artistically minute, and is as rigid and unyielding as a Procrustean bed. Its theory of human culture bears the stamp of ideality that proclaims its origin in a dreamy brain. The discipline of conscience, the regeneration and mastery of the will, the essential features of independent, self-controlled character are almost utterly ignored. Each mind must ascend by so many definite and measured steps the staircase of intellectual and moral eminence. The wheat of humanity is to be ground out by precise and definite formulas, and all individual souls are treated as so many indistinguishable grains. The rigid uniformity of astronomical laws, is transferred to the processes of intellectual and moral training, and the whole system is to be put in motion, and sustained in action, in the total absence of that great mainspring, the existence of a personal Deity, infinitely Holy and Supreme. It is a body which is to live and act with the heart torn out. No ordinary degree of theorizing fanaticism could devise such a system, or commend it with the cool audacity and rigid logic of a Robespierre to universal adoption. Such a mockery of childhood's yearnings and manhood's hopes, and the decrepitude of age slipping off the crumbling brink of being, into "a world without souls," was, we venture to say, never before, elaborately contrived and reduced to system.

Yet this is "the worship now demanded," according to one of Comte's followers. With him, we can well describe it one such as has never been witnessed upon the earth." But who in sane reason would proceed to speak of it as "capable of profoundly modifying and ameliorating the human soul?" How long will "the systematic worship of humanity," withstand the inroads of an atheistic depravity, and a license made reckless by the utter ignoring of all future retribution and even existence? Will Thomas à Kempis, and Danté's epic, which Comte recommends for daily reading, prove a substitute for the Bible? Will that "true Satan, the naturally preponderating selfishness, our great enemy," be quelled through "the repression of personality by the development of sociality?" Will the "disinterested love" which is desiderated, be "awakened, stimulated, cherished," by the bald, soulless doctrines, of Positive Philosophy or Religion? Surely, the penetrating sagacity of

a man who must in some respects be pronounced one of the ablest thinkers of this or of any age, has been sadly duped by his own fanatic dreams. We follow him with admiration along the lofty tracks of scientific research, we climb with him to the height from which he promises us a survey of the destined Canaan of humanity, but when we have reached the summit, it is opaque with dense vapors, while the very earth beneath our feet trembles with the throes of volcanic dissolution. We see no deity but an "idealized humanity;" the soul is but a "metaphysical entity," an abstraction or a quality of matter, and notwithstanding "there has been no age in which man did not yield to the natural desire and supposition of his own eternal existence," yet we are calmly told, that it is "a tendency which it is perfectly easy to explain." We begin to feel almost a contempt or a disgust for human existence, and we are informed that "respect for human life will be increased, as the chimerical hope dies out which disparages the present life as merely accessory to the one in prospect. We tremble at the dissolution of that idea which throws a whole race, rich and poor alike, as equal objects of condescending and providential regard upon the Fatherhood of God, but we are gravely assured that by the advance of the Positive Philosophy, "the rich will morally consider themselves, the depositories of the wealth of society. Our anxieties for the spiritual welfare of a degraded and apostate race, reach toward that regeneration which the convictions of reason and experience, as well as the word of God declare to be necessary, but the Positive Philosophy at once turns prophet, and assures us of the approach of its own millennium, when the obligation will be felt to procure for all, suitable education and employment-the only conditions that the lower classes can justly demand." We refer it to its own terrible disclosures of the intellectual anarchy of the times, the widespreading dissolution of moral ties, the fermentation of diseased minds, the revolutionary restlessness of the nations, and we are told of the infallibility of those laws of social science whose universal acceptance will reorganize society and harmonize order with progress.

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Surely, there is a lesson in this finale of the Positive Philosophy, with its connate Religion of humanity. It is another

splendid reductio ad absurdum by which the loftiest human. reason demonstrates its own insufficiency. It leads us to bow with a deeper reverence before the Author of revealed truth, whose "foolishness is wiser than men."

We have no great apprehension of the spread of the Positive Philosophy, at least in its conclusions, which alone are mainly objectionable. Only here and there will an affinity be felt for it by minds peculiarly constituted. It has no adaptation to secure a lasting hold upon the community at large. Science may adopt its methods, and thus eliminate error from its results, but even scientific minds with all their prepossessions in favor of invariable laws, will easily discern that constant interposition to change them is not at all essential to the idea of a constant and ever-working Providence.

