happiness of being to a considerable degree untainted by the moral plague then spreading its baneful influence throughout the whole European continent, it was entirely owing to the revival of Evangelical teaching which the Wesleys, George Whitfield, Newton, Romaine, and Venn so triumphantly brought about. Adequate and spiritual views of God, and of man's relation to God, were introduced, or rather restored, by them out of the Word of God, which satisfied the understanding, and at the same time brought consolation to the hearts of men. There was a means provided whereby men were not reduced to the frightful alternative between barren scepticism and wild mysticism. It is an ill omen of our present times when extreme rationalism, hardly to be distinguished from infidelity, and foolish ritualism, more childish than Romanism, are prevalent amongst the upper classes of society, to find all these extravagant delusions reappearing both in England and America, and seducing many. In the absurdities we have been describing, we read the counterpart of follies which are in extensive vogue amongst us. There may be some trifling modifications of paraphernalia, but the essential delusions are identical. It would be hard to say in what the difference consists between Count Cagliostro and the modern pretenders on whom his mantle has fallen. And who shall distinguish between their dupes? The command given to the Jews of old in the Book of Deuteronomy is not without significant warning to us

now.

"When thou art come into the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not learn to do after the abominations of those nations. There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For all that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord: and because of these abominations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee. Thou shalt be perfect with the Lord thy God. For these nations, which thou shalt possess, hearkened unto observers of times, and unto diviners: but as for thee, the Lord thy God hath not suffered thee so to do. The Lord thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; unto him ye shall hearken; according to all that thou desiredest of the Lord thy God in Horeb in the day of the assembly, saying, Let me not hear again the voice of the Lord my God, neither let me see this great fire any more, that I die not."

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JOHN STUART MILL.

Autobiography of John Stuart Mill. Second Edition. London: Longmans. 1873.

"VANITY of vanities, all is vanity." We can scarcely imagine any other conclusion as to life's mystery possible to the reader of this book, who, having no other guide, should seek to find in it what was the method of life that tended to the "greatest happiness of the greatest number," and wherein that happiness lay. It is true that Mr. Mill did not, in his preface, assign it as an object consciously before him in writing his autobiography, that we should, from his own example, furnish a practical comment on the value of his theories; yet it is hardly unfair to use the book in this way. There is no attempt on his part, nor even a wish, to disguise the fact that his attitude towards the received religion and morality of his fellow-countrymen was not that of indifference, but of active hostility. Christianity, as commonly represented to mankind, was, in his view, absolutely wicked and demoralizing, and was to be exchanged ere long, by the intelligent world, for Utilitarianism. So violent a revolution as this demands some justification; the apostle of these doctrines cannot expect, and, we are sure, would not wish for, the observance in his case of the rule now too commonly overstrained, "De mortuis nil nisi bonum." The disciple is not greater than his master; and if we are to be persuaded that the embracing of Mr. Mill's doctrines would add to the general happiness of humanity, it is only fair that we should ask what promise of such a result was given in the life of the expounder of them? To us as Christians it is, indeed, a very terrible thought, that one should have passed from the visible to the invisible world who wished it to appear on record after his death as his father's teaching, accepted fully, as far as we can see, by himself, "that all ages and nations have represented their gods as wicked in a constantly increasing progression ; that mankind have gone on adding trait after trait, till they reached the most perfect conception of wickedness that the human mind can devise, and have called this God, and prostrated themselves before it" (p. 41), and that this ne plus ultra of wickedness was the Christian's God. But such language as this makes it clear that to argue against these views as inconsistent with the teaching of the Bible, would be useless. We must take them at their own worth, test them by their own standard, and judge them by their own criterion-the criterion of experience; and if they then fail to satisfy us, there will be no need of further examination. We will, therefore, honestly

endeavour to set before our readers Mr. Mill's view of his own life, and we will leave them to judge whether the conclusion forced upon them is not aptly expressed by the words of the Preacher which stand at the head of this article.

In the first place, we may notice that the experiment could hardly have been made under fairer conditions than those of Mr. Mill's early circumstances. Though his father would seem to have had a hard struggle in the early years of his life for maintenance, he had what was far more important than wealth, the power and the will to give the most perfect intellectual training to his son. Education is in no system of religion or philosophy so important as in Mr. Mill's; for upon it alone, using it in the widest sense of all the surroundings of youth, does the future character depend. Many philosophers have regretted that they had to unlearn erroneous beliefs and vicious modes of thinking forced upon them in boyhood; but not so Mr. Mill. Not an hour of his life was wasted. By the end of his eighth year he had read, besides more elementary Greek books, the whole of Herodotus, Xenophon's Cyropædia and Memorablia, the first six Dialogues of Plato, including the Theatetus, to say nothing of Robertson, Hume, Gibbon, and a number of other historical works; and this seems to be a fair specimen of the amount of reading continued all through his boyhood. Everything was not merely learnt, but thoroughly learnt, under his father's eye; not as an education of cram,-nothing was allowed to be a mere exercise of memory,-but with the strictest attempt to make the understanding not only go along with every step of the teaching, but, if possible, precede it. No holidays were allowed, and apparently no amusements that were not bookish. Thus the intellect was trained to exercise all its powers, and at the same time was imparted the strictest moral teaching: "praise of justice, temperance, veracity, perseverance, readiness to encounter pain, and especially labour; regard for the public good, estimations of persons according to their merits, and of things according to their intrinsic usefulness; a life of exertion, in contradiction to one of sloth and ease;" his father's example, modelled on the best features of the Cynic philosophy; and in addition to all, a studious inculcation of the fallacies of every religion: all these were before Mr. Mill as a boy, as the influences by which his character was to be formed. There was nothing to unlearn, and apparently to his mind only one great defect, the consequence of national temperament, and therefore not the sole fault of his father, a fault, if we were to take Mr. Mill's explanation, not easily avoided in the training of any English child. That defect was his father's want of tenderness, not, Mr. Mill believed, a deficiency in his own nature; for towards his younger children he showed

