evils. (a) Polytheism mixed up temporal and spiritual authority, confounding Rule and Advice, Law and Worship, the evils of which are more or less perpetuated in the Greek Church and Islam. Both are ruinous to society. (b) The Catholic priesthood, whilst recognising the contrast between government by the State and guidance by the Church, limited the action of the Church to purely transcendental things except for a short time in the Middle Ages. It did not affect to guide or advise in the real things, the solid and practical concerns of life. And when it did interfere in such things it did so in supreme ignorance, and usually in the way of sect and to secure its own privileges or gain.

Positivism, per contra, whilst insisting on intellectual and moral guidance in an organised form, entirely separate from all temporal authority, and without any force or legal power, is far more completely divorced from power than any Christian priesthood. It insists on a general scientific and philosophic education and on the competence of moral teachers, who without ever presuming to command or appeal to force, may restrain passions and selfishness, and constantly recall citizens, rich or poor, to a sense of social duty, forbearance and peace.

IV.-Polytheism is distinguished above all religions by its spirit of tolerance, by its respect for national and tribal religions as opinions, or where they were not made a source of insurrection-as was often done by Jews, Egyptians, and Britons. No intolerance and fanatical

exclusiveness existed in Greece or Rome. Paul spoke freely before the Areopagus at Athens.

Rome ad

mitted Serapis, Jews and Christians, until it found Christianity a sort of public treason. Rome had no proselytism, no denunciation of heathens, no persecution or attempts at extirpation of heresy, apart from treason.

This is a noble record of Polytheism if compared with the crimes that have stained Catholicism, Protestantism, Mussulman, Buddhist religions. Polytheism admitted infinite variety of doctrine, creed and worship, encouraged and incorporated them, and stimulated civic union and respect for opinion everywhere. Positivism effects this purpose far more completely and on a coherent system. It incorporates the permanent parts of each faith; and sees in each profound historical meanings and social The Religion of Humanity can no more insult or seek to persecute an earlier phase of thought than a rational man in his old age despises and condemns the serious beliefs of his own youth and manhood. He may have grown out of them, and may have enlarged them. But he knows well out of what they arose and to what good ends they led.

uses.

The Religion of Humanity finally closes the long blood-red roll of persecution with its record of stupidity, cruelty and arrogance. Positivism only can close it. For every absolute creed is bound by its nature to be aggressive and arrogant. It is only the relative creed that can be truly tolerant, really human.

V. Turn to the system of Apotheosis in the ancient

world of Polytheism-Hero Worship-e.g., Theseus, Romulus, Numa, Æneas, eponymous Patrons, Demigods. This was extended to Alexander, Julius, Augustus, with the Imperial numen. It was often grossly abused, as all such deifications will be; it was akin to the Canonisation of Catholics. But it was free from the gross defects of Catholic Canonisation, which made saints out of the most abject fanatics-e.g., S. Simon Stylites, S. Anthonys, etc., etc.-which was always confined to superhuman qualities, such as piety, self-torture and absurd extravagance. Polytheistic Apotheosis at least admitted great leaders of men, real heroes and human demi-gods. Both forms of canonisation were defective. Polytheism omitted women. One became too often an immoral and barbarous form of servility; the other became a fanatical superstition. Both introduced reverence for great men. The Positivist Calendar gives honour to the great men and women of the past in due order.

VI. On the other hand, the morality of Polytheism was essentially defective in personal restraint of passions, especially in its sexual relations and domestic habits. Worst of all in its sanction of slavery, with all its hideous evils to the master and mistress of youths and girls. It was this ingrained corruption of personal life which caused and justified the revolutionary movement of Paul and his people. Vice was directly encouraged by Polytheism. But, unfortunately, the Christian reformation, in its frantic extravagance seeking to

glorify purity at the cost of everything else, thirsting to extirpate the bloodiness, the insolence and tyranny of corrupt Polytheism, sadly neglected the grand old heathen virtues of courage in war, energy, discipline, civic patriotism, and all the great gifts of a Pericles, an Epaminondas, of Scipio, Julius, Trajan, and Marcus Aurelius. Men like these, with all their faults, were far truer saints, far nearer to the Religion of Humanity than the wretched monks of Mount Athos or the Apennines, who lived a life of useless self-torture and babbled about Virginity and Poverty as the highest manifestations of human virtue. Now Positivism, which insists on personal purity and self-control as much as any Catholic confessor, will not tolerate any extravagance and falsification of the ethical synthesis, even for this end. It asserts an all-round Morality wherein the old manly virtues of the antique heroes have their due place; courage, tenacity, energy, civic loyalty, social discipline, patriotism, justice, toleration. These things (the great legacy of Plutarch's Heroes) they ought to have done— and not to have left the other undone.

VII. The great characteristic of Polytheism was its limitless field for imagination. It gave us the inexhaustible mythology of Greece and Rome and the sublime works of ancient art and poetry. We owe every single type of literature to the Polytheistic world: Epic, Drama, Comedy, Tragedy, Hymn, Lyric, Epigram, History, Biography, Philosophy, Essay, Satire, Oratory, Romance. They reached the highest type in

all but Romance. So in art: everything almost is due to the Ancients, except probably in Music and Painting.

No doubt the Christian world and Monotheism generally has had its own splendid triumphs which we need not underrate. But the great triumph of the Renascence (say from Michelangelo to Milton and Corneille) was a reasoned return upon antique modes of thought; and so is most of the art and poetry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Positivism will free poetry, art, and life from the narrowness, bigotry, and ascetic superstition of Catholic and Protestant dogmatism, and will return upon the free, humane, jovial, æsthetic temper of the Polytheist-but without the scandalous impurity, the wild self-indulgence, and the easy allowance of almost any vice, which was the damning dry-rot of the ancient world.

The Positivist honour paid to Humanity will resist these evils as stoutly as ever any medieval priest, monk, or inquisitor. But it will tolerate no crusades, no wars of religion, no hell, no monasticism, no inhuman asceticism. It will look for a world of humane fellowship, and intellectual enjoyment of all things wholesome, beautiful, and loving-a stronger, braver, and more social world—and certainly a world purer than that of Homer and Aristophanes, but happier than that of Hildebrand, Bernard, and Dante.