ctive unity can follow from it, because you can only find out the
right and wrong of a given course by summing up the advantages and
disadvantages, and striking a balance, and there is nothing in the
Religion of Humanity to force two men to find the balance on the same
side. The Comtists are no better off than other utilitarians in judging
policy, events, conduct.

The worship and discipline.

The particularities of the worship, its minute and truly ingenious
re-adaptations of sacraments, prayers, reverent signs, down even to the
invocation of a New Trinity, need not detain us. They are said, though
it is not easy to believe, to have been elaborated by way of Utopia. If
so, no Utopia has ever yet been presented in a style so little
calculated to stir the imagination, to warm the feelings, to soothe the
insurgency of the reason. It is a mistake to present a great body of
hypotheses--if Comte meant them for hypotheses--in the most dogmatic and
peremptory form to which language can lend itself. And there is no more
extraordinary thing in the history of opinion than the perversity with
which Comte has succeeded in clothing a philosophic doctrine, so
intrinsically conciliatory as his, in a shape that excites so little
sympathy and gives so much provocation. An enemy defined Comtism as
Catholicism _minus_ Christianity, to which an able champion retorted by
calling it Catholicism _plus_ Science. Comte's Utopia has pleased the
followers of the Catholic, just as little as those of the scientific,
spirit.

The priesthood.

The elaborate and minute systematization of life, proper to the religion
of Humanity, is to be directed by a priesthood. The priests are to
possess neither wealth nor material power; they are not to command, but
to counsel; their authority is to rest on persuasion, not on force. When
religion has become positive, and society industrial, then the influence
of the church upon the state becomes really free and independent, which
was not the case in the middle ages. The power of the priesthood rests
upon special knowledge of man and nature; but to this intellectual
eminence must also be added moral power and a certain greatness of
character, without which force of intellect and completeness of
attainment will not receive the confidence they ought to inspire. The
functions of the priesthood are of this kind:--To exercise a systematic
direction over education; to hold a consultative influence over all the