the internal life. The object of philanthropy is to do good;
the object of religion is to be good, if only for a moment,
amid a crash of brass.

And the same antithesis exists about another modern religion--I mean
the religion of Comte, generally known as Positivism, or the worship
of humanity. Such men as Mr. Frederic Harrison, that brilliant
and chivalrous philosopher, who still, by his mere personality,
speaks for the creed, would tell us that he offers us the philosophy
of Comte, but not all Comte's fantastic proposals for pontiffs
and ceremonials, the new calendar, the new holidays and saints' days.
He does not mean that we should dress ourselves up as priests
of humanity or let off fireworks because it is Milton's birthday.
To the solid English Comtist all this appears, he confesses, to be
a little absurd. To me it appears the only sensible part of Comtism.
As a philosophy it is unsatisfactory. It is evidently impossible to
worship humanity, just as it is impossible to worship the Savile Club;
both are excellent institutions to which we may happen to belong.
But we perceive clearly that the Savile Club did not make the stars
and does not fill the universe. And it is surely unreasonable to attack
the doctrine of the Trinity as a piece of bewildering mysticism,
and then to ask men to worship a being who is ninety million persons
in one God, neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.

But if the wisdom of Comte was insufficient, the folly of Comte
was wisdom. In an age of dusty modernity, when beauty was thought
of as something barbaric and ugliness as something sensible,
he alone saw that men must always have the sacredness of mummery.
He saw that while the brutes have all the useful things, the things
that are truly human are the useless ones. He saw the falsehood