hope that that judgment will be favourable, on condition of sincere repentance, and, where possible, reparation. poration, Seven years after the latest consecration of the living, a (ix) Incorconsecration of the dead perfects the series of objective preparations, and proclaims, before an appropriate bier, the solemn incorporation of its occupant into the Great Being. Such an interval combines maturity of judgment on the part of the priesthood with the preservation of the various documents it requires for its judgment. To bring public opinion to bear more satisfactorily, a provisional decision is given in the fourth year, a decision susceptible of revision and preparatory of the final and irreversible sentence. The cere Such is the last sacrament, by which Sociocracy, brought into direct connection with Theocracy, completes the process of consecrating all the marked epochs of man's mortal life by incorporating it with the eternal life of Humanity. mony of the final judgment consists principally in the solemn transfer of the noble remains to the sacred grove which should surround each temple of Humanity. This act initiates a definitive cultus of the man and of the citizen, paid at the sacred tomb, which is adorned with an inscription, a bust, or a statue, according to the degree of honour accorded. An adverse sentence, as a rule, is simply negative; it treats, that is, as final, the civil burial with which the priesthood is never concerned. In cases where strong reprobation is deserved, the body of the condemned is borne in a fitting manner to the waste ground allotted to the rejected, there to lie with those who have been publicly executed, with suicides and with duellists, though not, as they are, subject to anatomical exami nation. Taken as a whole, the preceding exposition, in which it has been impossible to explain the worship without anticipating upon the regime, manifests the inherent competence of Sociolatry to deal with domestic life, all its phases finding their appropriate regulation in the nine sacraments. The consecration of that life, if it is to be complete, must embrace the modifications which, if not universal, are yet so frequent as to call for the sanction of the priesthood. Such a modification will be, in particular, Adoption, an institution to be largely developed in the Positive state; its religious ceremonial to be connected, as the case may require, either with the sacrament Special modomestic readoption." difications of lations, e.g. Wherein lies the power of these sacraments. The Series Personal, Domestic, Public Worship. Public Worship. The Calen dar. What a date is. The Week of presentation, or it may be, with those of destination and retirement. In estimating the power of these various ceremonies, we see that it depends throughout on the habitual practice of personal worship, whether prior in order of time or coexistent; in default of such habit the priesthood would be unable by the sacraments to excite any but mere transient emotions. But they who, by the habit of daily prayer, are ever ready to feel and to understand the Great Being, will receive deep impressions from these consecrations, sanctifying as they do in combination the life of each, as connecting it by gradual steps with Humanity. Their interdependence is calculated to secure easy access for the influence of each, as each resumes its predecessors, nay even heralds its successors, so as to be a conclusive evidence of adhesion to the true religion. The family worship rests on the personal, and is a preparation for the public, by its introducing, in an elementary form, the abstraction and the publicity which are the characteristics of public worship. To give an ideal embodiment of Sociology and still more of Sociocracy, such is the aim of our system of Sociolatry, and its power to attain it is seen on a comparison of its three general forms or stages. For the first, purely statical, represents order; the second, mainly dynamical, represents progress; the last, both statical and dynamical, is the expression of the combination of order and progress. Previous to entering on public worship, the direct worship, that is, of Humanity, I must explain the calendar it requires. Its introduction gives systematic form to a construction begun during Fetichism, and by the necessity of the case preserving its empirical character till the advent of Positivism. To date, is to distinguish each day by the place it holds in the whole period elapsed since the beginning of the era chosen. If stated directly and simply, it would involve too large. numbers, even as regards the duration of the life of the individual, much more in reference to that of the society. For dates then we must, as in abstract numeration, adopt an indirect and compound system by grouping the days, not however exceeding three orders of groups, or we necessarily get confused. Of these periods, or groups of days, which are at once of man's p. 130. institution and natural, it is the smallest alone which hitherto has gained unanimous acceptance by virtue of the subjective Vol. iii. properties of the number seven, pointed out in the last volume. Positivism explains the attributes of the week, and by so doing places on rational grounds an institution instinctively adopted, which goes back to Fetichism, even in its nomad stage. But Positivism, whilst referring to the week its whole system of public worship, sanctions and regulates the combination of the week with larger periods, for otherwise the date would still require too high numbers. As far as possible, it connects these periods with the week, in order to facilitate numerical comparisons, and most of all with the view of introducing the greatest possible concordance into our religious solemnities. The two conditions are met by a judicious combination of the month and the year, the two periods in common use, regard being had to their true nature; the month being subjective, the year objective. The Month and the Year. Solar years. All divergences relating to the calendar are to be looked Lunar and upon as traceable, above all, to a want of the due recognition of this inherent difference of the two periods. It was from not being awake to it that our Fetichist ancestors, when arranging their calendar, had recourse to the