but to assume their ultimate triumph in their own unaided strength is the mere fancy of a dreamer. Comte would indeed aid them by devising a "religion of humanity," to supply the place of the rejected theology. He would adopt the organization, while eschewing the doctrine of the Romish church. He would have a constituted hierarchy composed of a "homogeneous speculative class," the priests of Positive Philosophy who are to unfold and enforce the laws of science, and lead the nations in the educational process of adoring an idealized humanity.

Comte's Divinity can scarcely be called a logical necessity of his philosophical system, but it is essential to his scheme of social reorganization. The system of hierarchical order which he proposes, would be a ludicrous abortion without some locum tenens to take the place of a God. But what Deity shall be proposed? Atheism, Comte indignantly repudiates. It is disorganizing; it cannot assert itself on Positive grounds. Indeed, its pretensions are terribly riddled by the first application to it of the Positive Philosophy. What, then, is that Divinity whose existence and worship are to be vindicated on Positive grounds? Is it the intelligent Creator and Ruler of the Universe? Is it "our Father in Heaven?" Is it the moral Judge and Governor of the race? Not at all. It is as pure an idealism as ever emanated from the metaphysical dreams which he reprobates. It is invested with attributes. It is clothed with personality, power, and wisdom, and yet it is not a person, but a figure of speech, a lofty generalization. It is an ideal humanity, whose shape varies with the varied conceptions of its worshippers. Man was made in God's image, but here is a God made in man's. The "Great Being" is the embodied life, the progressively developed humanity of the race. The interior ideal life distinct from that of the race, occupies scarcely a subordinate sphere. It is also the object of religious reverence, and is evidently associated in Comte's mind with that image of holy, stainless maternity, which Catholic art has embodied in pictures and statues of the Virgin, and placed within its temples, to divide at least the homage due to God alone.

This evident leaning to the venerable forms of the Romish

Church is visible in many features of the Positivist Calendar. The vast, and in many respects, beneficent influence exerted through a hierarchical organization that has endured for centuries, and even now survives like a coat of mail-the memorial of conflicts that have failed to crush it-has invited the attention of Comte, and excited in him the envy of its possession. It meets so exactly the demand of his system of social reorganization and intellectual supremacy, that he appropriates from it to a large extent. The ideal of his "priesthood of humanity" is largely borrowed from Rome. It is slightlyit needs to be only slightly-paganized, and with a liberality which Rome of old would have applauded, canonizes Raphael, Tasso and Milton on the same calendar with Numa, Mahomet, Socrates, Luke, Augustine and Hildebrand. It is true that some of these had far different conceptions of a Deity, from those which Comte entertains. But with a sublime and almost horrid indifference, the key to this liberality is given us. We are told that "God and the Soul are not denied any more than heat, light and electricity." We are taught that we know God just as we know them, only in their effect.

We can see at once that the exclusiveness of the Positive Philosophy finds no place in the Positive religion. A man's views on life, death and a judgment to come, are mere incidents to his eminent "humanity," and whether he worships with Mahomet, Socrates or Paul, the Positivist Calendar accepts him with equal readiness.

But other features of the Catholic system reappear. Five of the seven Romish sacraments are adopted among the nine of the new church. The showy solemnities of saints' days and imposing processions, find a place in Comte's ceremonial of worship. The spiritual power, the pontificate of the religion of humanity, is intensely despotic, a very Hildebrand in absolute supremacy over the domain of education, morals and thought, so as to effect a perfect subordination and an ascetic discipline, the reverse of that anarchy and social chaos which Comte regards with such supreme abhorrence.

Social regeneration and reorganization is indeed his ruling idea. The whole system of educational training from infancy onward, is subordinate to this. It is, indeed, fancifully and yet

artistically minute, and is as rigid and unyielding as a Procrustean bed. Its theory of human culture bears the stamp of ideality that proclaims its origin in a dreamy brain. The discipline of conscience, the regeneration and mastery of the will, the essential features of independent, self-controlled character are almost utterly ignored. Each mind must ascend by so many definite and measured steps the staircase of intellectual and moral eminence. The wheat of humanity is to be ground out by precise and definite formulas, and all individual souls. are treated as so many indistinguishable grains. The rigid uniformity of astronomical laws, is transferred to the processes of intellectual and moral training, and the whole system is to be put in motion, and sustained in action, in the total absence of that great mainspring, the existence of a personal Deity, infinitely Holy and Supreme. It is a body which is to live and act with the heart torn out. No ordinary degree of theorizing fanaticism could devise such a system, or commend it with the cool audacity and rigid logic of a Robespierre to universal adoption. Such a mockery of childhood's yearnings and manhood's hopes, and the decrepitude of age slipping off the crumbling brink of being, into "a world without souls," was, we venture to say, never before, elaborately contrived and reduced to system.

