He worked at the _Analysis_ during several successive vacations, up to the year 1829, when it was published, and allowed me to read the manuscript, portion by portion, as it advanced.

The other principal English writers on mental philosophy I read as I felt inclined, particularly Berkeley, Hume's _Essays_, Reid, Dugald Stewart and Brown on Cause and Effect.

Brown's _Lectures_ I did not read until two or three years later, nor at that time had my father himself read them.
Among the works read in the course of this year, which contributed materially to my development, I owe it to mention a book (written on the foundation of some of Bentham's manuscripts and published under the pseudonyme of Philip Beauchamp) entitled _Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness of Mankind_.

This was an examination not of the truth, but of the usefulness of religious belief, in the most general sense, apart from the peculiarities of any special revelation; which, of all the parts of the discussion concerning religion, is the most important in this age, in which real belief in any religious doctrine is feeble and precarious, but the opinion of its necessity for moral and social purposes almost universal; and when those who reject revelation, very generally take refuge in an optimistic Deism, a worship of the order of Nature, and the supposed course of Providence, at least as full of contradictions, and perverting to the moral sentiments, as any of the forms of Christianity, if only it is as completely realized.

Yet very little, with any claim to a philosophical character, has been written by sceptics against the usefulness of this form of belief.