On the following day, the first of the New Year,
the Positivists celebrated, in the same place, the Festival of Humanity, Mr. Frederic Harrison delivering another address, in which he maintained that all other believers feed themselves on vanity and creeds without a foundation ; but that Positivists are the only realists, and that if in worshipping humanity their adora- tion cannot exactly be called ecstatic prayer, it is much better than any ecstatic prayer, because it is communion with realities, and not with dreams. In what sense the worship of humanity is either communion with realities or prayer at all, he did not explain. Apparently, he regards all genuine devotion as limited to breathing into the air the right sort of wishes for the future, with a clear recollection of the fact that the good of this pro- cednre is neither due to any benefit derived by space from the thoughts confided to it, nor due to any gain of strength from outside, but simply due to the utterance of the right sort of aspiration. Mr. Harrison, in reviewing the state of the world, made a grotesque attack on Canon Liddon and the Christian party who had joined Mr. Gladstone in resisting Lord Beacons- field's Turkish policy, for not resisting as vehemently Mr. Gladstone's Egyptian policy. And he ascribed this to the violence of that Christian prepossession which, though it could enter into the wrongs of Bulgarian Christians, is utterly in- different to the wrongs of Mahometan Egyptians. He forgets, surely, that Lord Beaconsfield's Afghan foreign policy was the object of even more vehement animadversion than his Turkish foreign policy, and that the Afghans are not Christians. It was not religious prepossession, but the state of the facts, that obliged men of sound judgment to discriminate clearly between the two cases.