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Yet this is "the worship now demanded," according to one of Comte's followers. With him, we can well describe it one such " as has never been witnessed upon the earth." But who in sane reason would proceed to speak of it as capable of profoundly modifying and ameliorating the human soul?" How long will "the systematic worship of humanity," withstand the inroads of an atheistic depravity, and a license made reckless by the utter ignoring of all future retribution and even existence? Will Thomas à Kempis, and Dante's epic, which Comte recommends for daily reading, prove a substitute for the Bible? Will that "true Satan, the naturally preponderating selfishness, our great enemy," be quelled through "the repression of personality by the development of sociality?" Will the “disinterested love" which is desiderated, be "awakened, stimulated, cherished," by the bald, soulless doctrines, of Positive Philosophy or Religion? Surely, the penetrating sagacity of

a man who must in some respects be pronounced one of the ablest thinkers of this or of any age, has been sadly duped by his own fanatic dreams. We follow him with admiration along the lofty tracks of scientific research, we climb with him to the height from which he promises us a survey of the destined Canaan of humanity, but when we have reached the summit, it is opaque with dense vapors, while the very earth beneath our feet trembles with the throes of volcanic dissolution. We see no deity but an "idealized humanity;" the soul is but a "metaphysical entity," an abstraction or a quality of matter, and notwithstanding "there has been no age in which man did not yield to the natural desire and supposition of his own eternal existence," yet we are calmly told, that it is "a tendency which it is perfectly easy to explain." We begin to feel almost a contempt or a disgust for human existence, and we are informed that "respect for human life will be increased, as the chimerical hope dies out which disparages the present life as merely accessory to the one in prospect. We tremble at the dissolution of that idea which throws a whole race, rich and poor alike, as equal objects of condescending and providential regard upon the Fatherhood of God, but we are gravely assured that by the advance of the Positive Philosophy, "the rich will morally consider themselves, the depositories of the wealth of society." Our anxieties for the spiritual welfare of a degraded and apostate race, reach toward that regeneration which the convictions of reason and experience, as well as the word of God declare to be necessary, but the Positive Philosophy at once turns prophet, and assures us of the approach of its own millennium, when the obligation will be felt to procure for all, suitable education and employment-the only conditions that the lower classes can justly demand." We refer it to its own terrible disclosures of the intellectual anarchy of the times, the widespreading dissolution of moral ties, the fermentation of diseased minds, the revolutionary restlessness of the nations, and we are told of the infallibility of those laws of social science whose universal acceptance will reorganize society and harmonize order with progress.

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Surely, there is a lesson in this finale of the Positive Philosophy, with its connate Religion of humanity. It is another

splendid reductio ad absurdum by which the loftiest human reason demonstrates its own insufficiency. It leads us to bow with a deeper reverence before the Author of revealed truth, whose "foolishness is wiser than men."

We have no great apprehension of the spread of the Positive Philosophy, at least in its conclusions, which alone are mainly objectionable. Only here and there will an affinity be felt for it by minds peculiarly constituted. It has no adaptation to secure a lasting hold upon the community at large. Science may adopt its methods, and thus eliminate error from its results, but even scientific minds with all their prepossessions in favor of invariable laws, will easily discern that constant interposition to change them is not at all essential to the idea of a constant and ever-working Providence.

The errors of the Positive Philosophy are indeed so obvious, that it is scarcely necessary to point them out, while their refutation is an easy task for sound criticism. That all practical knowledge must have a scientific base, is a groundless assumption, which daily experience constantly ignores. Comte himself, if driven to find a scientific base for his own system, would soon be at a loss. Ignoring metaphysics is only cutting, not untying the Gordian knot. It simply shuts its eyes to what it cannot solve. What are the elements of mathematical science, the ideas or principles that give it substance and being, but metaphysical entities, and entities whose investigation might soon throw a man like Comte, if he followed them up, into all the vagaries of German ontology? Science is first of all based upon assumptions-unquestionably true-but what has a man who repudiates all recognition of first and final causes, to do with what cannot be definitely proved on scientific principles? There is in the world a vast mass of what may be called unscientific truth, the fragmentary experience and observation of mankind, the convictions and feelings that have grown out of indefinable but acknowledged instincts, theories that cannot be mathematically demonstrated, but which are sustained by overwhelming proof, and by which alone we can harmonize our life with its conditions. Is all this-the vast field along which the race destitute of the Positivism of science has still pursued its progressive course-to be utterly ignored? Is man to yield