abundant kindness, aud they loved him tenderly. But, like most Englishmen, James Mill was ashamed of signs of feeling, and starved the principle itself, while he checked the display of it. May we not believe, though Mr. Mill did not hint it, that the doctrines professed by his father and himself had even a more important influence in the same direction, namely, that actions are never to be judged by the motives which prompted them, but only by their tendencies? Now as of all motives strong love is the most powerful, and compassion almost equally so, they must, unless diligently repressed, lead to actions which, from a bare examination of their tendencies, would be culpable, and consequently it is not surprising that the elder Mill should have checked such feelings. At all events, there was herein, as Mill himself believed, a defect in his education, that affection was very scantily, if at all, cultivated. We do not like, however, to pass on from this subject without quoting his comment upon this fact, which we believe to be, at the present time, of the utmost importance :

"I do not believe that boys can be induced to apply themselves with vigour, and what is so much more difficult, perseverance, to dry and irksome studies, by the sole force of persuasion and soft words. Much must be done, and much must be learnt, by children, for which rigid discipline, and known liability to punishment, are indispensable as means. It is, no doubt, a very laudable effort in modern teaching, to render as much as possible of what the young are required to learn, easy and interesting to them. But when this principle is pushed to the length of not requiring them to learn anything but what has been made easy and interesting, one of the chief objects of education is sacrificed. I rejoice in the decline of the old brutal and tyrannical system of teaching, which, however, did succeed in enforcing habits of application; but the new, as it seems to me, is training up a race of men who will be incapable of doing anything which is disagreeable to them. I do not, then, believe that fear, as an element in education, can be dispensed with; but I am sure that it ought not to be the main element; and when it predominates so much as to preclude love and confidence on the part of the child to those who should be the unreservedly trusted advisers of after years, and perhaps to seal up the fountains of frank and spontaneous communicativeness in the child's nature, it is an evil for which a large abatement must be made from the benefits, moral and intellectual, which may flow from any other part of the education."

To this statement we most heartily subscribe. Like many other passages in the book, it is thoroughly true and sensible. O si sic omnia! There is a point, however, in the boyhood of Mill, of which we are left without any notice whatever, and that is the character and influence of his mother. We cannot recall a single passage in the book in which she is named: his bro

thers and sisters are once noticed, but merely because Mill was set by his father to teach them, and he wished to record his disapprobation of his father's policy in this respect. In a word, we have a complete picture of the boy trained to be a thinking machine, with what are called high moral principles; but as far as the record before us goes, Mill might have been an orphan, carefully educated by a stern and somewhat unloving uncle. Home, as we conceive it, forms no part of the picture. Is this altogether an accident? Is it an exception to the complete working out of Mr. Mill's social ideas, or rather in accordance with them? We remind our readers of Mr. Mill's belief that women have the same powers, and should have the same work, as men; that he regarded marriage, not as a sacred tie, but as a contract which ought to be dissolved when one of the two contracting parties wishes to recede from it; and we leave them to judge what possibility there is, in his system, of a home life after this. Yet the object to be gained by this reversal of the existing social and moral order is the greatest happiness of the greatest number. "Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools." We are loath to speak thus harshly of one on whom the grave has so recently closed; but we cannot refrain from marvelling at the blindness obscuring a vigorous and powerful intellect, so that, while seeking, honestly enough, to increase the happiness of life, it would thus cast a blight upon it from infancy. What if some homes are unhappy; are these the homes in which the religion of Christ really rules, and where the Gospel teaching is not a nominal but a real power? Has it been left to the nineteenth century to discover something more conducive to the happiness of a child than the love and care of a wise mother? Even in dealing with the homeless orphan, or with children whose parents are brutal and degraded, Christian charity knows that it may alleviate misery, but it cannot offer anything like a substitute for a happy home? Would the number of happy homes be increased or diminished by Mr. Mill's social doctrines?

In the next stage of Mr. Mill's life, his early life in London, though it is full of interest as a history of the growth of Utilitarian doctrines in England, there is nothing that very immediately concerns us. Except in its precocity, it does not differ much from what might now be the life of any young man of strong intellectual tastes, and with access to a brilliant literary circle. The happiness which he then enjoyed was as keen as could be procured by vigour of mind, free interchange of thought, and the ambition of youthful propagandism. It was in this period that the Westminster Review was first started, in opposition to the Edinburgh and Quarterly and a Debating Society, which numbered among its members friends and foes