RITUALISTIC ATHEISM.
lifFR. RICHARD CONGREVE has devoted a great part of his .111 life to the teaching of the Ritualistic Atheism which Comte revealed to the world in one of those fits of insanity that he fancied to be fits of inspiration. Comte firmly believed that he was not a crack-brained mathematician, with a real turn for ingenious gene- ralising, but the greatest man that ever lived, and Mr. Congreve seems to be entirely of the same opinion. Mr. Congreve luta there- fore taken the pains to explain this to the English people in 538 pages* of often able, but almost always whimsical, controversy. Comte's system of worship is, perhaps, the most eccentric structure of insane and sanctimonious vanity, ever fashioned outside of a mad-housei and his description of it beggars all other achievements of human folly that rise, as this does, clear above the atmosphere of drivel. The only part of Comte's religious creed that any man with a sense of humour can look at without laughing is- its preliminary declaration that there is no God and no future life. That is too solemn a theme for merriment. The further deliverance that man must worship something may be regarded as a hopeful glimmering of sanity. But Comte takes leave of his senses when he sets up Humanity, past, present, and to come, as the object, of some inscrutable worship, and when he baptises it with the name of the Grand-bre. The reflection of sane men is that Humanity is not a-Grand Etre, but a multitude of etres ; that the vast majority of them are not at all great, but -so petty as to be unworthy of capital letters even when spoken -of collectively ; and that the real object of Comte's own wor- ship was the grand .1tre who lived at 10 Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, Paris, who wrote fifteen volumes of "The Positive Philosophy," who was troubled with insanity, and who, in a spirit of what would be termed sublime impudence in any man who had not been off his head, proclaimed that he was the successor of Aristotle and St. Paul. Comte then borrowed from the Catholic Church the worship of the Virgin Mary, and from the fanatics of the French Revolution the worship of the Goddess of Reason. Dethroning both deities, Ira put in their place an intimate lady friend of his, Madame Clotilde de Vaux. Then he borrowed the Sacraments of the Catholic Church, the ritual, the phrases of adoration, and wrapt them round the shivering generalisation of the Grand are, to keep it warm. Finally, he made off with the Catholic Calendar of the Saints, blotted out every name that he did not like, put in every name that struck his fancy, and naturally took good care that the best place in the list .should be reserved for his own. Thus Comte's equivalent for a heavenly reward was a line of print in a long list of proper names. It was the cheapest and shabbiest little heaven ever devised even in a Parisian back street. Comte so lacked inventive power that he borrowed even his heaven from the French Government. The original of his Heavenly Host is that Legion of Honour which, in the Minister of the Interior, has a Recording Angel who goes out and in with the Government ; which distributes the rewards of the blessed in the form of red ribbons ; which makes the seraphic throng wear the symbols of immortality at their button-holes, and dooms them to forfeit their immortality if they happen to dis- please the Minister of the day.
Such was the Religion of Humanity with which Auguste Comte was to replace Christianity, satisfy the divinest aspirations of the spirit, regenerate the world, and give himself the first rank among human beings. Had his friends been really kind, they would, on hearing the first whisper of the scheme, have locked up the ingenious old man for life, burned his funny scribblings, and sworn each other to eternal secrecy by the bell, book, and candle of science, rather than have allowed the irreverent world to learn that their master's considerable power of philosophical generalisation had de- veloped into a passion for organising crazy devotion under the pres- sure ef pecuniary debt, outrageous vanity, quarrels with the friends
• Essays, Political, Social, and Religious. By Richard Congrere. London: Long- mans, Ureen, and Co. 1875. who would not subsidise his growing insanity with £300 a year, quarrels with his wife because she would not worship him, and a passion for a woman of whom his wife was jealous, and whom he thought divine. But instead of sending Comte back to the asylum, some of his friends fell down at his feet and hailed him as a new 5Iessiah. The number, it is true, was rather scanty. It has been irreverently said that the Coratist trinity consists of three persons and no God. The three are Comte himself, M. Lafitte, and Mr. Richard Congreve.
Comte is such as we have described him to be. M. Lafitte, his successor, and now "the Director of Positivism in the Occidental Republic," is a tall man, as spare and vigorous as a greyhound. He possesses almost as wonderful a faculty for continuous speech as Dr. Kenealy. The present writer has heard him discourse in Comte's own house for three hours less ten minutes without draw- ing breath, and he seemed to be so fresh at the end of the tre- mendous bout of preaching, that we feel sure he could have spoken as long again without calling for a glass of water. He almost tempted us to believe that he was perpetual motion in the flesh. His sermon, which was about the French Revolution, and espe- cially about Danton, might have seemed a, sorry farrago of dog- matic pretentiousness and emptiness if. it had been reduced to print;, but it was nevertheless a remarkable instance of phy- sical endurance and moral credulity. We learn from Mr. Coni, greve's book, and other sources, that M. Lafitte is obliged' to earn a poor but honest living by teaching mathematics, —the Positivist Fund for the maintenance of the priesthood not being sufficient to afford him complete leisure for spiritual meditation on the glad tidings of Atheism; nor can we wonder at M. Lalitte's. misfortune, when Mr. Congreve tells us that the basis of the Sacerdotal Fund in England is a subscription of a penny a week. There was once, as Mr. Carlyle reminds us, "a penny-a-week Purgatory Society" and Positivism has borrowed even that plan for outwitting the Devil.
