t had been
qualified to exercise as improving an influence over him intellectually
as morally, and if he could have been contented with something less
ambitious than being the supreme moral legislator and religious pontiff
of the human race.

When we say that M. Comte has erected his philosophy into a religion,
the word religion must not be understood in its ordinary sense. He made
no change in the purely negative attitude which he maintained towards
theology: his religion is without a God. In saying this, we have done
enough to induce nine-tenths of all readers, at least in our own
country, to avert their faces and close their ears. To have no religion,
though scandalous enough, is an idea they are partly used to: but to
have no God, and to talk of religion, is to their feelings at once an
absurdity and an impiety. Of the remaining tenth, a great proportion,
perhaps, will turn away from anything which calls itself by the name of
religion at all. Between the two, it is difficult to find an audience
who can be induced to listen to M. Comte without an insurmountable
prejudice. But, to be just to any opinion, it ought to be considered,
not exclusively from an opponent's point of view, but from that of the
mind which propounds it. Though conscious of being in an extremely small
minority, we venture to think that a religion may exist without belief
in a God, and that a religion without a God may be, even to Christians,
an instructive and profitable object of contemplation.

What, in truth, are the conditions necessary to constitute a religion?
There must be a creed, or conviction, claiming authority over the whole
of human life; a belief, or set of beliefs, deliberately adopted,
respecting human destiny and duty, to which the believer inwardly
acknowledges that all his actions ought to be subordinate. Moreover,
there must be a sentiment connected with this creed, or capable of being
invoked by it, sufficiently powerful to give it in fact, the authority
over human conduct to which it lays claim in theory. It is a great
advantage (though not absolutely indispensable) that this sentiment
should crystallize, as it were, round a concrete object; if possible a
really existing one, though, in all the more important cases, only
ideally present. Such an object Theism and Christianity offer to the
believer: but the condition may be fulfilled, if not in a manner
strictly equivalent, by another object. It has been said that whoever
be