its ideal expression, we make administrative capacity the characteristic of the patricians, whilst we represent industrial discoveries as reserved for the plebeians, recognising at the same time the diminishing importance in the regime of such discoveries. fective Pro To complete the public commemoration of the Proletariate (i) The afin its completest form, the second Sunday of the popular letariate. month must be set apart for the honour of the proletary women. In Positive society all women will become strictly proletaries, as voluntarily renouncing all inheritance; still the holy uniformity of their great fundamental function will leave room for the modifications due to position. Again, notwithstanding the identity of education, so adapted is the situation of the Proletariate to develope the leading attributes of women as to call for this special festival which, at a later period, may be prefaced by a commemoration of individual types. On the third Sunday, we enter on the commemoration of the Proletariate in its less complete form, as we then honour the dutiful acceptance of their existence as plebeians by those members of the class in whom the industrial function suffers from tendencies to intellectual action which find but imperfect scope. It is true that the Priesthood even more than the Patriciate must be recruited mainly from the Proletariate, still its necessarily limited numbers will not allow, in the majority of cases, full satisfaction of the aspirations aroused by the education. Whilst kept in due subordination to practical duties, such aspirations give rise in the body of the people to an unfortunate but honourable class, a class which, over and above the honour paid to it collectively, may admit of personal distinctions, by contributing to perfect the social action of the Proletariate. (iii) The tive Prole contempla. tariate. passive Pro Carry out to the full the above case, and we are led to end (iv) The the thirteenth month by honouring the life of the proletary letariate. when it takes an essentially passive character. This modification may be due either to the predominance in excess of intellectual aspirations, or to a situation adverse to the developement of the particular talent of the individual. On the one or the other ground equally, Mendicity, even when it is Mendicity. the life of the individual, deserves a distinct festival in a worship which claims to idealise all actual forms of life, and which therefore may not neglect an inevitable result of the Walter The Thurs. day before. St. Francis of Assisi. Festival of sum of imperfections to which Humanity is liable. In the Middle Ages, Mendicity received its due tribute of honour, for the Priesthood, in its wisdom, knew how to ratify the instinctive verdict of mankind; à fortiori must it receive it in Sociolatry, as a more sympathetic and more truly synthetical system. The anarchical repugnance to accept this conclusion shown by metaphysical empiricism, is but an evidence of an erroneous estimate of the social function of the Proletariate. Separate the function of the citizen from that of the artisan, and we shall at once feel that, in spite of their coexistence as a rule, the first may deserve honour when the second is entirely in abeyance. Nay, we may consider this festival as already initiated by the admirable idealisation which is the salient feature in one of the numerous masterpieces of the greatest poetical genius of this exceptional century. Nor are we limited to this anticipation of a poet's instinct, the more conclusive, it must be allowed, as originating in a milieu of industrial egoism and Protestantism, for the past offers us a direct and collective type of Mendicity in the remarkable institution of the Mendicant orders. The admirable founder of that institution must have a special glorification, on the Thursday before the abstract commemoration of the passive element of the Proletariate-the complementary element of which he will ever be the patron Saint, as the characteristic representative, under the form adapted to the thirteenth century, of its social action. From the historical point of view, this festival gives us indirectly an opportunity of honouring as it deserves-and it is the only one which throughout was honourable the effort to arrest the irrevocable decay of Catholicism, an effort however destined, such were the conditions, to failure. The Positivist year ends with consecrating its complementary day to all the dead, the rulers of the living with an indispensable and inevitable sway. This concluding festival recalls the similar institution of Catholicism, and in doing so evidences the superiority of the Positivist systematisation as alone able to make the commemoration completely universal in its comprehension. Connected by feeling with the ceremony of the eve, it forms a natural introduction to the festival beyond compare, which on the morrow must open the new year by the direct idealisation of the love of Humanity. Festival of men. Finally, the system of Sociolatry fills up its last void, by Leap Year. placing at the end of each bissextile year a festival in honour Holy Wocollectively of the women who have as individuals attained holiness. The affective sex, it is true, neither allows nor requires individual distinctions, save such as arise from its efficient discharge of its domestic duty, yet the tendency of the encyclopædic education is to increase the number of exceptions even in the sphere of action, still more in that of thought. There would be incompleteness, then, in the public worship of Humanity, did it not remind us, by a supplementary festival every four years, of her highest representatives, some of whom will attain an individual glorification. the one Festi The eightyvals. Their Well the private Worship. in Such are the eighty-one solemn festivals, secondary or principal, which constitute the worship annually paid to Great Being by its servants assembled in its temples. calculated to compensate the effort of abstraction required the direct worship of Humanity, such public assemblies cannot but increase the moral effect of the worship by kindling the natural sympathies of the worshippers, each looking on the body of his fellow-worshippers