ompassion frequently tempered by contempt, upon the
rest of the world still groping in the mists of childish superstition,
was prodigiously to the taste of youths of eighteen and twenty. How, to
be sure, we did turn up our noses at the homely teachings in the college
chapel on Sundays! Well do I remember attending my father's church when
at home on vacation, and endeavoring to assume the mental attitude of
a curious traveler in a Buddhist temple. Together with the intellectual
vanity which it fostered, our new faith was commended to us by its
flavor of the secret, the hazardous, and the forbidden. We were
delightfully conscious of being concerned in a species of conspiracy,
which if it came to light would convulse the college and the community,
have us expelled, and cause no end of scandal to the public.

"But the more I took my new faith in earnest and tried to make of it the
religion it claimed to be, I was troubled by a lack that seemed to be
inherent. Humanity, the object of our devotion, was but an abstraction,
a rhetorical expression for a mass of individuals. To these individuals
I might indeed render affection, service, compassion, tenderness,
self-sacrifice; but their number and pettiness forbade me the glow of
adoration with which service was touched in religions which offered
a personified object of adoration. When, finally, I confided these
troubles to Regnier, I expected to be rebuked; but on the contrary, and
to my great discomfiture, he embraced me effusively after the Gallic
manner. He said that he had been waiting for the time when in the course
of my development I should become conscious of the need I had confessed
before explaining to me the provision made for it by Positivism.

"To start with, he put in, as a sort of special plea for Positivism,
that it was not singular among religions in recognizing as the object
of devotion an abstraction, the mode of the existence of which was a
mystery. As a solace to their votaries and an aid to their faith, nearly
all religions recognized sacred emblems; not indeed to be confounded
in clear minds with the original object of devotion, but worthy of
reverence in its place, as its special representative and reminder. In
precisely this sense the sacred emblem of humanity was woman.

"Of course, Positivism claiming to be a creed of demonstration, not of
faith, Regnier did not ask me to receive this proposition as his mere
statement, but proceeded to establish its r