of his reading) he never once mentions having read the Bible; and there is uo trace whatever that he read a line of books containing the historic evidence as to the Christian faith. So that we are brought to this conclusion: the believer, when he asks himself, "Am I happy?" is able to answer, "Yes." The philosopher, making happiness his aim, dare not ask himself the question, for fear of being reduced to a state of misery. The evidences which satisfy the believer are such as have satisfied minds of great critical sagacity; while the philosopher, attempting to apply everywhere the test of reason, fails in the most crucial point of the whole of his examination, namely, happiness-the object of his search, the rule of his conduct, the goal of his life? Is Christianity so very irrational, after all?

We cannot now enter into the very interesting account which Mr. Mill gives of the service which Wordsworth did him at this time, by giving him culture of the feelings, joy in sympathy with nature, sources of happiness which should be perennial, when all the greater evils of life have been removed; but we do not think it an unjust or unkind comment that before the greatest number of mankind, or even of Englishmen, can taste and appreciate these sources of comfort, a revolution without parallel in history will have been effected in our moral and social character. To contemplative minds like those of Wordsworth and Mill it may be that

"The meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears;"

but the day is further off than we could wish when it will cease to be true of the majority of men that

"A primrose by the river's brim

A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more."

However, all through this period Mr. Mill's views were undergoing considerable change. He was modifying very much the political views in which he was brought up by his father. Under the influence of French thinkers, his views on social questions were becoming more antagonistic than ever to the received order of modern society; while admiration for Carlyle was materially altering his earlier and more narrow creed. All these changes tended to diminish the old unity of opinion between his father and himself; for his father, trained in early life to the dogmatizing proselytism of the Scotch Church, seems simply to have substituted for it the dogmatizing proselytism of Utilitarianism.

The next epoch in Mr. Mill's life is one which an ordinary biographer would probably have passed over or coloured, and

which we might have preferred to leave unnoticed, did not Mr. Mill challenge our admiration of it. It is what he terms "the most valuable friendship of his life "—that is, with Mrs. Taylor, to whom he was afterwards married. She seems to have more than taken the place of his father in being the partner of his intellectual labours, and the guiding star of his life. His books hereafter were written under her guidance, and were apparently almost her inspiration; and since her death, Mr. Mills says,

"I have sought for such alleviation as my state admitted of, by the mode of life which most enabled me to feel her still near me. bought a cottage as close as possible to the place where she is buried, and there her daughter (my fellow-sufferer and now my chief comfort) and I live constantly during a great portion of the year. My objects in life are solely those which were hers; my pursuits and occupations those in which she shared, or sympathized, and which are indissolubly associated with her. Her memory is to me a religion, and her approbation the standard by which, summing up as it does all worthiness, I endeavour to regulate my life."

Now, this lady was, by Mr. Mill's own account, "married at an early age to a most upright, brave, and honourable man, of liberal opinions and good education, but without the intellectual or artistic tastes which would have made him a companion for her, though a steady and affectionate friend, for whom she had true esteem, and the strongest affection through life, and whom she most deeply lamented when dead." He also tells us, in speaking of her a little later among his friends,

'Among these, the principal was the incomparable friend of whom I have already spoken. At this period she lived mostly with one young daughter, in a quiet part of the country, and only occasionally in town, with her first husband, Mr. Taylor. I visited her equally in both places; and was greatly indebted to the strength of character which enabled her to disregard the false interpretations liable to be put on the frequency of my visits to her while living generally apart from Mr. Taylor, and on our occasionally travelling together, though in all other respects our conduct during those years gave not the slightest ground for any other supposition than the true one, that our relation to each other at that time was one of strong affection and confidential intimacy only. For though we did not consider the ordinances of society binding on a subject so entirely personal, we did feel bound that our conduct should be such as in no degree to bring discredit on her husband, nor therefore on herself."

We would desire to take Mr. Mill literally at his own word, for there is an impress of truthfulness in his book to which we desire to do all credit; but examining his actions, as his philosophy requires, not by the feelings which led to them, but by their tendencies, we ask whether of the two is more conducive

to the greatest happiness of the greatest number, an imitation of Mr. Mill's conduct, or an obedience to the command of the Christian's God, "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife." We cannot help thinking that our readers will share with us the feeling of simple amazement that a logical mind should have yielded to what Mr. Mill terms, in the believer of Christianity, "a slovenliness of thought which prevents him from seeing the logical consequences (or at least, in this case, the practical consequences) of his theory." To us it seems that Utilitarianism, so far from boasting of increasing happiness, is bound, from the life of its great exponent, to clear itself of the charge of entailing endless misery.

The remainder of Mr. Mill's life is that from which he and his friends probably derived the greatest satisfaction. His doctrines began to be widely accepted; he is justified, doubtless, in believing that they tended greatly to the amelioration of law; he was useful to his country in and out of Parliament, at least from his own point of view. He gives us a curious bit of modern English history in connection with the Hyde Park riots, in which he says that the Reform League were dissuaded by him from attempting a second meeting in Hyde Park, which would have brought them into collision with the military forces ready there to receive them, and that Mr. Walpole, when informed by Mr. Mill that the intention was abandoned, thanked him "with a depth of relief, and with expressions of gratitude, which he could never forget." We presume, with tears! Great, however, as the service of Mr. Mill may have been, he could not claim more than a share in the modern amelioration of society. There were others than Utilitarians who advocated reform of criminal law, opposed slavery, conferred benefits on the working class, and, though they may have written little upon education of the poor, actually took the work in hand of free will, and without external pressure. We should be inclined to attribute whatever there is of increased happiness among the poor, not so much to the advance of Utilitarianism, as to the revival of religious thought, which has been quite as marked in the epoch of Mr. Mill's life, as has been the growth of the opinions which he held.

