Volume 27 — THE CATHOLIC WORLD. VOL. XXVII., No. 161.—AUGUST, 1878. (continued 4)

Comte, desirous of giving hierarchical form to positivism, invented a worship and a calendar in which were commemorated three hundred and sixty-five “eminent servitors of humanity” in place of the saints of the Catholic Church. He began with Moses and ended with himself. Among the saints were Bichat, Condillac, Gutenberg, and Frederick II. of Prussia. He also invented a public service, a hymnal, and a certain form of worshipping the Sublime Humanity, by which he probably meant himself. He himself adored the Sublime Humanity as embodied and idealized in a very commonplace lady. Guizot says of him that he made repeated attempts to commit suicide, and in his review of positivism seems to think the insanity of its founder a sufficient refutation of his strange opinions. He admits, however, that long before Comte’s 667death his religion had made considerable progress in France and in England, where it was enthusiastically embraced by two men who, one would suppose, would be the last to adopt a fantastic creed—J. S. Mill and Wm. Hartpole Lecky, the historian of rationalism.

Toning down the sublimities of the irrepressible Comte, and not deigning to admit his hierarchy or his saints—which, to say the truth, smacked too much of Catholicity—the positivists of England and America contented themselves with a denial of all supernatural religion, and announced with a flourish of trumpets the infinite perfectibility of the human race, the glory of humanity, the cosmic emotion which is the deepest religious feeling of humanity, and the superiority of aggregate immortality to a private or personal existence after death. Man, very much in the abstract, was exalted to the throne of the Deity. All this blatant puffing of modern progress, development, and evolution is kept up by these man-worshippers. The spirit is the spirit of pride. But it must in justice be said of Mr. Frothingham that he is not so enthusiastic in the cause of humanity as he might be. His book on the subject is quite tame when contrasted, say, with Comte’s Woman and Priest. He does not gush enough, and he has not the irreverent boldness of his master, Theodore Parker. Mr. Frothingham is not by any means an emotional man, and this is fatal to his humanitarian progress. Nor is he a deeply-read man even in his own theology, though, to be sure, no sane man would blame him for that defect.

The doctrine of the infinite progressiveness of man is another of those high-sounding phrases that no logic will tolerate. There can be no internal progress in religion. All the scientific discoveries that may be made to the end of time will not have the slightest influence upon one jot or one tittle of revealed truth. Nor will they have any essential or related power over the truths of natural theology, or what is generally known as such. The relations of man to God, the coming of Christ, the establishment and conservation of his church, are truths and facts that can never be changed. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but the word of God shall not pass. This is why the church is so calm when all Protestantism is in a ferment about science. The two spheres of truth, divine and human, supernatural and natural, can never collide. Man may progress in many things, but religion, the Everlasting Yea, as Carlyle calls it, cannot from its very nature change, transform, advance, increase, or diminish. The humanitarians long for the day when there will be no sects and no religious differences. Then the best plan is for all the sects to enter the Catholic Church. They want a religion for man, and surely that religion is the best which God himself made for man.

There is a great deal of speciousness in this cry of progress, culture, and modern enlightenment, and even Catholics are deceived by the spirit of pride, for man from the beginning loved to consider himself a god knowing good from evil. Humanitarianism gains adherents in Catholic countries who would roar with laughter at the idea of turning Protestants. France never forgets those delusive words, liberty, fraternity, and equality, and this religion of humanity has blazoned them over the world. The restlessness 668under church government, the rational submission which the faith exacts, the lessons of mortification, and the stern portrayal of man which Christianity presents are all influences that tend to the progress of humanitarianism. No man likes to hear the dread truth regarding his slavery to the devil, the necessity of grace, the duty of confessing, and his unutterable weakness. It is these that are the unpalatable truths which spoil the teaching of the Ideal Man, as they call our Saviour. Comte would not suffer him to be enrolled among his saints, perhaps for the reason that St. Frederick the Great of Prussia used to refer to our Lord as L’Infame. If there is one truth most saliently brought out in the Gospel, it is that without Christ we can do nothing, and this would never suit the apostles of the infinite progressiveness of the human race.

This latter absurdity, most ridiculous when applied to religion, is not a whit more reasonable as applied to science. There must be a limit. The human mind is not infinite. No doubt we shall continue our improvements in machinery. There can be no vast progress made in literature or art. It seems from the history of the race that our powers are limited, and, though we boast of our great mechanical improvements, Washington Irving said that he would not be surprised if they yet unearthed a locomotive engine from the ruins of Persepolis. Infinite progress would seem to be only a figment of the brain of a poetic humanitarian. It is well known that Don Quixote, who certainly gave himself up to redressing the wrongs of humanity, was peculiarly eloquent upon the charms and perfections of Dulcinea; though the honest old knight, crackbrained though he was, would have crossed himself devoutly at the idea of Dulcinea being a divinity in any other sense than that familiar to true lovers.