The third member of the Comtist trinity is Mr. Congreve, and he believes not only in Comte, but in Lafitte too. Once upon a time he had a high repute for power as well as scholarship, and- there are ample traces, in his new book of this force of intel- lect; but, nevertheless, as regards the parts which expound the Comtist faith, it is such a book as might be written by a pious and benevolent but misanthropical Atheist, who bad lived in an Atheistical monastery for twenty years, with half-a-dozen Atheistical devotees, and who had spent all his waking hours in organising a cast-iron millennium of Atheistical bliss. Solitude is the nurse of fanaticism, and Mr. Congreve is fanatically eager to preach that Christianity is a worn-out delusion ; that there is no Deity, that there is no immortality, and that Comte has made men blessed for ever by telling them to make the most of their time in this world because there is no other, and to raise themselves to the requisite pitch of moral sublimity by adoring Madame Clotilde de Vaux, the lady of whom Madame Comte was jealous. Everybody has heard the joke, "There is no God, and Congreve is his Prophet." A great part of his large book is a fanatical comment on this precept. Solitude is the nurse of dogmatism as well as of fanaticism, and of all dogmatists of whom we have ever heard or read, Mr. Congreve is, next to Comte and Lafitte, the most towering specimen. He has long ago passed that stage of intellectual modesty in which most men think it needful to give some proof of their assertions, and to proportion the degree of the proof to the improbability of the statement. Like other prophets, Mr. Congreve seldom reasons; he pro- claims, and the bigger the proclamation the farther apart is it fromall the props of argument. Solitude is likewise the nurse of prolixity. Men who live in a cloister, who need never catch the post or the train, who need never obey a division-bell, and who can always be certain of finding half-a-dozen reverential listeners, do not, of course, see the value of time, and hence do not try to express themselves with epigrammatic brevity. They get into the habit of thinking aloud. The perpetual flattery of attention makes them fancy that their slightest reflection is made of gold. So they beat it thin. They are like those African streams which rise in the sands and are lost in the sands. And such is the literary characteristic of Mr. Congreve's whimsical volume. As regards a considerable proportion of it, we must say that drearier, more prolix, more pointless meditation we defy any critic to find, even in the sermons of a Fifth-Monarchy divine.
Mr. Congreve lays bare the outlines of his faith with charming frankness in a sermon on "The Propagation of the Religion of Humanity." There he tells us bow wide is the range of its sympathies ; and we frankly confess that they are much wider than those of Christianity. In the first place, Comtism sym-
pathises with Mrs. Edger, an American lady whom we never heard of before, but who seems to be a true believer in the most comfortable faith that all human beings ought to adore Madame de Yalta. Secondly, M. Comte's Church sympathises with all Catholics, Protestants, Monotheists, Polytheists, and Fetishists. It boasts that it knows no difference between these forms of faith ; and we are quite prepared to believe it. Thirdly, it sympathises -with the oppressed nationalities of Italy, Hungary, and Poland, -with the empires of Eastern Europe and Asia, and with the tribes of Polynesia and Africa. Finally, it sympathises with the whole
human race. It is further grateful for the service which Humanity has received from its "coeval institution, Space." Mr. Congreve is so full of thankfulness that he thanks vacancy for giving him elbow-room. If any man were to bid him go to Jericho, or in_ other words, into Space, he would be devoutly thankful that Space had left him a Jericho to go to. Likewise, the followers of M. Comte "commemorate the service of our common servant, the Earth, the planet which is our home, and the orbs which form with her the Solar system." But why do they stop there ? Why do they not commemorate Watt's condensing steam-engine, Wheatstone's telegraphic apparatus, and Thorley's food for cattle, seeing that these products do much more good to the physical frame than the planet Mars? Lastly, the devotees of this strange ..scientific fetishism commemorate "the greatest servant" of Humanity,' Angruste Comte. And the man who wrote all this was once_ a Fellow of an Oxford college, and is proud of his -creed !
