ns whose convictions he attacked. Thus he husbanded the
strength of truth, and avoided wasteful friction. Probably no English
writer that ever lived has done so much as Mr. Mill to cut at the very
root of the theological spirit, yet there is only one passage in the
writings published during his lifetime--I mean a well-known passage in
the Liberty--which could give any offence to the most devout person. His
conformity, one need hardly say, never went beyond the negative degree,
nor ever passed beyond the conformity of silence. That guilty and
grievously common pusillanimity which leads men to make or act
hypocritical professions, always moved his deepest abhorrence. And he
did not fear publicly to testify his interest in the return of an
atheist to parliament.

His courage was not of the spurious kinds arising from anger, or
ignorance of the peril, or levity, or a reckless confidence. These are
all very easy. His distinction was that he knew all the danger to
himself, was anxious to save pain to others, was buoyed up by no rash
hope that the world was to be permanently bettered at a stroke, and yet
for all this he knew how to present an undaunted front to a majority.
The only fear he ever knew was fear lest a premature or excessive
utterance should harm a good cause. He had measured the prejudices of
men, and his desire to arouse this obstructive force in the least degree
compatible with effective advocacy of any improvement, set the single
limit to his intrepidity. Prejudices were to him like physical
predispositions, with which you have to make your account. He knew,
too, that they are often bound up with the most valuable elements in
character and life, and hence he feared that violent surgery which in
eradicating a false opinion fatally bruises at the same time a true and
wholesome feeling that may cling to it. The patience which with some men
is an instinct, and with others a fair name for indifference, was with
him an acquisition of reason and conscience.

The value of this wise and virtuous mixture of boldness with tolerance,
of courageous speech with courageous reserve, has been enormous. Along
with his direct pleas for freedom of thought and freedom of speech, it
has been the chief source of that liberty of expressing unpopular
opinions in this country without social persecution, which is now so
nearly complete, that he himself was at last astonished by it. The
manner of his dialectic, firm and vigorous as the