John Stuart Mill: A Secular Life is an unusual work in the field of Mill studies, but one that is scholarly, provocative, and original. It is biographically oriented, but from a religious, primarily Christian perspective, and it happily demonstrates how Mill's life can shed light on his philosophical claims. For Timothy Larsen, “Mill was a religious sceptic, but not the kind of person which that term usually conjures up in one's imagination. The unexpected presence and prominence of spirituality is not only there in Mill's late, startling essay, ‘Theism,’ in which he makes the case for hope in God and in Christ. It is everywhere” (viii). That may sound like a stretch as a description of the “Saint of Rationalism,” but Larsen makes a powerful case for it with one telling detail after another—details often pulled from neglected letters and life experiences in which Mill's voice does indeed sound like “the Mill you never knew; the Mill that even some of his closest disciples never knew” (viii).

The theme of the book is what Larsen holds to be the theme throughout Mill's life. Admittedly, Mill “placed stress upon the more skeptical or believing aspects of his thought” (200) depending on his purpose and audience. Nonetheless, Larsen argues, there was a consistent theological vision at work:

Mill's vision, on this account, is not best described as “agnostic”; rather, Mill adhered to a “probabilist theism”—or more fully, a “hopeful, imaginative, beneficial, probabilist theism” (209). Indeed, for Larsen, “there is nothing in Mill's scheme that would have prevented him from being an ordained minister in a range of mainline denominations and a beloved member of the faculty of a major, venerable theological seminary in the twentieth century and beyond” (210). Even if, as Larsen seems to intimate from time to time, the Unitarians might have been Mill's best bet (51), it is insightful in the extreme to insist on how Mill, like his great utilitarian successor Henry Sidgwick, was given to the use of a “life verse”—John 9:4: “I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day; the night cometh, when no man can work” (223). Revisiting Mill's life and work in the light of this text and his frequent invocations of it in his work (or better, vocation), even in his dying words (225), does brightly illuminate the meaning of Mill in a way that makes much better sense of the continuity of religious concerns between him and Sidgwick, who devoted much of his life to trying to determine whether there was an afterlife.

Again, Larsen's reading of Mill reflects many sources, all of which end up mutually and forcefully complementing each other. Mill's “Theism” essay is important, but so is his church attendance, his constant, lifelong deployment of biblical quotations and allusions, and his deep friendships with such figures as the Reverend F. D. Maurice (56–57, 191–93) and the Reverend Louis Rey of the Protestant Church in Avignon, where Mill spent so much time toward the end of his life, near the grave of his beloved wife. Ultimately, this book feels more like a philosophical crusade than a mere philosophical biography; Larsen's tone is that of the polemical Mill taking up the arms of argumentation against the forces of evil. And as in Mill's own debating mode, some uncongenial evidence does not get sufficient attention, such as Mill's suggestion that it was probable that “in a higher, and, above all, a happier condition of human life, not annihilation but immortality may be the burdensome idea” (“Utility of Religion,” Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. X. J. Robson [1969], 428). Yet even so, this book is an important corrective to the dominant interpretations of Mill, which for their part have often downplayed the evidence Larsen presents. Importantly, this is not hostile criticism from the outside, but a brief from someone who clearly adores Mill: “It is to John Stuart Mill's immortal glory that he was on the right side on almost all the major issues… Mill defied a strong British wave of support for the cause of the Confederacy in the American Civil War…. the glory of Mill's time in Parliament was his championing of women's suffrage. Indeed, Mill's commitment to the rights of women by itself should qualify him to be considered one of the figures from nineteenth-century Britain worthy of lasting fame and honour” (175–77). Mill's prioritizing of chastity and blind spots on race and imperialism get a pass.

Some might urge that Larsen is elaborating on the divided soul of Mill that scholars such as John Skorupski have highlighted—the tension between Mill's naturalism and his soaring, strikingly Romantic vision of self-development and cultivation. How could the associationist and determinist psychology that Mill inherited from his father account for the character development and autonomy described in, say, On Liberty? A similar point could be made about his naturalistic and spiritual dimensions, as described here. Still, Larsen's readings of Mill are fresh, and again and again, it is the telling detail—for example, how Mill “occasionally attended Christian worship services during his teen years and thereafter for the rest of his life” (15)—that adds color to this portrait and makes it a most welcome contribution to the broad church that is utilitarian studies.