Three Essays on ReligionJohn Stuart Mill

Three Essays on Religion appeared posthumously in 1874, edited by Mill's stepdaughter Helen Taylor. The volume joins three pieces written at different times: "Nature" and "Utility of Religion," composed in the 1850s, and "Theism," written later, between 1868 and 1870. Together they give Mill's most sustained treatment of religious belief from a utilitarian and empiricist standpoint.

"Nature" attacks the habit of treating Nature as a moral standard. The natural order is full of cruelty and waste; to follow Nature is no guide to right action. "Utility of Religion" asks what social goods religion has supplied (consolation, moral motive, social cohesion) and whether a "Religion of Humanity," devoted to the improvement of this world, might supply them without supernatural belief. "Theism" is more careful and more open. Mill examines the design argument and allows that the evidence of order in the universe makes a limited, finite deity a possible hypothesis, while rejecting omnipotence joined to perfect goodness as inconsistent with the world's evils. The essays refuse both dogmatic atheism and orthodox theology. They keep open a sober, fallibilist theism and a secular moral idealism, and they force later readers to separate the ethical functions of religion from the metaphysical claims made on its behalf.