Various - Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, April 1885

The opening of a new year again assembles us together to look back on the work of the year that is gone, to look faithfully into our present state, and to take forecast of all that yet awaits us in the visible life on earth, under the inspiring sense of the Great Power which makes us what we are, and who will be as great when we are not.

In the light of this duty to Humanity as a whole, how feeble is our work, how poor the result! And yet, looking back on the year that is just departed, we need not be down-hearted. Surely and firmly we advance. Not as the spiritualist movements advance, by leaps and bounds, as the tares spring up, as the stubble blazes forth, but by conviction, with system, with slow consolidation of belief resting on proof and tested by experience. If at the beginning of last year we could point to the formation of a new centre in North London, this year we can point to its maintenance with steady vigor, and to the opening of a more important new centre in the city of Manchester. Year by year sees the addition to our cause of a group in the great towns of the kingdom. Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Newcastle, already have their weekly meetings and their organised societies.

I make no great store of all this. The religious confidence in Humanity will not come about, I think, like the belief in the Gospel, or in the Church, or in any of the countless Protestant persuasions, by the formation of a small sect of believers, gradually inducing men to join some exclusive congregation. The trust in Humanity is an ineradicable part of modern civilisation: nay, it is the very motive power and saving quality of modern civilisation, and that even where it is encumbered by a conscious belief in God and Christ, in Gospel and salvation, or where it is disguised by an atheistical rejection of all religious reverence whatever. Positivists are not a sect. Positivism is not merely a new mode of worship. It is of small moment to us how numerous are the congregations who meet to-day to acknowledge Humanity in words. The best men and women of all creeds and all races acknowledge Humanity in their lives. For the full realisation of our hopes we must look to the improvement of civilisation; not to the extension of a sect. Let us shun all sects and everything belonging to them.

I shall say but little, therefore, of the growth of Positivist congregations. Where they are perfectly spontaneous and natural; where they are doing a real work in education; where they give solid comfort and support to the lives of those who form them, they are useful and living things, giving hope and sign of something better. But I see evil in them if they are artificial and premature; if they spring out of the incurable tendency of our age toward sects; if they are mere imitations of Christian congregations; and, above all, if their members look upon them as adequate types of a regenerated society. The religion of Humanity, by its nature, is incapable of being narrowed down to the limits of a few hundreds of scattered believers and to casual gatherings of men and women divided in life and activity. And that for the same reason that civilisation or patriotism could not possibly be the privilege of a few scattered individuals. Where two or three are gathered together, there the Gospel may be duly presented, and God and Christ adequately worshipped. It is not so with Humanity. The service of Humanity needs Humanity. The only Church of Humanity is a healthy and cultured human society. It is the very business of Humanity to free us from all individualist religion, from all self-contained worship of the isolated believer. And though the idea of Humanity is able to strengthen the individual soul as profoundly as the idea of Christ, yet the idea of Humanity, the service of Humanity, the honoring of Humanity, are only fully realised in the living organism of a humane society of men.

For this reason I look on a Positivist community rather as a germ of what is to come, one which may easily degenerate into a hindrance to true life in Humanity. The utmost that we can do now as an isolated knot of scattered believers is so immeasurably short of what may be done by a united nation, familiar from generation to generation with the sense of duty to Humanity, saturated from infancy with the consciousness of Humanity, and with all the resources of an organised public opinion, and a disciplined body of teachers, poets, and artists, to secure its convictions and express its emotions, that I am always dreading lest our puny attempts in the movement be stereotyped as adequate. Our English, Protestant habits are continually prompting us to look for salvation to sects, societies, self-sufficing congregations of zealous, but possibly self-righteous reformers. The egotistic spirit of the Gospel is constantly inclining us to look for a healthier religious ideal to some new religious exercises, to be performed in secret by the individual believer, in the silence of his chamber or in some little congregation of fellow-believers. Positivism comes, not to add another to these congregations, but to free us from the temper of mind which creates them. It comes to show us that religion is not to be found within any four walls, or in the secret yearnings of any heart, but in the right systematic development of an entire human society. Until there is a profound diffusion of the spirit of Humanity throughout the mass of some entire human society, some definite section of modern civilisation, there can be no religion of Humanity in any adequate degree; there can be no full worship of Humanity; there can be no true Positivist life till there be an organic Positivist community to live such a life. Let us beware how we imagine, that where two or three are gathered together there is a Positivist Church. There may be a synagogue of Positivist pharisees, it may be; but the sense of our vast human fellowship – which lies at the root of Positivist morality; the reality of Positivist religion, which means a high and humane life in the world; the glory of Positivist worship, which means the noblest expression of human feeling in art – all these things are not possible in any exclusive and meagre synagogue whatever, and are very much retarded by the premature formation of synagogues.

I look, as I say always, to the leavening of opinion generally; to the attitude of mind with which the world around us confronts Positivism and understands, or feels interest in Positivism. And here, and not in the formation of new congregations, I find the grounds for unbounded hope. Within a very few years, and notably within the year just ended, there has been a striking change of tone in the way in which the thoughtful public looks at Positivism. It has entirely passed out of the stage of silence and contempt. It occupies a place in the public interest, not equal yet to its importance in the future; but far in excess, I fear, of anything which its living exponents can justify in the present. The thoughtful public and the religious spirits acknowledge in it a genuine religious force. Candid Christians see that it has much which calls out their sympathy. But apart from that, the period of misunderstanding and of ridicule is passed for Positivism for ever. Serious people are beginning now to say that there is nothing in Positivism so extravagant, nothing so mischievous as they used to think. Many of them are beginning to see that it bears witness to valuable truths which have been hitherto neglected. They are coming to feel that in certain central problems of the modern world, such as the possibility of preserving the religious sentiment, in defending the bases of spiritual and temporal authority, in explaining the science of history, in the institution of property, in the future relations of men and women, employers and employed, government and people, teachers and learners, in all of these, Positivism holds up a ray of steady light in the chaos of opinion. They are asking themselves, the truly conservative and truly religious natures, if, after all, society may not be destined to be regenerated in some such ideal lines as Positivism shadows forth: —