On reviewing his book, therefore, we feel it to be one of the most conclusive answers ever yet published against Utilita

rianism. It seems to teach of its own accord that the maximum of happiness which that philosophy can pretend to confer-and it aims at nothing but conferring happiness-is a satisfaction to be derived from the steady pursuit of a lofty ideal, but which will vanish at the first touch of analysis. To ask the believer to exchange such happiness as he possesses for this miserable substitute, and that for happiness' sake, is the height of incon

sistency. Probably Mr. Mill's followers would tell us that our happiness is a delusion, but surely we may be allowed to be the best judges of that. Utilitarianism labours under this great defect, that, while making happiness its aim, it first begs the question, What is happiness? Upon this there never has been the smallest agreement among thinkers since the dawn of philosophy. The Utilitarian considers that he has solved the question by making pain and pleasure the test of happiness; but the difficulty is, after all, only removed a stage farther back. Is smoking, for instance, a pain or a pleasure? The world, if polled upon the point, would certainly not be unanimous. We may, if we please, lay down as a premiss that smoking is a pleasure, and then say that those to whom it is a pain could easily be educated into liking it; but it is equally open to our opponent to lay down that it is a pain, and then accuse all who like it of a depraved and vitiated taste. So that at last we are driven to fall back upon the old rule, " De gustibus non disputandum." Even physical pains and pleasures, therefore, are very far from being a settled point, for instances like that of smoking might be abundantly multiplied; and as to the value of mental pleasures, there is no sort of agreement. Many minds, after most laborious education, remain insensible to them as ever, and cannot be appealed to by them. Instead of having a certain standard of morals, we have one which is proverbially arbitrary and shifting. Not that we would be supposed to assert that it is absolutely useless. There are some pains and pleasures on which there is a very fair consensus of opinion; and where we have not definite commands from God, we can often gather that a course of action is wrong because of the pain it entails; but to the person who boldly asserts that what we call pain is pleasure, we cannot see that Utilitarianism can furnish any answer. We may say that he is wrong, but, on Utilitarian principles, no power is left us to dissuade him from any course of conduct he may see fit to pursue. If Nero, or Do nitian, tell us that they find the maximum of happiness in the torture of their fellow creatures; and that the majority of men, if sufficiently educated, would attain the maximum of happiness for themselves by torturing the minority; it is as much waste of time to tell them that theirs is a vitiated taste as it is to make the same futile and unconvincing remark to a sınoker over his pipe.

If we are asked where we find our motive power of action, and the sanction of our laws, we reply, in the will of God, as revealed to us in the Bible. Mr. Mill rejected the Christian's God with scorn; but on what ground?-that the God of the Bible did not agree with his ideas of omnipotent justice and benevolence? But has man a right to claim this of God,-that God shall accord with his own understanding? Here we have a general

proposition. In their controversy on the subject, Mr. Mill thought man had aright to claim this. Dr. Mansel thought not. But surely an argument of this kind resembles, not the scientific method which Mr. Mill advocated, but the old scholastic method which he did his best to destroy. Mr. Mill, if consistent with his own philosophic teaching, was bound not to reject the Bible on the ground that there could not be an omnipotent and benevolent author of hell, just as much as theologians were bound not to reject the rotundity of the earth, on the score of its being an impossibility. The true and scientific method of inquiring would be to examine the evidence, historical and moral, which is advanced in support of the Bible. That evidence may fail to be convincing to some minds; but only too many never make the inquiry at all. With the name of science ever in their mouths, they make an hypothesis eminently unscientific, and easy deductions follow. Certainly the only arguments which Mr. Mill advances against Christianity consist of general propositions of this nature; he never mentions a study of the evidences of Christianity as forming at any moment of his life a part of his reading; and we are quite sure that, whether he read them or not, many of his followers scorn the attempt. Yet, difficult as the question of those evidences may be, it is one of vital importance, when we are asked, for the sake of increasing the sum of human happiness, to cut off all idea of even a life, much less of a happiness hereafter, and to cast ourselves upon the pursuit of a lofty ideal, with the vague hope that, if fortunately circumstanced, we may attain a moderate enjoyment, which we shall never dare consciously to realise to ourselves, knowing that when death comes, nothing will be left us but mournfully to add, with the Preacher of old, "As it happeneth to the fool, so it happeneth even to me; and why was I then more wise? Then I said in my heart, that this also is vanity. For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever, seeing that which now is, in the days to come shall all be forgotten. And how dieth the wise man? as the fool. Therefore I hated life, because the work that is wrought under the sun was grievous unto me: for all is vanity and vexation of spirit."

ON THE ALLEGED PRIMACY OF THE APOSTLE PETER.

"The first, Simon, who is called Peter." (Matt. x. 2.)

FEW persons are ignorant of the unwarrantable manner in which that "great mystery of iniquity," the assertion of supreme authority over the whole of the Christian Church by successive Bishops of Rome, has been foisted on public credulity in con