"I am thus," he adds, "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."[252]
How he could grow up in a negative condition with regard to religion is not easily understood when we consider that his father instilled into his mind from his earliest years the doctrine that the very essence of religion is evil, since it is, and ever has been, worship paid to the demon, the highest possible conception of wickedness; though he was at the same time careful to impress upon him the duty of concealing his belief on this subject; and this lesson of parental prudence was, as the younger Mill himself informs us, attended with some moral disadvantages.[253]
These moral disadvantages, in his own opinion at least, were without positive influence upon his character, since through the whole book there runs the tacit assumption of his own perfect goodness. I am an atheist, he seems to say, and yet I am a saint; and he is evidently persuaded that his own life is sufficient proof that the notion that unbelief is generally connected with bad qualities either of mind or heart is merely a vulgar prejudice.
"The world would be astonished," he informs us, "if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those most distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete sceptics in religion.... But the best of them (unbelievers), as no one who has had opportunities of really knowing them will hesitate to affirm, are more genuinely religious, in the best sense of the word religion, than those who exclusively arrogate to themselves the title."[254]
This is probably not more extravagant than the assertion that the God of Christianity is the embodiment of all that is fiendish and wicked.
We cannot, however, pass so lightly over this portion of Mill's book, or dismiss without further examination the assumption that the best are they who refuse to believe in God, and hold that man is merely an animal.
The real controversy of the age, as thoughtful men have long since recognized, is not between the church and the sects. Protestantism, from the beginning, by asserting the supremacy of human reason, denied the sovereignty of God, and in its postulates, at least, was atheistic. Hence Catholic theologians have never had any difficulty in showing that rebellion against the authority of the church is revolt against that of Christ, which is apostasy from God. To this argument there is really no reply, and the difficulties which Protestants have sought to raise against the church are based upon a sophism which underlies all non-Catholic thought.
The pseudo-reformers objected that the church could not be of Christ, because in it there was evil; many of its members were sinful; as the deists hold that the Bible is not the word of God, because of the many seeming incongruities and imperfections which are everywhere found in it; as the atheists teach that the universe cannot be the work of an all-wise and omnipotent Being, since it is filled with suffering and death; and that love cannot be creation's final law, since nature, "red in tooth and claw with ravin," shrieks against this creed.
If the imperfections and abuses in the practical workings of the church are arguments against its divine institution and authority, then undoubtedly the "measureless ill" which is in the world is reason for doubting whether a Being infinitely good is its author.
Hence the traditional objections of Protestants to the church are, in the ultimate analysis, reducible to the atheistic sophism, which, because there is evil in the creature, seeks to conclude that the creator cannot be wholly good; not perceiving that it would be as reasonable to demand that the circle should be square as to ask that the finite should be without defect.