lity,
which apostles have pictured, in which armies of martyrs have placed
their unshakable faith, and whence obscure men and women, like
Catherine of Sienna and John Knox, have derived the courage to rebuke
popes and kings--is not likely to underrate the importance of the
Christian faith as a factor in human history, or to doubt that if that
faith should prove to be incompatible with our knowledge, or necessary
want of knowledge, some other hypostasis of men's hopes, genuine
enough and worthy enough to replace it, will arise. But that the
incongruous mixture of bad science with eviscerated papistry, out of
which Comte manufactured the positivist religion, will be the heir of
the Christian ages, I have too much respect for the humanity of the
future to believe. Charles the Second told his brother, "They will not
kill me, James, to make you king." And if critical science is
remorselessly destroying the historical foundations of the noblest
ideal of humanity which mankind have yet worshipped, it is little
likely to permit the pitiful reality to climb into the vacant shrine.

That a man should determine to devote himself to the service of
humanity--including intellectual and moral self-culture under that
name; that this should be, in the proper sense of the word, his
religion--is not only an intelligible, but, I think, a laudable
resolution. And I am greatly disposed to believe that it is the only
religion which will prove itself to be unassailably acceptable so long
as the human race endures. But when the Comtist asks me to worship
"Humanity"--that is to say, to adore the generalised conception of men
as they ever have been and probably ever will be--I must reply that I
could just as soon bow down and worship the generalised conception of
a "wilderness of apes." Surely we are not going back to the days of
Paganism, when individual men were deified, and the hard good sense of
a dying Vepasian could prompt the bitter jest, "Ut puto Deus fio." No
divinity doth hedge a modern man, be he even a sovereign ruler. Nor is
there any one, except a municipal magistrate, who is officially
declared worshipful. But if there is no spark of worship-worthy
divinity in the individual twigs of humanity, whence comes that
godlike splendour which the Moses of Positivism fondly imagines to
pervade the whole bush?

I know no study which is so unutterably saddening as that of the
evolution of humanity, as it is set forth in the annals of histor