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cBishopsgate laMtitutai
JOHN STUART MILL
ON
RELIGION
AND
FREETHOUGHT.
If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more
justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be
justified in silencing mankind.—On Liberty.
All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.—On Liberty.
Who can compute what the world loses in the multitude of promising
intellects combined with timid characters, who dare not follow out any bold,
vigorous, independent train of thought, lest it should land them in something
which would admit of being considered irreligious or immoral ?.......No one
can be a great thinker who does not recognise that, as a thinker, it is his first
duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead.—On Liberty.
\
All Christians believe that the blessed are the poor and humble, and
those who are ill-used by the w’orld ; that it is easier for a camel to pass
through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of
heaven ; that they should judge not, lest they be judged ; that they should
swear not at all; that they should love their neighbour as themselves ; that,
if one take their cloak, they should give him their coat also; that they should\
take no thought for the morrow ; that, if they "would be perfect, they should
sell all that they have, and give it to the poor. They are not insincere when
they say that they believe all these things. They do believe them, as people
believe what they have always heard lauded, and never discussed. But, in
the sense of that living belief which regulates conduct, they believe these
doctrines just up to the point to which it is usual to act upon them............
Whenever conduct is concerned, they look round for Mr. A. and B. to direct
them how far to go in obeying Christ.—On Liberty.
It [Christian Morality] holds out the hope of heaven and the threat of
hell as the appointed and appropriate motives to a virtuous life : in this
falling far below the best of the ancients, and doing what lies in it to give to
human morality an essentially selfish character, by disconnecting each man’s
feelings of duty from the interests of his fellow-creatures, except so far as a
self-interested inducement is offered to him for consulting them. It is essen
tially a doctrine of passive obedience; it inculcates submission to all autho
rities found established............ What little recognition the idea of obligation
to the public obtains in modern morality is derived from Greek and Roman
sources ; as, even in the morality of private life, whatever exists of magnani
mity, high-mindedness, personal dignity, even the sense of honour, is derived
from the purely human, not the religious, part of our education, and never
could have grown out of a standard of ethics in which the only worth, pro
fessedly recognised, is that of obedience.—On Liberty.
(
It can do truth no service to blink the fact, known to all who have the
most ordinary acquaintance with literary history, that a large portion of the
noblest and most valuable moral teaching has been the work, not only of
men who did not know, but of men who knew and rejected, the Christian
faith.—On Liberty,
�J. s. MILL ON RELIGION AND FREETHOUGHT.
I am thus one of the very few examples, in this country, of one who has
not thrown off religious belief, but never had it : I grew up in a negative
state with regard to it.—Autobiography.
He [James Mill, his father] looked upon it [Religion] as the greatest
enemy of mankind: first by settingup fictitious excellencies—-belief in creeds,
devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected with the good of human
kind—and causing these to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtues :
but, above all, by radically vitiating the standard of morals; making it
consist in doing the will of a being, on whom it lavishes indeed all the phases
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 repre
sented 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 which the human mind can devise, and
have called this God, and prostrated themselves before it. This ne plus
ultra of wickedness he considered to be embodied in what is commonly
presented to mankind as the creed of Christianity.—yizz/^zT^ra/Zy'.
Not even on the most distorted and contracted theory of good which
ever was framed by religious or philosophical fanaticism can the govern
ment of Nature be made to resemble the work of a being at once good and
omnipotent.—Essays on Religion.
Belief, then, in the supernatural, great as are the services which it rendered in the early stages of human development, cannot be considered to
be any longer required, either for enabling us to know what is right and
wrong in social morality, or for supplying us with motives to do right and to
abstain from wrong.—Essays on Religion.
That because life is short we should care for nothing beyond it is not d
legitimate conclusion ; and the supposition that human beings in general are
not capable of feeling deep, and even the deepest, interest in things which
they will never live to see, is a view of human nature as false as it is abject.
Let it be remembered that, if individual life is short, the life of the human
species is not short ; its indefinite duration is practically equivalent to
endlessness ; and, being combined with indefinite capability of improvement,
it offers the imagination and sympathies a large enough object to satisfy any
reasonable demand for grandeur of aspiration. If such an object appears
small to a mind accustomed to dream of infinite and eternal beatitudes, it
will expand into far other dimensions when those baseless fancies shall have
receded into the past.—Essays on Religion.
It seems to me not only possible, but probable, that in a higher, and,
above all, a happier condition of human life, not annihilation, but immortality,
may be the burdensome idea ; and that human nature, though pleased with
the present, and by no means impatient to quit it, would find comfort, and
not sadness, in the thought that it is not chained through eternity to a con
scious existence, which i" cannot be assured that it will always wish to pre
serve.—Essays on Religion.
Published for the British Secular Union by Charles Watts, 84, Flee.
Street, London.—Price Sixpenee per hundred.
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Dublin Core
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Title
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John Stuart Mill on religion and freethought
Creator
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Mill, John Stuart [1806-1873]
Description
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 2 p. ; 21 cm.
Notes: Brief extracts from Mill's works. Published for the British Secular Union. Stamp for Bishopsgate Institute on front page. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
Publisher
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Charles Watts
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[n.d.]
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N484
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Free thought
Religion
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (John Stuart Mill on religion and freethought), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
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Text
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English
Free Thought
NSS
Religion