The schemes in which Mill was interested at this time drew Bentham's
attention in other directions. In 1813 the Quaker, William Allen, who
had been a close ally of Mill, induced Bentham to invest money in the
New Lanark establishment. Owen, whose benevolent schemes had been
hampered by his partners, bought them out, the new capital being partly
provided by Allen, Bentham, and others. Bentham afterwards spoke
contemptuously of Owen, who, as he said, 'began in vapour and ended in
smoke,'[314] and whose disciples came in after years into sharp conflict
with the Utilitarians. Bentham, however, took pleasure, it seems, in
Owen's benevolent schemes for infant education, and made money by his
investment, for once combining business with philanthropy
successfully.[315] Probably he regarded New Lanark as a kind of
Panopticon. Owen had not as yet become a prophet of Socialism.

Another set of controversies in which Mill and his friends took an
active part, started Bentham in a whole series of speculations. A plan
(which I shall have to mention in connection with Mill), was devised in
1815 for a 'Chrestomathic school,' which was to give a sound education
of proper Utilitarian tendencies to the upper and middle classes.
Brougham, Mackintosh, Ricardo, William Allen, and Place were all
interested in this undertaking.[316] Bentham offered a site at Queen's
Square Place, and though the scheme never came to the birth, it set him
actively at work. He wrote a series of papers during his first year at
Ford Abbey[317] upon the theory of education, published in 1816 as
_Chrestomathia_; and to this was apparently due a further excursion
beyond the limits of jurisprudence. Educational controversy in that
ignorant day was complicated by religious animosity; the National
Society and the 'British and Foreign' Society were fighting under the
banners of Bell and Lancaster, and the war roused excessive bitterness.
Bentham finding the church in his way, had little difficulty in
discovering that the whole ecclesiastical system was part of the general
complex of abuse against which he was warring. He fell foul of the
Catechism; he exposed the abuses of non-residence and episcopal wealth;
he discovered that the Thirty-nine Articles contained gross fallacies;
he went on to make an onslaught upon the Apostle St Paul, whose evidence
as to his conversion was exposed to a severe cross-examination; and,
finally, he wrote, or supplied the materials for, a rema