They start into being not with the belief in God, and a future of rewards and punishments, but with the belief in the moral law and in virtue, and they are common to all systems in which the worth of virtue is recognised.
The vulgar view of the matter cannot be better stated than in the following account given by J.S.Mill of the anti-religious reasonings of his father.

He looked upon religion, says his son, '_as the greatest enemy of morality; first, by setting up fictitious excellences--belief in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected with the good of humankind, and causing them to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtues_; but above all _by radically vitiating the standard of morals, making it consist in doing the will of a being, on whom, indeed, it lavishes all the phrases of adulation, but whom, in sober truth, it depicts as eminently hateful.

I have a hundred times heard him say that_ all ages and nations have represented their gods as wicked _in a constantly increasing progression; that mankind had gone on adding trait after trait, till they reached the most perfect expression of wickedness which the human mind can devise, and have called this God, and prostrated themselves before it.

The_ ne plus ultra _of wickedness he considered to be embodied in what is commonly presented to mankind as the creed of Christianity.

Think (he used to say) of a being who would make a hell--who would create the human race with the infallible foreknowledge, and therefore with the intention, that the great majority of them, should be consigned to horrible and everlasting torment._' James Mill, adds his son, knew quite well that Christians were not, in fact, as demoralised by this monstrous creed as, if they were logically consistent, they ought to be.