en. III.] COSMIC THEISM. 419 



serve to difference the world-religion of Jesus and Paul 

 from the ethnic religions of antiquity. 



Nevertheless, after freely acknowledging all these points 

 of excellence in the Comtean conception, it must still he 

 maintained that Comte's assignment of Humanity as the 

 direct object of religious worship was a retrograde step, when 

 viewed in contrast, not only with the cosmic conception of 

 Deity already clearly foreshadowed by Goethe, but even with 

 the anthropomorphic conception as held by contemporary 

 liberal theologians. A fatal criticism — omitted, and appa- 

 rently overlooked by Mr. Mill, in his account of the Comtean 

 religion — remains to be made upon it. I do not refer to 

 the difficulty of ascribing godhood to a product of evolution, 

 neither is it necessary to insist upon the marvellous shading- 

 ofif of collective apehood into Deity which must puzzle the 

 Comtist who stops to confront his theory with the conclu- 

 sions now virtually established concerning man's origin ; 

 though beneath the cavil and sarcasm which cannot be kept 

 from showing itself upon the surface of such objections, there 

 lies just scientific ground of complaint against the Comtean 

 hypothesis. The criticism to which I refer is one the force 

 of which must be acknowledged even by those who have not 

 yet learned to estimate the resistless weight of the evidence 

 by which the development theory is supported. However 

 grand Humanity may be as an object of contemplation, it 

 is stUl finite, concrete, and knowable. It has had a begin- 

 ning ; in all probability it is destined to have an end. We 

 can no longer, since the Copernican revolution, regard it as 

 the chief and central phenomenon of the universe. We 

 know it but as a local assemblage of concrete phenomena, 

 manifested on the surface of a planet that is itself a lesser 

 member of a single group among innumerable groups of 

 worlds. It is no less significant than amusing that toward 

 the last Comte would fain have banished from astronomy 

 not only the study of the stars, but even the study of those 



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