are most minutely delineated. This is the consequence, however, not of internal self-consistency and reasonableness, but of imitation of Roman Catholicism. While Comte abandoned the great and comprehensive principles which the Roman Catholic Church holds in common with the rest of the Christian world, he retained many of the distinctive prejudices which it sanctions and engenders, and copied its policy and ritual in describing the constitution and prescribing the worship of what he believed would be the religion of the future. He demanded that there should be set apart to the service of humanity an order of priests or savants, composed of positivist philosophers, hierarchically arranged, with a supreme pontiff at their head, to whom absolute powers are to be intrusted in intellectual or spiritual matters. This priesthood is to be salaried by the State; is to have the entire charge of public education and of the practice of medicine; and is to counsel, and, if need be, reprove the temporal power. The high priest must reside in Paris, the holy city of the new religion. There are to be ecclesiastical courts and laws. The temples should all face towards Paris, and are to be furnished with altars, images, &c. The dress of the clergy is to be rather more feminine than masculine. Eighty-one solemn festivals, secondary or principal, are to constitute the worship annually paid

to the Great Being by its servants assembled in its temples. Each step in life is to have its special consecration, and hence the sacraments of the new religion are to be nine in number,-presentation, initiation, admission, destination, marriage, maturity, retreat, transformation, and incorporation. Private prayers are to be presented thrice a-day; the morning prayer is to be an hour, the mid-day prayer a quarter of an hour, and the evening prayer half an hour in length. What is called

"the beautiful creation of the medieval mindthe woman with the child in her arms," is selected as the symbol of humanity; and "to give life and vividness to this symbol, and to worship in general, each positivist is taught to adopt as objects of his adoration his mother, his wife, his daughter, allowing the principal part to the mother, but blending the three into one compound influence-representing to him humanity in its past, its present, and its future."

I must not more minutely describe the monstrous mixture of atheism, fetichism, ultramontanism, and ritualism, which claims to be the Religion of Humanity, so absurd and grotesque is it. Almost its only noble characteristic is the spirit of disinterestedness which it breathes, the stress which it lays on the duty of living for the good of others. In this respect it has imitated, although longo

intervallo, the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But unlike the Gospel, although it enjoins love to one another with the urgency which is due, it unseals no fresh source and brings to light no new motives of love. A mere doctrinal inculcation of the duty of active and affectionate beneficence, under the barbarous name of altruism, is its highest service as a system of religion, what it has added thereto being worse than useless, because tending to render even "the royal law" of love itself ridiculous.1

Is it not instructive that Comte should have been unable to devise anything better than the so-called religion of which I have been speaking, and that neither he nor any other person who has attempted to raise a substitute for Christianity on the basis of science has failed signally to display his own feebleness and folly? The character of the religions which have been invented in the present age is no slight indirect confirmation of the divine origin of the religion which they would displace. If all that men can do in the way of religious invention, even in the nineteenth century, and with every help which science can give them, is like what we have seen them doing, the religion which has come down to us through so many centuries can have been no human invention. It could not have been originated by science; and were it

1 See Appendix XXII.

withdrawn, science would assuredly find no substitute for it. Take it away and we should be left even at this hour in absolute spiritual darkness and helplessness. That is the truth which all modern attempts to found and form new religions concur in establishing.

LECTURE VI.

SECULARISM.

I.

THE subject of my last lecture was Positivism. Now I wish to speak of Secularism. These two theories are nearly related in nature. They are manifestations of the same principles and tendencies. They may almost be said to be the two halves of the same whole; in other words, secularism may be regarded as the theory of life or conduct which flows from the theory of belief or knowledge that constitutes the substance of positivism. And yet it would be an error to represent secularism as historically an offshoot of positivism. It may fairly claim, I believe, to be as much of English growth as positivism must be admitted to be of French growth. Its representatives have been, it is true, considerably influenced by the writings of the founder of positivism, and still more influenced by the writings of his English followers,