In our Sunday meetings, which have been regularly continued excepting
during the four summer months, we have continued our plan of dealing
alike with the religious, the social, and the intellectual sides of
the Positivist view of life and duty. The Housing of the Poor, Art,
Biology, Socialism, our social Duties, the Memory of the Dead, the
Positivist grounds of Morality, and our Practical Duties in Life,
formed the subject of one series. Since our re-opening in the autumn,
we have had courses on the Bible, on the religious value of the
modern poets, and on the true basis of social equality. Amongst the
features of special interest in these series of discourses is that
one course was given by a former Unitarian minister who, after a life
of successful preaching in the least dogmatic of all the Christian
Churches, has been slowly reduced to the conviction that the reality
of Humanity is a more substantial basis for religion to rest on than
the hypothesis of God, and that the great scheme of human morality is
a nobler Gospel to preach than the artificial ideal of a subjective
Christ. I would in particular note the series of admirable lectures
on the Bible, by Dr. Bridges, which combined the results of the
latest learning on this intricate mass of ancient writings with the
sympathetic and yet impartial judgment with which Positivists adopt
into their sacred literature the most famous and most familiar of
all the religious books of mankind. And again I would note that
beautiful series of discourses by Mr. Vernon Lushington on the great
religious poets of the modern world:—Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron,
Wordsworth and Shelley. When we have them side by side, we shall have
before us a new measure of the sound, sympathetic, and universal spirit
of Positivist belief. It is only those who are strangers to it and to
us who can wonder how we come to put the Bible and the poets in equal
places of honor as alike the great organs of true religious feeling.
The systematic teaching of science, which is an essential part of
our conception of Positivism, has been maintained in this hall with
unabated energy. In the beginning of the year Mr. Vernon Lushington
commenced and carried through (with what an effort of personal
self-devotion no one of us can duly measure) his class on the history
and the elements of Astronomy. This winter, Mr. Lock has opened a
similar class on the History and Elements of Mathematics. Positivism is
essentially a scheme for reforming education, and it is only through
a reformed education, universal to all classes alike, and concerned
with the heart as much as the intellect, that the religious meaning of
Humanity can ever be unfolded. The singing class, the expense of which
was again assumed by Mr. Lushington, was steadily and successfully
maintained during the first part of the year. We are still looking
forward to the formation of a choir. The social meetings which we
instituted last year have become a regular feature of our movement, and
greatly contribute to our closer union and our better understanding of
the social and sympathetic meaning of the faith we profess.
The publications of the year have been first and chiefly, _The
Testament and Letters of Auguste Comte_, a work long looked for, the
publication of which has been long delayed by various causes. In the
next place I would call attention to the new and popular edition of
_International Policy_, a work of combined essays which we put forward
in 1866, nearly twenty years ago. Our object in that work was to state
and apply to the leading international problems in turn the great
principles of social morality on which it is the mission of Positivism
to show that the politics of nations can only securely repose. In an
epoch which is still tending, we are daily assured, to the old passion
for national self-assertion, it is significant that the Positivist
school alone can resolutely maintain and fearlessly repeat its dictates
of morality and justice, whilst all the Churches, all the political
parties, and all the so-called organs of opinion, which are really the
creatures of parties and cliques, find various pretexts for abandoning
them altogether. How few are the political schools around us who could
venture to republish after twenty years, _their_ political programmes
of 1866, _their_ political doctrines and practical solutions of the
tangled international problems, and who could not find in 1885 a
principle which they had discarded, or a proposal which to-day they are
ashamed to have made twenty years ago.
Besides these books, the only separate publications of our body are
the affecting address of Mr. Ellis _On the due Commemoration of the
Dead_. The Positivist Society has met throughout the year for the
discussion of the social and political questions of the day. The most
public manifestation of its activity has been the part that it took
in the third centenary of the great hero of national independence,
William, Prince of Orange, called the Silent. The noble and weighty
address in which Mr. Beesly expressed to the Dutch Committee at Delft
the honor in which we held that immortal memory, has deeply touched, we
are told, those to whom it was addressed. And it is significant that
from this hall, dedicated to peace, to the Republic, to the people,
and to Humanity, there was sent forth the one voice from the entire
British race in honor to the great prince, the soldier, the diplomatist
the secret, subtle, and haughty chief, who, three hundred years ago,
created the Dutch nation. We have learned here to care little for a
purely insular patriotism. The great creators of nations are _our_
forefathers and _our_ countrymen. Protestant or Catholic are nothing
to us, so long as either prepared the way for a broader faith. In
our abhorrence of war we have learned to honor the chief who fought
desperately for the solid bases of peace. In our zeal for the people,
for public opinion, for simplicity of life, and for truthfulness and
openness in word as in conduct, we have not forgotten the _relative_
duty of those who in darker, fiercer, ruder times than ours used the
weapons of their age in the spirit of duty, and to the saving of those
precious elements where-out the future of a better Humanity shall be
formed.