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In the second chapter of his autobiography, shortly after describing how his father taught him to believe that the ne plus ultra of wickedness was embodied in the creed of Christianity as commonly understood, John Stuart Mill declared that he was "one of the very few examples, in this country, of one who has, not thrown off religious belief, but never had it" and grew up with a wholly negative view of it. Seeking to set himself apart from all those Victorians who looked back nostalgically to the lost Christianity of their youth, Mill said that "I looked upon the modern exactly as I did upon the ancient religion, as something which in no way concerned me. It did not seem to me more strange that English people should believe what I did not, than that the men whom I read of in Herodotus should have done so" (see Autobiography and Other Writings, ed. Jack Stillinger, 27-28).
In fact, Mill (writing in the 1850s) overstates the extent of his separation from his Christian contemporaries. The posthumous publication (in 1874) of the Three Essays on Religion, two written between 1850 and 1858, the third between 1868 and 1870, revealed-to the consternation of many of his agnostic followers-that Mill was by no means the dogmatically secular "saint of rationalism" that many had supposed him to be. Neither had he been, in earlier years, as free of the premises (and prejudices) of Christendom as he later declared himself to be. This is evident in his (now astonishing) statement in the Westminster Review of July 1824, when he was supposed to be a devout Benthamite rationalist, that "Christianity is the only true faith in our opinion," in his remarkably sympathetic letters to the Morning Chronicle in 1842 about the Tractarians, in his 1840 essay on Coleridge, and even in the assumptions that pervade On Liberty about the superiority of "the West" to "the East" But nowhere is the unacknowledged Christian substratum of Mill's thought more apparent than in his remarks about Judaism and Jews.
Most of his allusions to the Jews participate in the common Christian practice of self-congratulatory observations on the ethical inferiority of Jewish biblical practices to those of Christianity. In Utilitarianism (1861), for example, Mill expresses...