The New International Encyclopædia/Mill, John

MILL, John (1645-1707). A scholar of the Church of England. He was born at Shap, Westmoreland; studied at Queen's College, Oxford, and was elected a fellow in 1670. He entered the ministry, and became distinguished as a preacher; became rector in 1681 of the college living of Bletchington, Oxfordshire, and chaplain to Charles II. In 1685 he was principal of Saint Edmund Hall; in 1704 he became prebendary of Canterbury. The work for which he is most distinguished is his new edition of the Greek Testament, on which he spent thirty years, and which appeared only fourteen days before his death. It was undertaken at the advice and expense of Dr. Fell, Bishop of Oxford, but after the Bishop's death (1686) Mill continued it at his own expense, and repaid to the executors what he had received. The text which Mill adopted is that of Robert Stephens of 1550, and his work contains 30,000 various readings collected from manuscripts, commentaries, writings of the Fathers, etc. Dr. Daniel Whitby attacked the work in his Examen Variantium Lectionum Johannis Millii (London, 1709); but Dr. Richard Bentley approved the labors of Mill, and Michaelis, Marsh, and other critical scholars acknowledged the value of the edition.