My Dear Gustave- I am really ashamed to see that your last letter, one of the most interesting I ever received from you, has remained more than six weeks unanswered. My only excuse is that I was & still am busy making the final revision of a book which is to be published this spring & in which I have said all that I can find to say on Methods of Philosophic Investigation. I do not expect to find many readers for this book, but I had things to say on the subject, & it was part of my task on earth to say them & therefore having said them I feel a potion of my work to be done.

With regard to Salvador’s two books, the earliest made a very mixed impression upon me, the latest one wholly favourable; it seems to me that he has better understood the spirit of the times in which Christianity arose, & the nature of Christianity itself as a phenomenon in the history of the ancient world than anybody else, & that he is neared the truth than even Strauss. Altogether it is a grand book & I have instigated several people to read it. As for the first, it has also thrown much new light upon history & has made me think in a manner I never expected to do of the Hebrew people & politty, mais cela se ressent horriblement des quinze dernieres annees de la resauration- I could hardly help laughing at the manner in which he strains everything to recommend poor Moses to the Constitutional Opposition & to shew that the Jews were Liberals, political economists & Utilitarians, that they had properly speaking no religion, or next to none, & were altogether a la hauteur do lepoque, worthy sons of the 18th century.

I would very strongly advise him to cancel the whole book & write it over again in the spirit worthy of his second work, written ten or twelve years later & for public much more advanced. He is quite right for instance in saying that the liberty of prophesying was equivalent in the Jewish polity to the liberty of the press & the point is a new & striking one, but is really is not necessary to tell us that the prophets did not pretend to be, nor were supposed to be, specially accredited from God, that all the expressions implying them to be such are a mere facon de parler, meaning only that they were very cleaver fellows, & to fortify this by philological arguments from the usages & phrases of the Hebrew tongue.

Why not say at once that all persons of genius, inspired persons in the modern sense, poets & persons of imagination & eloquence who had great & wonderful powers not derived from teaching, were believed to derive these powers straight from God & were in consequence of that religious belief, permitted from religious motives to exercise that right of free speech & free censure of powerful persons, which certainly would not in that age have been conceded to any one who spoke merely as from himself?

I have been reading at odd times your old friend Leroux’s book, De lHumanite: the historical part I like; those few pages on the schools & Greek philosophy are quite perfect; but when we come to his won theory, did ever mortal man write such intolerable nonsense! There are ideas in that too about Moses, but qui ne valent pas celles de Salvador.

I long to see your speculations on the subject but I would not advise your publishing a translation here, at least in the first instance: even Salvador has not been translated nor heard of , & nobody here is yet ripe for reading a serious philosophical discussion on the Bible. We are all either bigots or Voltairians. But we are improving. In ten years I think we shall have made some way, between our neo-Catholic school at Oxford & the German Rationalists who are beginning to be secretly read here.

All you say on politics in your letter is extremely interesting & evidently true. You are the only person whose opinion on the political state & prospects of France I always feel that I can rely on. As for us, I believe that we are about to have a real juste milieu ministry & that things will go on tolerably smoothly till the grande question sociale des ouviers becomes imminent, which it is rapidly becoming, perhaps more rapidly here than even with you. What will happen then, heaven knows. Il nous manque un homme, tout comme a vous.

Give my kindest regards to Adolphe & remembrances to all friends.

Ever yours,

J.S. Mill