tially jejune and dreary. It is not in the least
surprising that such a feeling should prevail. If it were otherwise, if
the majority of thoughtful men and women were already in a condition to
be penetrated by sympathy for the life of 'search with many sighs,' then
we should have already gone far on our way towards the goal which a
Turgot or a Mill set for human progress. If society had at once
recognised the full attractiveness of a life arduously passed in
consideration of the means by which the race may take its next step
forward in the improvement of character and the amelioration of the
common lot,--and this not from love of God nor hope of recompense in a
world to come, and still less from hope of recompense or even any very
firm assurance of fulfilled aspiration in this world,--then that
fundamental renovation of conviction for which Mr. Mill sighed, and that
evolution of a new faith to which he had looked forward in the far
distance, would already have come to pass.

Mr. Mill has been ungenerously ridiculed for the eagerness and
enthusiasm of his contemplation of a new and better state of human
society. Yet we have always been taught to consider it the mark of the
loftiest and most spiritual character, for one to be capable of
rapturous contemplation of a new and better state in a future life. Why,
then, do you not recognise the loftiness and spirituality of those who
make their heaven in the thought of the wider light and purer happiness
that, in the immensity of the ages, may be brought to new generations of
men, by long force of vision and endeavour? What great element is
wanting in a life guided by such a hope? Is it not disinterested, and
magnanimous, and purifying, and elevating? The countless beauties of
association which cluster round the older faith may make the new seem
bleak and chilly. But when what is now the old faith was itself new,
that too may well have struck, as we know that it did strike, the
adherent of the mellowed pagan philosophy as crude, meagre, jejune,
dreary.

Then Mr. Mill's life as disclosed to us in these pages has been called
joyless, by that sect of religious partisans whose peculiarity is to
mistake boisterousness for unction. Was the life of Christ himself,
then, so particularly joyful? Can the life of any man be joyful who sees
and feels the tragic miseries and hardly less tragic follies of the
earth? The old Preacher, when he considered all the oppressions that are
done und