VII AGNOSTICISM 255 



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 the Second 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 wor- 

 shipped, it is little likely to permit the pitiful 

 reality to climb into the vacant shrine. 



That a man should determine to devote him- 

 self 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 

 reatly 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 Comtist asks me to worship 

 "Humanity" that is to say, to adore the 

 generalised 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 worship 

 the generalised 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 



132 



