AGNOSTICISM. 773 



fulness, to the extremity of self-sacrifice ; its ethical purity and 

 nobility ; which apostles have pictured, in which armies of 

 martyrs have placed their unshakable faith, and whence obscure 

 men and women, like Catherine of Sienna and John Knox, have 

 derived the courage to rebuke popes and kings, is not likely to 

 underrate the importance of the Christian faith as a factor in 

 human history, or to doubt that if that faith should prove to be 

 incompatible with our knowledge, or necessary want of knowl- 

 edge, some other hypostasis of men's hopes, genuine enough and 

 worthy enough to replace it, will arise. But that the incongruous 

 mixture of bad science with eviscerated papistry, out of which 

 Comte manufactured the positivist religion, will be the heir of 

 the Christian ages, I have too much respect for the humanity of 

 the future to believe. Charles II told his brother, " They will 

 not kill me, James, to make you king." And if critical science is 

 remorselessly destroying the historical foundations of the noblest 

 ideal of humanity which mankind have yet worshiped, it is 

 little likely to permit the pitiful reality to climb into the vacant 

 shrine. 



That a man should determine to devote himself to the service 

 of humanity — including intellectual and moral self -culture under 

 that name ; that this should be, in the proper sense of the word, 

 his religion — is not only an intelligible, but, I think, a laudable 

 resolution. And I am greatly disposed to believe that it is the 

 only religion which will prove itself to be unassailably acceptable 

 so long as the human race endures. But when the positivist asks 

 me to worship " Humanity " — that is to say, to adore the general- 

 ized conception of men as they ever have been and probably ever 

 will be — I must reply that I could just as soon bow down and wor- 

 ship the generalized conception of a " wilderness of apes." Surely 

 we are not going back to the days of paganism, when individual 

 men were deified, and the hard good sense of a dying Vespasian 

 could prompt the bitter jest, " Utputo Deusfio." No divinity doth 

 hedge a modern man, be he even a sovereign ruler. Nor is there 

 any one, except a municipal magistrate, who is officially declared 

 worshipful. But if there is no spark of worship-worthy divinity 

 in the individual twigs of humanity, whence comes that godlike 

 splendor which the Moses of positivism fondly imagines to per- 

 vade the whole bush ? 



I know no study which is so unutterably saddening as that of 

 the evolution of humanity, as it is set forth in the annals of his- 

 tory. Out of the darkness of prehistoric ages man emerges with 

 the marks of his lowly origin strong upon him. He is a brute, 

 only more intelligent than the other brutes ; a blind jjrey to im- 

 pulses, which as often as not lead him to destruction ; a victim to 

 endless illusions, which make his mental existence a terror and a 



