of that almost universal notion of to-day, the notion that rites
and forms are something artificial, additional, and corrupt.
Ritual is really much older than thought; it is much simpler and much
wilder than thought. A feeling touching the nature of things does
not only make men feel that there are certain proper things to say;
it makes them feel that there are certain proper things to do.
The more agreeable of these consist of dancing, building temples,
and shouting very loud; the less agreeable, of wearing
green carnations and burning other philosophers alive.
But everywhere the religious dance came before the religious hymn,
and man was a ritualist before he could speak. If Comtism had spread
the world would have been converted, not by the Comtist philosophy,
but by the Comtist calendar. By discouraging what they conceive
to be the weakness of their master, the English Positivists
have broken the strength of their religion. A man who has faith
must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool.
It is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictions
when he is not even ready to wear a wreath round his head for them.
I myself, to take a corpus vile, am very certain that I would not
read the works of Comte through for any consideration whatever.
But I can easily imagine myself with the greatest enthusiasm lighting
a bonfire on Darwin Day.

That splendid effort failed, and nothing in the style of it has succeeded.
There has been no rationalist festival, no rationalist ecstasy.
Men are still in black for the death of God. When Christianity was heavily
bombarded in the last century upon no point was it more persistently and
brilliantly attacked than upon that of its alleged enmity to human joy.
Shelley and Swinburne and all their armies have passed again and again
over the ground, but they have not altered it. They have not set up