The motives for moral action presented by the humanitarian theory are very noble but, alas! very impracticable. While we entirely dissent from the opinion of Bentham and Paley, that selfishness is the guiding principle of our actions—an opinion which is at once an insult and a falsehood—still the vast majority of mankind cannot be influenced by the very airy and sublime notions of our philosophers. Even natural goodness appears to be prompted by heavenly intimations and aids. Gratia supponit naturam. Of course a good work, to merit salvation, must be attended with grace from its origin to its consummation. But our humanitarians will not even promise us happiness hereafter, and we know how slim are the chances for happiness in this world. This great humanity for which we must labor is only an abstraction. No doubt a man may have a real and pure love for his fellow-man on merely speculative grounds or through natural kindness of heart; for have we not a Bergh for the brutes? All of us, however, feel how vague and impotent such a feeling must be or is likely to become. Christ unites love of our neighbor with love of God, its reason and cause, and there is a world of sweet philosophy in this precept on which depend the law and the prophets. It is the only motive that has been found fruitful in any age. Charity is a Christian growth. There was not one hospital in pagan Athens or Rome, though there were numerous coteries of eminent philosophers.

669From whatever side we view this strange “religion,” its hollowness and absurdity become apparent. Its genesis in a morbid mind clouded at times with insanity, and its elaboration in other morally unbalanced intellects, awaken at the outset doubts of its coherency. The vagueness of its formulas wearies and confounds the critic. It has no philosophical structure, and, we are afraid, no theological results. Its literature is marked with weak sentiment and an effusive love and praise of mere naturalism—we were going to say mere animalism—which cannot hold any mind that has a perception of the true dignity and exaltation of human nature as created by God and redeemed by his only Son. So far as we are aware, it has exerted no appreciable influence upon the morality of the world, and its failure to commend itself generally to the humanity it so loudly praises would indicate that men perceive its intrinsic weakness and ineptitudes.

We know that many Protestants condemn and detest this creed as heartily as does the church, which in simple and noble language condemned it in the very first session of the Vatican Council. But we cannot help thinking that Protestantism has had much to do in bringing the monster to birth. It is the logical evolution of Protestant right of private judgment, of personal independence of the doctrinal authority of the church, and of unwise tolerance of all sorts of mischievous religious vagaries. Stripped, of all disguises and forced to speak in true tones, this deified man of the Religion of Humanity is the Antichrist, setting himself up as God and claiming to be God. It is the apotheosis of man, who renews the folly of building a tower of pride in which he may secure himself against the wrath of the Eternal. But before the face of His wrath who can abide? It will not do to speak of the Omniscient as the Unknowable or the Unknowing.

The worst feature of this placitum is that it is militant and aggressive. Comte, as we have said, established a regular system of worship, and what passes under the more respectable name of Unitarianism is really formulated positivism. We should care little for it, did it openly profess its origin and purpose, but it works under a false name and has no scruples about deceiving the confiding and unwary. The Boston Index would be highly indignant if asked to defend Comte’s calendar of saints and to explain the culte of the Sublime Humanity; and George Eliot places in the mouth of Daniel Deronda the most exquisite praise and appreciation of the Hebrew creed. Comte says that the day advances when we shall worship no being inferior to man; and as no man is very much disposed to think another greater than himself, especially under the religious teachings which we have analyzed, each of us will act practically upon Satan’s declaration to Eve, “You shall be as God.”

There is no doubt that as the doctrinal authority of Protestantism fades away year by year, this pronounced individualism will more boldly assert itself. The gospel of vulgar and intense selfishness will triumph, and the worst phases of paganism will return. St. Paul complains of the heathens that they were without affection, and this was because of their creed. The spirit of modern infidelity hates and despises the poor, the ignorant, and, like the Spartans of old, would soon 670dispose of the sick, the lame, and the blind. Herbert Spencer luckily is no philosopher, though he labors hard to synthetize humanitarianism. Should this monstrous parody on religion ever take clear and scientific form, all traces of faith and charity in Protestantism will disappear. Fetichism itself would be better than this horrible worship and deification of selfishness. If a man believes in anything outside of himself as something diviner and better than he, there is hope for him; but woe to him and to his neighbor when he enthrones himself upon an altar and worships his humanity. It is to be hoped that much of the excessive laudation of ourselves in these days springs from no deeper source than an overweening opinion of our abilities. It may be only vanity. It may not be spiritual and intellectual pride. This question we leave to the reflection of our readers, with a concluding remark that all exaltation of the merely natural powers of the human intellect is attended with extreme danger to moral sanity. The man who has cast off the yoke of the church, the traditions of his race, and the honest suggestions of his conscience has already joined the ranks of the arch-deceiver who first flattered us with hopes of divinity, and now tempts us with unbounded visions of the enlightenment of the world, social progress, the political amelioration of the human race, the downfall of all tyranny in church and state, and the splendid advent of the coming man; but he only lures us to that awful destruction which hurled him from heaven because of the usurping thought, “I will become like unto the Most High.”

SONNET. UNCONSCIOUS FACULTIES.

Say, do the mighty winds in silence sweep

The crystal breadth of ocean’s quivering plane?

The unmeasured forests, quickening in their sleep,

Breathe they no sound, or breathe that sound in vain?

Say, can our compass small of ear and brain

With Nature’s boundless concords measure keep?

Not so! Her lyre, we know, hath tones too deep,

Too high, for man to hear, or to sustain.

Nor doubt that likewise in this soul of ours

Functions and faculties there work alway

Below the level of our conscious powers;

And chords whose music—were there aught to wake

Its echoes ’mid that inner world—would shake

To dust our tenement of mortal clay.

671

PEARL

BY KATHLEEN O’MEARA, AUTHOR OF “IZA’S STORY,” “A SALON IN THE LAST DAYS OF THE EMPIRE,” “ARE YOU MY WIFE?” ETC.