Last Sunday, Mr. Frederic Harrison took for the theme of
his discourse to his Positivist friends the career of Gambetta, whom he spoke of as the first statesman of European import- ance to recognise Comte as his master alike in politics and in philosophy. Further, Gambetta "was himself, to some extent, the type of the Republican chief whom Comte had sought,—a statesman, that is, who should unite the cities and the country in one policy, and carry out the legitimate ends of the Great Revolution in a Conservative spirit, governing by public opinion, but never making a doctrine of pure democracy." Rising to a more ardent point of eulogy, Mr. Frederic Harrison declared Gamlaetta to be "the first statesman of European rank finally to repudiate any kind of homage to any sort of Church. His religion was France." "It may well be that in history he- will be recorded not only as the young lawyer who replaced the Empire by the Republic, but as the first statesman in Europe who refused to bow the knee in the Temple of Rim mon." By a mighty effort of imagination, Mr. Frederic Harrison uses the Temple of Rimmon to signify the Temple of God. The Positivist who recurs to the Old Testament in his imagery when denouncing theology, is, indeed, either singularly audacious, or singularly deficient in literary feeling. Mr. Harrison might as -fitly use the language of rapture in which the gates are bidden to lift up their heads, and the everlasting doors to be lift up, that the King of glory may come in, as appropriate for the welcome of the pallid Positivist into his dreary and empty shrine.
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