Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/480

466 is the giving and taking of wounds in fights arising from trivial causes or none at all, and where, last year, a single day witnessed twenty-one such encounters in one university; we are reminded more of North American Indians, among whom tortures constitute the initiation of young men, than of civilized people taught for a thousand years to do good even to enemies. Or when we see, as lately in a nation akin to the last, that an officer who declined to break at once the law of his country and the law of his religion by fighting a duel, was expelled the army; we are obliged to admit that profession of a creed which forbids revenge, by those whose deeds emphatically assert revenge to be a duty (almost as emphatically as do the lowest races of men), presents Humanity under an aspect not at all of the kind which we look for in "the adorable Great Being." Not reverence, not admiration, scarcely even respect, is caused by the sight of a hundred million Pagans masquerading as Christians.

I am told that by certain of M. Comte's disciples (though not by those Mr. Harrison represents) prayer is addressed to "holy" Humanity. Had I to choose an epithet, I think "holy" is about the last which would occur to me.

"But it is only the select human beings—those more especially who are sanctified in the Comtist calendar—who are to form the object of worship; and, for the worship of such, there is the reason that they are the benefactors to whom we owe everything."

On the first of these statements, made by some adherents of M. Comte, one remark must be that it is at variance with M. Comte's own definition of the object of worship, as quoted above; and another remark must be that, admitting such select persons to be worshipful (and I do not admit it), there is no more reason for worshiping Humanity as a whole on the strength of these best samples, than there is for worshiping an ordinary individual, or even a criminal, on the strength of the few good actions which qualified the multitudinous indifferent actions and bad actions he committed. The second of these statements, that Humanity, either as the whole defined by M. Comte or as represented by these select persons, must be adored as being the producer of everything which civilization has brought us, and, in a measure, even the creator of our higher powers of thought and action, we will now consider. Let us hear M. Comte himself on this point:

What may have been the conceptions of "veneration and gratitude" entertained by M. Comte, we can not, of course, say; but if