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 Front Page arrow Titles (by Subject) arrow 399.: RELIGIOUS SCEPTICS UNPUBLISHED LETTER TO THE WEEKLY DISPATCH [1 FEB., 1851] - The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXV - Newspaper Writings December 1847 - July 1873 Part IV

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Subject Area: Political Theory
Collection: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill

399.: RELIGIOUS SCEPTICS UNPUBLISHED LETTER TO THE WEEKLY DISPATCH [1 FEB., 1851] - John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXV - Newspaper Writings December 1847 - July 1873 Part IV [1847]

Edition used:

The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, XXV - Newspaper Writings December 1847 - July 1873 Part IV, ed. Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, Introduction by Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).

Part of: Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, in 33 vols.

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


399.

RELIGIOUS SCEPTICS

UNPUBLISHED LETTER TO THE WEEKLY DISPATCH [1 FEB., 1851]

The MS draft, Brotherton Library, Leeds, bears a note in Mill’s hand: “left at the office 1st Feb. 1851.” The “office” was that of the Weekly Dispatch, a Sunday paper, in which appeared the article to which Mill is objecting, “The Round of the Clerical Circle,” 26 Jan., p. 49, from which the quotations are taken. Being unpublished, the letter is not listed in Mill’s bibliography.

sir,—

I cannot remain quite silent on the unjust and unfounded attacks made by the Dispatch on those whom it calls by the old-fashioned appellation of sceptics. In the first article of the number for January 26th, there is a charge against all who hold merely negative opinions on religion, of being “Epicureans” who “take the world as they find it”—of “believing in nothing,” being “earnest in nothing,” being “merely a speculative, disquisitive, logical, thinking machine.” Whoever wrote these accusations, believing them to be true, is as ignorant of life and the world, and of the opinions of instructed persons in the present age, as a Church of England parson. I affirm that nearly all the persons I have known who were, and are, eminently distinguished by a passion for the good of mankind, hold the opinions respecting religion which your article stigmatizes, that is, they think that nothing can be known on the subject. The very phrase “believing nothing” as a synonyme for believing no religious creed, as if nothing were true or false, right or wrong, except with reference to some theory of creation, is one of the calumnies of shortsighted and ignorant intolerance. But your writer, like other heretics, must have a scapegoat, to whom to pass on the slanders thrown upon themselves, and be able to say to the bigots, It is not I, it is my brother. According to him, those who pull down one positive religion, if it is to put up another, however slight and flimsy, are heroes, but if they see no sufficient evidence for any belief as to the origin and purpose of the world, and will not succumb to the vulgar by professing any, against them you indorse the accusations of the orthodox. The smallest rag of dogmatic religion is enough, in the opinion of its professors, to entitle them to call themselves infinitely higher and worthier than those who profess no dogmatic belief. But as all my own experience and observation lead me to an exactly opposite conclusion, I strenuously deny the accusation in the Dispatch, and charge the writer of it with bearing false witness against his neighbour.1

J.S.M.

[1 ]Proverbs, 25:18.