ABSTRACT
When Victoria became queen of England in 1837, belief in the dependence of morality upon the Christian religion was widespread. A "growing number of intellectuals," writes Chadwick, "began to imagine the possibility of morality without religion." The founder of British utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham predates the Victorian age, though his ideas influenced many Victorian thinkers. Bentham, like Auguste Comte, saw himself as a crucial figure in the moral regeneration of society. Yet, unlike in Comte's positivist polity, the utilitarian utopia had no priests or worship. The utilitarian heaven, writes one student of Bentham, was a heaven without gods or saints. The utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill was more nuanced, and his attitude toward role of religion in society was more in line with Victorian modes of thinking. Basil Willey calls Morley a "near-Comtist" because, like Comte, he sought to build a new religion that would "extract the permanent elements of the old faith to make 'the purified material of the new.'"
