Hence, one of the ablest attempts to supersede Christianity is that
which goes by {103} the name of Positivism or the Religion of Humanity,
which sets Man on the throne of the universe, and makes of him the sole
object of worship. 'A helper of men outside Humanity,' said the late
Professor Clifford, 'the Truth will not allow us to see. The dim and
shadowy outlines of the Superhuman Deity fade slowly away from before
us, and, as the mist of His Presence floats aside, we perceive with
greater and greater clearness the shape of a yet grander and nobler
figure, of Him who made all gods and shall unmake them. From the dim
dawn of history, and from the inmost depths of every soul, the face of
our Father _Man_ looks out upon us with the fire of eternal youth in
His eyes, and says, "Before Jehovah was, I am." The founder of the
organised Religion of Humanity was Auguste Comte, who died in the year
1857. He held that in the development of mankind there are three
stages: the first, the Theological, in which {104} worship is offered
to God or gods; the second, the Metaphysical, in which the human mind
is groping after ultimate truth, the solution of the problems of the
universe; the third, the Positive, in which the search for the illusive
and the unattainable is abandoned, and the real and the practical form
the exclusive occupation of the thoughts. On Sunday, October 19, 1851,
he concluded a course of Lectures on the General History of Humanity
with the uncompromising announcement, 'In the name of the Past and of
the Future, the servants of Humanity, both its philosophical and
practical servants, come forward to claim as their due the general
direction of this world. Their object is to constitute at length a
real Providence, in all departments, moral, intellectual, and material.
Consequently they exclude, once for all, from political supremacy, all
the different servants of God, Catholic, Protestant, or Deist, as being
at once behindhand and {105} a source of disturbance.' All religions
were banished by the truly 'uncompromising announcement': they were all
condemned as futile and unreal. The best that could be said of the
worship of the past was that it directed 'provisionally the evolution
of our best feelings, under the regency of God, during the long
minority of Humanity.'
But the fact that Religion will not be banished, that it must somehow
find expression, never received fuller verification. We do not dwell
upon the private life of Comte, its eccentricities and inconsistencies,
but this at least cannot be omitted: he practised a course of austere
religious observances, he worshipped not only Humanity at large, but he
paid special adoration to a departed friend such as hardly the
devoutest of Roman Catholics has ever paid to the Virgin Mary.
Positivism became, what Professor Huxley called it, 'Catholicism
_minus_ Christianity.' Comte laid down for the guidance of his {106}
disciples, who are potentially all mankind, rules which no existing
religious communion can surpass in minuteness. The Supreme Object of
Worship is the Great Being, Humanity, the Sum of Human Beings, past,
present, and future. But as it is only too evident that too many of
these beings in the past and the present, whatever may be said about
the future, are not very fitting objects of worship, Humanity, the
Great Being, must be understood as including only worthy members, those
who have been true servants of Humanity. The emblem of this Great
Being is a Woman of the age of thirty, with her son in her arms; and
this emblem is to be placed in all temples of Humanity and carried in
all solemn processions. The highest representatives of Humanity are
the Mother, the Wife, and the Daughter; the Mother representing the
past, the Wife the present, and the Daughter the future. These are in
the abstract to be regarded as the guardian {107} angels of the family.
To these angels every one is to pray three times daily, and the
prayers, which may be read, but which must be the composition of him
who uses them, are to last for two hours. Humanity, the World, and
Space form the completed Trinity of the Positivist Religion. There are
nine sacraments: Presentation, Initiation, Admission, Destination,
Marriage, Maturity, Retirement, Transformation, Incorporation. There
is a priesthood, to whom is committed the duties of deciding who may or
may not be admitted to certain offices during life, of deciding also
whether or not the remains of those who have been dead for seven years
should be removed from the common burial-place, and interred in 'the
sacred wood which surrounds the temple of humanity,' every tomb there
'being ornamented with a simple inscription, a bust, or a statue,
according to the degree of honour awarded.' The priests are to receive
so comprehensive {108} a training that they are not to be fully
recognised till forty-two years of age. They are to combine medical
knowledge with their priestly qualifications. Three successive orders
are necessary for the working of the organisation: the Aspirants
admitted at twenty-eight, the Vicars or Substitutes at thirty-five, and
the Priests proper at forty-two.
The Religion of Humanity has a Calendar, each month of twenty-eight
days being in one aspect dedicated to some social relation, and in
another to some famous man representing some phase of human progress:
Moses, Homer, Aristotle, Caesar, St. Paul, Gutenberg, Shakespeare. Each
day of the year is dedicated to one or more great men or women, five
hundred and fifty-eight in number, and the last day of the year is the
Festival of All the Dead. 'Our Calendar is designed to remind us of
all types of the teachers, leaders, and makers of our race: of the many
modes in which the servants of Humanity {109} have fulfilled their
service. The prophets, the religious teachers, the founders of creeds,
of nations and systems of life: the poets, the thinkers, the artists,
kings, warriors, statesmen and rulers: the inventors, the men of
science and of all useful arts.... Every day of the Positivist year is
in one sense a day of the dead, for it recalls to us some mighty
teacher or leader who is no longer on earth.... But the three hundred
and sixty-four days of the year's calendar have left one great place
unfilled.... Those myriad spirits of the forgotten dead, whom, no man
can number, whose very names were unknown to those around them in life,
the fathers and the mothers, the husbands and the wives, the brothers
and the sisters, the sturdy workers and the fearless soldiers in the
mighty host of civilisation--shall we pass them by? ... It is those
whom to-night we recall, all those who have lived a life of usefulness
in their generation, though {110} they tugged as slaves at the lowest
bank of oars in the galley of life, though they were cast unnoticed
into the common grave of the outcast, all whose lives have helped and
not hindered the progress of Humanity, we recall them all to-night.'[7]