Mill has only succeeded in duping himself
on this point. A man _cannot_ free himself from self-consideration.
Christianity indeed appeals to the innate desire of happiness, but
condemns the overweening and blind self-regard which cannot see that
the highest happiness of self flows from a just respect to the
selfhood of others and from the cultivation of the spiritual nature.
Love your neighbor _as_ yourself is the Christian precept; and it has
the advantage of being practicable, which Mr. Mill's has not.
Mr. Mill considerately says he will forbear to urge the moral
difficulties and perversions of the Christian revelation, "the
recognition, for example, of the object of highest worship in a being
who could make a hell." "Is it possible," he asks, "to adore such a
one without a frightful distortion of the standard of right and
wrong?" "Any other of the outrages to the most ordinary justice and
humanity involved in the common Christian conception of the moral
character of God sinks into insignificance beside this dreadful
idealization of wickedness. Most of them, too, are happily not so
unequivocally deducible from the very words of Christ.
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