ere
'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]

IV

The Religion of Humanity has numbered among its adherents, in part or
in whole, several celebrated persons in this country, s