Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 162.djvu/20

 while these clothes are suitable to a belief in God and the supernatural — while they constitute the form in which supernatural belief comes before us in the greatest majesty and the greatest practical useful- ness — they are nothing less than gro- tesque when they array the unknowable or the Positivist deity humanity. Awe for the infinite Godhead is fitting, is dig- nified, is rational. Awe for a sort of a something of which we can know nothing is grotesque. But this Mr. Harrison him- self has sufficiently shown. It remains now to consider his own deification of humanity, and to see how badly the clothes of religion fit it, and then to per- form in its regard that kind office which he himself performed for the unknowable — to take the clothes off and see how it looks without them. Our task presents, at first sight, some difficulties. The grand simplicity of the unknowable, with his three robes of in- finity, eternity, and energy, made it easy work to unvest him. And once he was unvested the whole of his religion was exposed. Awe for the unknowable, is the beginning and end of the Agnostic reli- gion. But with Positivism the case is otherwise, and when we glance at Comte's catechism and at Mr. Harrison's ad- dresses, and see the terms Supreme Be- ing, immortality, last judgment, choir in- visible, sacraments, and look at the for- midable calendar of over five hundred saints, examine its elaborate ritual and numerous precepts of devotion, we are inclined at first to think that if these be clothes, and we are to find the essence beneath, the process of undressing will be long and tedious. But this is not so. Mr. Maccabe, the inimitable ventrilo- quist, has for many years been in the habit of giving entertainments involving a rapid and complete change of dress, and I have seen clothes prepared for his, or similar performances, which in spite of their apparent number are so arranged that the loosening of one or two strings, whereby they are secretly fastened, is sufficient to make them all come off easily enough. And so, too, the exposi- tion of one or two root principles in the Positivist religion will very readily lay the whole fabric bare in spite of its apparent complexity. And now to begin at the beginning, the power which we are gratefully to rever- ence as controlling our destiny is human- ity. And what is humanity? Comte's latest expression for it was, "the continu- ous sum-total of convergent beings " — the whole human race taken together. It in- cludes all that are to exist in the future, and in consequence humanity, or "the great being," as Comte styled it, is as yet incomplete. Certainly, at first sight, when we are told to have "grateful reverence,'* for the whole human race as acting upon us in connection with natural law * and controlling our life, many of us will demur. " You should trust in Providence," said a clergyman once to a poor man who was in distress. " Ah ! sir," replied the man, "that Providence he have always treated me badly. Last year he killed my wife, the year before he burnt down my house, and year before that he drove two of my children mad, and now he's sending the bailiffs to take what little I have left me. He bean't a kind 'un to me. But there's One above as '11 punish him some day, and as '11 make it right to me and give me back what I've lost." The man had taken Providence as being tantamount exactly to the Positivist deity. He re- garded it as exactly — to use Mr. Harri- rison's phrase — the power controlling his life — as natural forces and the mass of mankind in their capacity of controlling his destiny. And if you had told him that there was noi One above to reverse the unpleasant machinations of this earth- ly Providence, I should have doubts of his inclination to give much grateful rev- erence to the ruling powers which would remain. But both M. Comte and Mr. Harrison eagerly explain the inaccuracy of this conception of humanity, the great being. It excludes all "the worthless and the evil, whose worthlessness and evil die away in the tide of progress and good." These are Mr. Harrison's words, and Comte speaks to the same effect. I am afraid that this explanation would not have much effect with the poor man of whom we have spoken. He would probably insist, his mind being unable to rise to so large a conception as the " tide of progress and good," that the power controlling /t:'s life at all events inciudes an evil and unhappy influence, and will ask how he is to feel grateful towards a power which makes him unhappy, however happy it may make his companions or his successors, and however much it may minister to their progress ? Perhaps this is a narrow- conform our life to the laws which govern tlie world is religion." So said Mr. Harrison in his New Year's Address, and the "providence" for which we are to have "grateful reverence" is humanity as controlling and controlled by these laws.
 * " The devout submission of the heart and will to