466 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



hood is tlie giving and taking of wounds in fights arising from triv- 

 ial 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 thou- 

 sand 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 rever- 

 ence, 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 " Human- 

 ity. 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 ob- 

 ject 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 Hu- 

 manity 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 : 



Thus each step of sound training in positive thought awakens perpetual 

 feelings of veneration and gratitude ; which rise often into enthusiastic admira- 

 tion of the Great Being, who is the author of all these conquests, be they in 

 thought, or be they in action.* 



What may have been the conceptions of " veneration and grati- 

 tude " entertained by M. Comte, we can not, of course, say ; but if 



* " System of Positive Polity," vol. ii, p. 45. 



