There are 3 entries for this date: Stephan Girard, Honore de Balzac and John Stuart Mill.

On this date in 1750, Stephen Girard was born in Bordeaux, France. The freethinking philanthropist, who settled in Philadelphia in 1776, liked to say he began life with a sixpence. He went to sea as a cabin-boy before he was 14, and worked his way up to commander. Girard opened a store in his adopted city, then became a wealthy ship-owner. During the yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia in 1793, when half the residents fled, Girard became a local hero. He not only opened his pocketbook to help, but volunteered as nurse and hospital manager for two months, working directly with the sick and dying. Girard, an arch-critic of clergy and Christianity, named his sailing ships after thinkers such as Voltaire. When he died, Girard was considered the wealthiest person in the United States. He left nearly his entire estate, valued at $7.5 million, to charity. He gave $30,000 to the Pennsylvania hospital, $20,000 to the "deaf and dumb" asylum, $10,000 to the Lancaster public school, $10,000 for the society for "distressed sea captains," $500,000 to the city of Philadelphia, and $300,000 to the state of Pennsylvania for canal construction. He willed more than $5 million for the construction and endowment of a college for orphans, instructing that there should be no sectarian control or instruction (see quote below). Writing in 1894, Samuel Putnam (Four Hundred Years of Freethought) noted that the estate was valued then at $20 million, and had about 1,500 scholars. But Putnam reported that Girard's provisions had been "shamefully violated," with the college under Christian supervision. D. 1831.

On this date in 1799, Honore de Balzac was born in France. Educated by the Oratorian priests at Vendome College, Balzac became a lawyer's clerk at his parents' insistence. When Balzac turned to writing, his parents reduced his allowance. Balzac worked in legendary privation for the next decade, honing his skill with his first unsuccessful novels. His success as a novelist was clinched by 1830, when he produced the first of his 47-volume Comedie Humaine. The prolific novelist also wrote 24 unrelated novels. Skepticism pervades Balzac's many masterpieces, including Pere Goriot and Cousin Bette. D. 1850.

On this date in 1806, John Stuart Mill was born in England. Mill, who met Jeremy Bentham as a young man, became a champion of individual liberty. With Bentham, Mill advanced utilitarianism, a philosophy advocating the role of government is to create the greatest amount of good with the least evil. Mill, known for his clear writing style and compelling logic, advanced and popularized such ideals as social and sexual equality, the public ownership of national resources, and political liberty. Mill was tutored at a tender age by his father, James Mill, who was an agnostic. Mill could not remember a time when he could not read Greek, writing in his autobiography that he started Greek study by age three. Mill wrote in his Autobiography (1873) that his father "impressed upon me from the first, that the manner in which the world came into existence was a subject on which nothing was known: that the question, 'Who made me?' cannot be answered, because we have no experience or authentic information from which to answer it; and that any answer only throws the difficulty a step further back, since the question immediately presents itself, Who made God?"

Even as a teenager, Mill wrote a defense of skeptic Richard Carlile, jailed for six years for "blasphemous libel." After a clerkship in India House, Mill became part of the "philosophic Radicals," and wrote for number of journals. A System of Logic, in two volumes, came out in 1843, followed by Principles of Political Economy (1848), On Liberty (1859), Utilitarianism (1863), and The Subjection of Women (1869). The latter book was influenced by his wife Harriet Hardy Taylor, a longtime friend whom Mill married in 1851. "Every established fact which is too bad to admit of any other defense is always presented to us as an injunction of religion," he noted in this work. In On Liberty, a work dedicated to his wife, who died in 1858, Mill rejected a standard of ethics predicated on obedience, or the crushing of individuality, whether by "enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men." Mill termed Christianity "essentially a doctrine of passive obedience; it inculcates submission to all authorities found established."

Mill was a member of Parliament from 1865 to 1868, rising to the defense of Charles Bradlaugh, the atheist politician who had to fight for years to be seated in Parliament. Although Mill's views were unpopular, Gladstone once referred to Mill as "the saint of Rationalism." Mill's Reform Bill of 1867, the first attempt to grant the vote to British women, while unsuccessful, ignited the British suffrage movement. Three essays on religion were published posthumously. In them, Mill hints that he had adopted a Deistic belief in what he termed a "limited liability god," surprising his freethinking friends. But his strong repudiation of miracles and dogma, while outraging the public, was a seminal defense of rationalism. Mill wrote in Utility of Religion, published in 1874, that belief "in the supernatural . . . cannot be considered to be any longer required. . ." D. 1873.