Mr. Congreve is satisfied with the progress which the Religion of Humanity is making in 'England. It is true that the penny-a- week Sacerdotal Fund does leave M. Lafitte rather badly off, but even in 1871, the prospects of its devotees were so brilliant that for nine months they had been in possession of a room, and hence the gain to their cause was expected to be great. It is im- possible to question the meekness which is thus satisfied with the . smallest mercies ever vouchsafed to what Mr. Disraeli would term "a small, but pernicious sect."
The practical judgments of Mr. Congreve on our possession of India, or on such subjects as the relations between capital and labour, are dogmatic assertions of strange arrogance. When he does pronounce a specific decision, it is too often the very quintessence of arrogant eccentricity, as when he commands us to abandon India at once, whatever may be the cost to the natives or to ourselves. When he ceases to be specific, he is apt to sink into vagueness or platitude. All the sense in the book belongs to society, to Christianity. and to the mother-wit in Mr. Congreve's own mind which even his beliefs have not been able to kill. All the absurdity and moon- struck folly—and these form three-fourths of the volume—be- longs to M. Comte. And we need not go far to find the reason. Christianity says to men, "Purify your hearts ;" Comtism says, -" Organise society." The one treats them as human beings, the the other as mere cog-wheels in a cast-iron organism. And hence Comte was quite consistent in voting himself into the Providential chair of the world. If the world be such a shabby machine as he imagined, Comte was quite able to be its Providence. And we should then laugh at the world as heartily as we laugh at him.
We must not be understood to speak with the slightest dis- respect either of Comte or of his present expositor as philosophical critics, little as we agree with them. It would be absurd and even self-condemnatory to do so. Still less would we depreciate the practical worship of human service_ which they recommend. That is the noblest part of their teaching, and we do not doubt that it is founded on far deeper ethical impulses than any which they put in evidence in their absurd devotional system. What we are here attacking as simply inane and amazing, is, chiefly, if not solely, that monstrous devotional system itself.
The follies of Comte, and Lafitte, and Congreve are the result of one terrible deficiency. All the three persons of the Positivist trinity lack a sense of humour. They never saw a joke in their lives ; they could not be made to see a flash of humour ; they seem to think that wit is absolutely wicked ; and they have suf- fered so grievously from the whip of healthy satire, as to excite no wonder that Mr. Congreve should keep the choicest of his anathemas for "the bravoes" of the Press, and demand that they should not only sign their articles, but also state their ages. If he and M. Lafitte had possessed the feeblest faculty of humour, they would have saluted Comte's diseased vanity, his taste for dressing-up in sacerdotal old clothes, his worship of Madame de Vaux, and his organisation of ceremonial Atheism with laughter that would have blown the philosopher's follies into space. And hence the advice that we give to the rank and file of Comtism is,—Cultivate your sense of humour. Never mind sociology, biology, and the three stages of human progression for a few months, but read Rabelais, "Don Quixote," "Gil Blas," the jokes of Falstaff, Dryden's " Mac- Flecknoe," the "Dunciad," "Pascal's Provincial Letters," and the philosophy of Sam Weller. And do not forget to read " Tartuffe." Laugh heartily, freely, like human beings, and we feel certain that in four or five months the cure will be complete. The jargon of Comtism will then seem as con- temptible as the gibberish of an Obi-man ; Comte himself, the deification of Madame de Vaux, the queer menagerie of philo- sophical and sacerdotal monstrosities, will shake the repentant devotee with a burst of that laughter which is the note of healthy moral indignation ; and then will come a feeling of inexpressible wonder that men of culture could permit themselves to be degraded by a belief in the most contemptible superstition ever fashioned by educated folly.
Mr. Congreve will not understand what we mean when we make a more solemn appeal, but perhaps it may not be wholly unintelligible to those of his disciples who have not yet altogether surrendered their minds to the devotional chimwras of Comtism. To such men we say, then,—If, as you assert, there is no intelligent and moral Ruler of the universe, if the tales of old-world sanctity respecting a Father in Heaven be so many childish dreams, if the Jehovah of whom the Hebrew prophets sang does not exist, and if the hopes of the martyrs that they should live with God in the blessedness of everlasting life were only the delusions with which imagination cheats all the children of men, then allow us to meet our fate with a fitting sense of its unutterable dreariness ; and if you do not cease to preach to us that noble service of humanity which draws all its springs of hope and confidence from the creed you are seeking to uproot, at least preach it without assigning motives for it which no one can appreciate but yourselves. Above all, do not mock the profoundest aspirations of the soul by decorating Atheism with the ritual and the sanctities of awful belief, or by using those words of devotion which, beautiful beyond descrip- tion in the mouth of Christian faith, are gibberish in the mouth of Comtism. Do not bring your sacerdotal apparatus for the propagation of Atheism into the very sanctuary of the human soul. If you do, you cannot be treated as philosophers. You merit, and you will receive, only the lash of satire and of scorn.
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