THE POSITIVIST STRIKE FOR A LITURGY.
WE referred last week to the rent in the minute Church of the Positivists,—the crack in the rather thin eggshell of the Religion of Humanity. There has been a partial estrangement between those who think, with M. Laffitte, that the scientific side of Positivism, or what calls itself by that name, should take pre- cedence of the moral and religious side, and those who think, with Mr. Congreve, that the emotional culture of the Positivist Church should take precedence of its scientific culture. In a sermon "delivered at the Positivist School, 19, Chapel Street, Lamb's Conduit Street, W.C., on the Festival of Humanity, 1st Moses, 91 (January 1, 1879) "* Mr. Congreve explains, with his usual perfect equanimity, that the differences of opinion developed among the handful of the Positivists have turned out less seri- ous than at one time he had been led to fear. Had Auguste Comte lived, he says, "to teach us what a Pontiff should be, we might have escaped most of our present embarrassments. But left to ourselves, with a many-sided doctrine, and one whose greatest development was, by the necessity of the case, most perfect in the direction to which its author assigned the secondary, subordinate place,—a doctrine, therefore, not com- plete and rounded off to his wish in all its parts, but over- weighted in its intellectual, as compared with the practical and religious constituent,—it was hardly to be hoped that we should escape a divergence such as the present, which turns ultimately on the relative immediate importance of these two distinct yet, in our system, inseparable constituents." But Mr. Congreve, though deeply regretting the divergence, is rather relieved than otherwise at the form it has taken. The split has come, and there has, nevertheless, been no backsliding. The Positivists who hold to the more scientific school have not deserted Posi- tivism. The Positivists who join with Mr. Congreve in a demand for the development of the Positivist worship, have been wholly faithful to their master. There have been heart-burnings, but none that Positivists, from their higher stand-point, cannot regard as temporary,—nay, as tending, perhaps, to a fuller de- velopment of Positivist energy than could have been secured with- out the schism. It appears that the schism originated with Mr. Congreve and those who think, with him, that Auguste Ccante's religions principles were not adequately embodied in the habits of the Positivist Communion prior to this schism :— " Painful as the responsibility was of changing the pre-existent order, it seemed to me, as to others, that it was a duty from which we might not shrink; that the taking it upon ourselves was the indispensable condition of a right presentment of the Religion of Humanity as the one paramount consideration; that a bolder, fuller, more direct assertion of thereligious aspect of our doctrine was the essential want; lastly, that the wor- ship, in some form or other, must precede the teaching in a more marked degree than than it had hitherto done. The ex- treme slowness of our progress we thought due, and the words of our common Master warrant our so thinking, to our own imperfect appreciation of, and insistence upon, this truth, more than to any external obstacle. We did not feel warranted by our experience, much less by the course of the discussion when the issue was once raised, in looking for any decided change in regard to this defect on the part of the then direction. The only alternative then was, either to acquiesce in that which we thought so imperfect, or, by a new combination, to attain com- plete freedom for working out our own conception of the true method to be pursued." And so the schism came. A certain number of French and a certain number of English Positivists —Protestant Positivists we may call them—joined in it. They "adhered strictly to that most important principle of avoiding all merely national formations." And Mr. Con- greve and his friends are still "in full communion with the only other constituent of the West which furnishes religious disciples." We conclude, therefore, that the liturgical form which is prefixed to Mr. Congreve's discourse has been sanctioned, if not in detail, at least in principle, by the religious section of the French Positivists. On the let Moses 91 were intro- duced, for the first time, into the services of the Positivist Church "the short sentences which precede the sermon ;" and "other additions," it is added, "will come in due time." Mr.
* Paneled by CT. Kogan Paul mill Co.
Congreve declares of this new liturgy that its form "is due to the thoughtful co-operation of two members?' and "with allow- ance for the accidental failure of the portrait" (whether of Humanity, or of Auguste Comte, or of Moses, whose month it was, it is left to outsiders to conjecture), "is, I think, very suc- cessful." The short sentences referred to, which are the chief results as yet of this portentous schism among a score or two of French and English Positivists, are, we suppose, those which immediately succeed the following invocation to Humanity :—
" Holy and Glorious Humanity, on -this thy High Day, at thb beginning of a new year, we are met in praise, in prayer, in thanks- giving, to celebrate thy coming, in the fulness of time, for the visible perfecting of thy as yet unseen work.
Priest.—We bow before thee in thankfulness ; People.—As children of thy Past.
Priest.—We adore thee in hope ; People.—As thy ministers and stewards for the Future. Priest.—We would commune with thee humbly in prayer; People.—As thy servants in the Present. All.—May our worship, as our lives, grow more and more worthy of thy great name."
