John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections

140 A NEGATIVIST AT BOTTOM. 1849-1872.
hopes for a bright future to the race, a religion of humanity.
To hold up an ideal that involves no contradictions to our
knowledge, to inspire and elate the mind, oppressed by the
dulness and the hardships of the present life, will be accepted
by many as comfort of the spiritual kind, the real analogue of
religion.
And something of this effect is undoubtedly produced
by Mill s later writings. With all this, however, the fact
remains, that in everything characteristic of the creed of
Christendom, he was a thorough-going negationist. He ad
mitted, neither its truth nor its utility. His estimate of its best
side is given in the remark to a friend under domestic sorrow
" To my mind the only permanent ralue of religion is in
lightening the feeling of total separation which is so dreadful
in a real grief".