sober truth, it
depicts as eminently hateful. I have a hundred times heard him say that_
all ages and nations have represented their gods as wicked _in a
constantly increasing progression; that mankind had gone on adding trait
after trait, till they reached the most perfect expression of wickedness
which the human mind can devise, and have called this God, and
prostrated themselves before it. The_ ne plus ultra _of wickedness he
considered to be embodied in what is commonly presented to mankind as
the creed of Christianity. Think (he used to say) of a being who would
make a hell--who would create the human race with the infallible
foreknowledge, and therefore with the intention, that the great majority
of them, should be consigned to horrible and everlasting torment._'
James Mill, adds his son, knew quite well that Christians were not, in
fact, as demoralised by this monstrous creed as, if they were logically
consistent, they ought to be. '_The same slovenliness of thought (he
said) and subjection of the reason to fears, wishes, and affections,
which enable them to accept a theory involving a contradiction in terms,
prevent them from perceiving the logical consequence of the theory._'

Now, in spite of its coarse and exaggerated acrimony, this passage
doubtless expresses a great truth, which presently I shall go on to
consider. But it contains also a very characteristic falsehood, of which
we must first divest it. God is here represented as _making_ a hell,
with the express intention of forcibly putting men into it, and His main
hatefulness consists in this capricious and wanton cruelty. Such a
representation is, however, an essentially false one. It is not only not
true to the true Christian teaching, but it is absolutely opposed to it.
The God of Christianity does not _make_ hell; still less does He
deliberately put men into it. It is made by men themselves; the essence
of its torment consists in the loss of God; and those that lose Him,
lose Him by their own act, from having deliberately made themselves
incapable of loving Him. God never wills the death of the sinner. It is
to the sinner's own will that the sinner's death is due.

All this rhetoric, therefore, about God's malevolence and wickedness is
entirely beside the point, nor does it even touch the difficulty that,
in his heart, James Mill is aiming at. His main difficulty is nothing
more than this: How can an infinite will that rules everywhere, find
room fo