Such are the truly magnificent first-fruits of this great reli- gious schism,—involving perhaps a score of persons in Eng- land, and it may be more still in l'rance. Our readers must not imagine that there is in those who composed this form of liturgy any tinge of the feeling of mockery,—we should rather
describe it as blasphemy if we thought it mockery at all,—which such parodies of Christian worship naturally suggest to men who have not followed out the quaint history of Positivism. These services and prayers,—there are other prayers, which, as they represent, we suppose, feelings among the Positivists as much akin to what we call devotion as those who ignore all existences higher than man's can entertain, we would rather not print,— are really and sincerely the expression of the highest Positivist piety. They are not parodies of Christian feelings. They are what Positivists maintain to be the legitimate residue of such feelings after the superstitions of theology have been purged away. The schism has evidently been a genuine strike for more and more earnest worship. These feeble little quavers of apostrophe to Humanity,—as they seem to those who worship God in Christ,—are the expressions of a genuine want,
a sincere craving for more heat on the part of those who are weary of mere light. One part of the service of the new schis- matic Positivist Church is devoted to the reading of Thomas a Kempis, but it is read with the changes described in the following grotesque explanatory note of Mr. Congreve's :—
"We read the 'Imitation of Christ,' by Thomas a Kempis, so strongly recommended by our founder, as the most universally re- ceived manual of devotion and of a holy life; but it may be wise here, in order to avoid ambiguity or any doubt as to our use of it, to say that in using it we substitute Humanity for God; the social type for the personal type of Jesus ; our own inward growth in goodness for outward reward ; the innate benevolent instincts for grace ; our selfish instincts for nature."
Thomas a Kempis, thus translated into the Agnostic dialect, must read as unlike the " Imitatio Christi" as does the lan- guage of the benediction with which the Positivist Liturgy closes, namely,—" The Faith of Humanity, the Hope of Humanity, the Love of Humanity, bring you comfort, and teach you sympathy, give you peace in yourselves, and peace with others, now and for ever. Amen." Yet to those who realise, as careful readers of Mr. Congreve's discourse must do, that all this is not "making believe very much," but a grave self-assertion of the legitimate authority of devout feeling against some of the very few who had hitherto been his chief friends and supporters, there is something extremely pathetic as well as quaint in all this unreal and almost absurd rifacinnento of the language of Christian adoration. No wonder that Humanity is addressed in one of the prayers as about to take to herself her "great power and reign," by inducing "all the members of the human family, now so torn by discord," to plane themselves, "by the power of the unity of thy Past," "under thy guidance, the living under the government of the dead." It is indeed the government of the dead, and the government of the dead only, as it seems to us, which could reconcile living men, who reject as superstitious all the doctrines of theology, first to discharge all the old meaning from the phraseology of wor- ship, and then to cling to the form when the life is g me and make a solemn and painful duty of separating from those who agree heartily with them hi creed, rather than fail in ob- servances suggesting nothing but ghosts of repudiated faiths,— rather than neglect to sprinkle ceremoniously every one of the sacrifices of life with a salt which has lost its savour, and seems, no doubt, even to their own more rationally-minded brethren, henceforth fit for nothing but to be cast out and trodden under the feet of men. Why need we wonder at Ritualism, in a day when Agnosticism itself is ritualistic ? when it prefers to per- form its worship in the presence of a portrait of (we suppose) one of Humanity's Saints, when it composes liturgies to Humanity wherein priest and people unite in ascribing to that dim abstraction of their fancy, a fictitious existence and an ima- ginary Messianic glory. "We acknowledge," says Mr. Congreve, "the sway of the dead." Nay, he not only acknowledges it, he hugs it, even after he has emancipated himself from the belief of the dead. He loves the echo of words of which the meaning for him has exhaled, and indulges himself in invocations to powers which he ostentatiously proclaims deaf and insensible. Nay, he goes so far even as to foster a barren passion of grati- tude to Space itself. "We gratefully commemorate also," he says in his discourse, "the services of our common mother, the Earth, the planet which is our home, and with her the orbs which form the solar system, our world. We may not separate from this last commemoration that of the milieu in which we place that system, the Space which has ever been of great service to man, and is destined to be of greater by his wise use, as it becomes the recognised seat of abstraction, the seat of the higher laws which collectively constitute the Destiny of Man, and is introduced as such in all our intellectual and moral training." How" Space" is to become " the recognised seat of abstraction" is not explained ; indeed, we should have thought Space as much, or as little, entitled to our gratitude, if it failed to become "the seat of abstraction," whatever such failure may mean, as if it succeeded in that ambitions enterprise. But however pallid these ghosts of the spiritual world which haunt the devotions of the pious (as distinguished from the scientific) Positivists, may be, there is to us something very touching in this extra- ordinary craving for the restoration of the outside of worship, when the inside is utterly gone. It is difficult to believe that men who talk of " Space " in almost the same earnest and devout language in which we talk of God, are really feeding their souls with anything but wind ; but even if they are but feeding them with wind, there is a pathos in this passionate con- viction of theirs that they have a soul to feed, and that they must address flattering words to it, if they cannot address any meaning. We think we can tell them how this propitiation of Humanity and Space will end. It will end either in blank ennui, or in recognising once more that under what they had deemed empty shadows, is the fullness of One who, being in the form of God and filling all space, made himself of no reputation, in order to touch even the thinnest fancies of our otherwise poor and pale humanity with his infinite life and love.
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