The errors of the Positive Philosophy are indeed so obvious, that it is scarcely necessary to point them out, while their refutation is an easy task for sound criticism. That all practical knowledge must have a scientific base, is a groundless assumption, which daily experience constantly ignores. Comte himself, if driven to find a scientific base for his own system, would soon be at a loss. Ignoring metaphysics is only cutting, not untying the Gordian knot. It simply shuts its eyes to what it cannot solve. What are the elements of mathematical science, the ideas or principles that give it substance and being, but metaphysical entities, and entities whose investigation might soon throw a man like Comte, if he followed them up, into all the vagaries of German ontology? Science is first of all based upon assumptions-unquestionably true-but what has a man who repudiates all recognition of first and final causes, to do with what cannot be definitely proved on scientific principles? There is in the world a vast mass of what may be called unscientific truth, the fragmentary experience and observation of mankind, the convictions and feelings that have grown out of indefinable but acknowledged instincts, theories that cannot be mathematically demonstrated, but which are sustained by overwhelming proof, and by which alone we can harmonize our life with its conditions. Is all this-the vast field along which the race destitute of the Positivism of science has still pursued its progressive course-to be utterly ignored? Is man to yield

respect to no sentiment of dependence or relationship to a holier life and a higher destiny, till every doubt is cleared away, and Deity becomes as demonstrable as the laws of astronomical science?

And while the order of mental and human progress is admitted to be generically as Comte states it, through the theological and metaphysical to the Positive stage; is there not a lesson in the instincts of the first, or must the mind rising from simple fetichism or pantheism to the conception of the Unity of Divine Providence, fall back again by means of scientific progression. to a lower depth than its original, and ignore altogether the instinctive idea of necessary causation? Is the fetich-abuse of the religious idea religion; or a blind superstition, theology? Because men have made gods of everything, is there, therefore, no God? Because errors commingled with truth have produced an intellectual recoil, is there therefore no truth? Because we cannot comprehend causation, must we reject all interest in first or final causes? Are the laws of nature, the ultimatum of human speculation? Are we not to be allowed to look beyond the law to the authority on which all law depends?

It is a stale method of scepticism to shroud Deity and Providence beneath invariable laws. But the very nature of what is called law, and even its invariability are only forceful testimonies to the great truths of an all-comprehending and uniform Providence. The Positive Philosophy objects to the theological, that supposing as it does everything to be governed by will, "phenomena therefore are eminently variable and irregular." But in this inference, utterly unwarranted, it shows itself a false interpreter. The precision of established laws is in no respect discordant with the constant supremacy of a sovereign will. Nor again is it true that the whole theological system rested, as Comte asserts, "on the notion that the entire universe was made for man," and if setting up this man of straw, he then undertakes to overthrow it by the disclosures of astronomy, and with it all providential action, he has overturned not theology-but a figment of his own brain. To speak of "metaphysical thraldom broken by the invariable relations and spontaneous and necessary order of the heavens," is in this case, a mere playing with words.

Comte, moreover, readily admits the value of hypothesis as preparatory to the establishment, or as experimental to the verification of scientific laws. We must, he asserts, "begin by anticipating results, by making a provisional supposition, altogether conjectural in the first instance, with regard to some of the very notions that are the object of the inquiry." Without this method, discovery or verification would, in many cases, be impossible. "The advice of prudent mediocrity, to abstain from hypothesis is very easy to offer, but if the advice were followed, nothing would ever be done in the way of scientific discovery." "There is no use," he remarks, "in dwelling upon a liability which arises from the infirmity of our intelligence." He admits that the use of the provisional hypothesis places us "in a sort of a vicious circle, from which we can issue only by employing in the first instance, materials which are badly elaborated, and doctrines which are ill-conceived." Yet he maintains that "a determinate end being indispensable to all true observation, any theory is better than none." Surely we have only to retort upon him his own arguments, to sweep away the whole pretence on which he ignores the entire body of theological doctrine. Call religious truth a hypothesis if you will, and bring to it as a test of its accuracy all the results of human observation and experience, and then see if all its main doctrines are not abundantly confirmed by a testimony as reliable as any offered by the most rigid science. Here is the theoretic form of that principle which Christ announced, when He said, If any man will do my will, he shall know of my doctrine. We demand some hypothesis. We, too, feel that "any theory is better than none," when we are confounded by moral and religious problems, by thoughts and feelings amid surrounding immensities, too grand for utterance, and we feel that far beyond all the unfoldings of science, a verified hypothesis of human nature and destiny is the problem of the world, and while with devout gratitude to God we acknowledge its solution in the volume of revealed truth, we find there what an atheistic philosophy must ever desiderate for its social plans, and what an humble piety would have shown Comte to be infinitely superior to all the grand generalizations and sagacious speculations of his own gifted intellect.