external world for the two higher periods, guided by the apparent movements of the moon and sun. The first naturally was in the ascendant during the nomad period; that of the sun during astrolatry, properly so called, at which time the priesthood made a first attempt at its calculation. But the numerical discrepancy between the two movements soon became evident, and compelled the abandonment of an objective agreement, and the acquiescence in a subjective connection. Such a connection might assume one or other of two forms, each excluding the other, according as one or other period became artificial, though the lunar period was never artificial enough. Hence the two forms of the calendar, the lunar and the solar; in which at one time the year is made to depend on the month, at another the month on the year. Whichever form was adopted, the ground of connection was always essentially the worship, and the worship, since the period of astrolatry, was indissolubly connected with the week. adopts the It is on the same ground that Positivism rests its definitive Positivism arrangement, by at once ratifying the unanimous preference of solar year. the western world for the solar calendar, as the direct combina Theo tion of the two simultaneous movements of the Earth. cracy laid the basis of their general agreement by its institution of mean time; an arrangement completed, during the Western transition, by the intercalation of leap year, first by Julius Cæsar, subsequently by Gregory XI. The Positive religion adopts without hesitation this slight alteration of the two natural periods, and its consequence, their perfect agreement; and devotes it to the evidencing the fundamental subordination of the subjective to the objective, a subordination which is the basis of the whole belief of mankind in its final form. In the solar year thus constituted by the Western world, the festivals of Humanity recur with the recurrence of the leading phenomena, the cosmological in the first place, and then the biological phenomena, characteristic of the planetary milieu which Humanity respects whilst she improves it. Our various ancestors having thus coordinated the two natural periods, the day and the year, it remains for us to perfect the calendar as an institution by bringing into satisfactory agreement the two periods of man's creation which connect them. All relation to the moon being set aside, and the month into thirteen becoming as subjective as the week, we soon come to see that it is necessary to make the month invariably four weeks eight days. exactly, which leads to the division of the year into thirteen months. The complementary day with which, on this system, each year ends, will have no weekly or monthly designation, any more than will the additional day which follows it in leap years. Their names will be derived solely from the festivals appointed for them, and in this way we secure the continuity of the Positivist calendar, all its months beginning with a Monday and ending with a Sunday. We may add that it keeps the present beginning of the Western year, so placed as to represent a renovation, since with it the days begin to lengthen in the Northern or principal hemisphere of the Earth. Be they what they may, however, it is not the practical advantages of this ultimate modification of the calendar, so much as the requirements of the worship, which will ensure its acceptance. Division of the year months of four weeks or twenty Reasons for Private worship alone would justify the modification, in order to avoid the painful uncertainty to which our affectionate memories are often exposed from the existing discrepancy between the two artificial dates. Though domestic worship less urgently demands the agreement of the two, it has its fitness here also, as by its help alone we can sufficiently recall the nine ceremonies always appointed for the Thursday. It is, however, above all, the whole system of public festivals which places beyond dispute the necessity of the leading innovation, the division, that is, of the year into thirteen months. ment of the months. No other number in fact can satisfy the several demands Apportion of the abstract cultus, in which we have to celebrate, first, the thirteen fundamental nature of the Great Being; then the stages of its necessarily gradual formation; lastly, its existence in the normal state. From the first point of view, the month with which the year opens must be devoted to the synthetical worship of Humanity, resting on the due subordination of its several nuclei to its sempiternal whole. But this direct commemoration of the great public bond of unity requires, to complete it, the particular consecration of each of the private ties on which it rests. Now they are five in number: marriage; the paternal; filial; fraternal; and domestic relations; ranked on the principle of decrease of intimacy and increase of generality, each has one of the five succeeding months devoted to it. The statical portion of the worship thus fully allowed for, the dynamical portion takes three more months, devoted severally' to the three grand phases of the preparation of the race: Fetichist; Polytheist; and lastly Monotheist. On this statical and dynamical foundation, the four last months give ample scope for the direct adoration of the true providence in its various forms: moral; intellectual; material; and general; vested respectively in women, the priesthood, the patriciate, and the proletariate. Thus the thirteen months of the Positivist year are found indispensable to Sociolatry, if it is adequately to idealise Sociology and Sociocracy. In the calendar of Humanity, in this its final form, two secondary questions for the present must remain unsettled. The first is that of the Positive era, for which we cannot in anywise adopt that introduced by the monotheistic transition, Islamic or Catholic. Naturally the Positive era must have reference to the triumph of the true religion, the date of which must be as yet uncertain. The second point is the impossibility of adhering in our definitive systematisation of the calendar to the present heterogeneous nomenclature of the months; not to speak of the confusion resulting from the difference in this The Positive Era not fixed, nor again the names of the months. |