as representing the supreme existence. The influence, however, of such collective worship would be but weak, appealing rather to our sense of beauty than to our affections, were there not the habit of solitary private prayer. Not to dwell on the fact that the personal worship is by its nature the basis of the two others, it alone is in the fullest sense freea circumstance which must largely increase its natural power. Although the Priesthood may dissuade the Patriciate from compelling, in any degree, attendance on religious worship, it cannot prevent public opinion from blaming those who abstain from the social sacraments or the public festivals. We must not then, in the splendour of these last, lose the sense of the superior value of daily prayer, in which each believer becomes his own priest, and labours in freedom for his own moral improvement, through the veneration he pays in secret to the representatives of the Great Being within his family circle. Conversely, however, we must not lose sight of the fact, that it is only by regular participation in the collective services that we can secure our private worship against a danger to which it is exposed, of evoking tendencies to mysticism, and even selfishness, tendencies which would direct to the part the worship due to the whole. relation to Temples and the artistic adjuncts. The Temples of Human ity. Situation of the Temples. To facilitate the comprehension of the general arrangement of the public worship, I have given it in a summary form in the subjoined table (Table A), where the words in italics and in parentheses indicate the subordinate festivals. This series of solemnities honouring every aspect of human life, cannot but have a powerful attraction for minds capable of grasping the conception in its fullness. The test, however, of their having had a deep moral effect, will be if each leaves on those who have assisted at it a feeling of regret that a year must pass before it returns, rather than a desire for the next in order, from a craving for fresh artistic emotions. In completion of the exposition of Sociolatry two subsidiary explanations must be placed here; their earlier introduction would have been an interruption. The first concerns the edifices devoted to the Positive worship; the second the artistic aids it requires. In the General View,' the symbolical representation of Humanity by sculpture and by painting is adequately set forth. Its architectural expression it is not possible at present to determine with equal clearness, be it because of the slower growth of the architectural conceptions proper, or that they depend on a much larger cooperation for their execution. Positivism is so real, and the times are so ripe for it, that suitable temples will rise more quickly than did the churches of Catholicism, for Catholicism was in open opposition with the world it came to modify. Still at the outset, the worship of Humanity in the West must be carried on in the buildings consecrated to the public worship of her immediate predecessor. They will be more easily adapted to Sociolatry than the temples of Polytheism could be to Monotheism. For the instruction and preaching introduced by Monotheism required a different form of building from that which sufficed for the earlier ceremonies, which were mainly in the open air. Positivism, then, need not introduce such sweeping changes in religious architecture as Catholicism was obliged to do; still its festivals, from their referring to the external world as well as to the world of man, will require alterations not to be specified at present. Yet one point I may even now determine, the regular position, viz., of the Positivist temple-nay, even the general features of its internal arrangements-both the one and the other being implied in the nature and object of the worship of Humanity. As it is the dead who deserve to live that are the chief constituents of the Great Being, so its public worship must be performed in the midst of the tombs of the more eminent dead, each tomb surrounded by a consecrated grove, the scene of the homage paid by their family and their fellowcitizens. In the second place, the universal religion will adopt and extend one of the best inspirations of Islam; it will direct the long axis of the temple and the sacred wood towards the metropolis of the race, which, as the result of the whole past, is, for a long time, fixed at Paris. This touching convergence, a convergence which the Kebla of the Mussulman applies to all the attitudes of worship and to the body after death, will naturally be similarly extended in the only worship which admits of entire unanimity. Later in origin and more social in character than the faith of the West, the Eastern faith was naturally a better manifestation of the direct aspirations after true universality. the Temples. As for the internal arrangement of the temples of Posi- Interior of tivism, two directions only can be given at present. In the first place, the choir, where stands the pulpit with the statue of Humanity over it, must be able to hold a seventh of the audience, in order that the interpreter of the Great Being may be surrounded by the eminent women who are its best representatives. Secondly, each of the seven side chapels will contain the bust of one of the thirteen principal organs of the education of the race, in the midst of the busts of his four greatest subordinates, the fourteenth chapel being reserved for the group of representative women. adjuncts. The foregoing exposition shows the boundless field opened by Artistic the Positive worship to art, not merely to the fundamental art, poetry, but to the subsidiary arts of sound and form. So extensive is the field, that at first sight it would seem to require a special class; the objection is, that such a class, however subordinate, would trench on the dignity of the Priesthood, and might compromise its unity. But if we emancipate ourselves from the peculiar habits of the West, we shall be led to acknowledge that all the needs of Sociolatry may be met, without devoting any one to the exclusive and constant exercise of the faculties of expression; for when made paramount they are no less degrading to the individual than |