wth of asceticism. Christianity, even in its
first expression, had a negative side towards the natural life of man;
while it lifted man to God, it yet taught that humanity "cannot be
quickened except it die." But the mediaeval Church, while it constantly
taught that humanity in its desires and tendencies must die, had almost
forgotten to hope that it could be quickened. Its highest morality--the
morality of the three vows--was the negation of all social obligations;
its science was the interpretation of a fixed dogma received on
authority; its religion tended to become an external service, an _opus
operatum_, a preparation for another world, rather than a principle of
action in this. Its highest act of worship, the Eucharist, in which was
celebrated the revealed unity of men with each other and with God, was
reserved in its fulness for the clergy, and even with them was finally
reduced to an external act by the doctrine of transubstantiation, in
which poetry "became logic," and in becoming logic, ceased to be truth.

Now, Comte, seeing the working of this negative tendency in mediaeval
Catholicism, and regarding it as the natural work of Monotheism, is
obliged to treat all the positive side of Christianity as an external
addition suggested by the practical wisdom of the clergy. St. Paul is
supposed by him to have invented (and Comte's language would ever
suggest that he consciously invented[38]) the doctrine of grace, in
order to reconsecrate those social affections which Monotheism, in its
condemnation of nature, had either denied to exist, or, what is nearer
the truth, had treated as having no moral value. But this only shows how
imperfectly Comte grasped the Pauline conception of the moral change
which religion produces. The idea that the immediate untamed and
undisciplined will of the natural man is not a principle of morality,
and that therefore man must die to live, must rise above himself to be
himself, is one which has in it nothing discordant with the claims of
social feeling. It is the commonplace of every powerful writer on
practical ethics, from the Gospels to Thomas a Kempis, and from Luther
to Goethe.

"Und so lang du das nicht hast
Dies-es: Stirb und Werde,
Bist du nur ein trueber Gast
Auf der dunkeln Erde."

St. Paul adds that this death to self is possible only to him in whom
another than his own natural will lives; "so then it is not I that live,
but Christ that liveth in me." Comte would p