to a still higher stage of
development,--that its existence was inevitable, and its influence, on
the whole, highly beneficial,--and that, even when it shall have passed
away, society will still be largely indebted to it for the impulse, yet
unspent, which it has imparted to the cause of civilization and
progress,--all this is admitted and even maintained by M. Comte, in
direct and often derisive opposition to the theorists who once ascribed
its origin to fraud, and its prevalence to priestcraft; nay, he elevates
it to the rank of a primordial and indispensable element of human
progress, a necessary and legitimate result of the great law of human
development. We know of no parallel instance of a change of opinion so
great and sudden, unless it be the marvellous transition of certain
modern Rationalists who were wont to ridicule the doctrine of the
Trinity as absurd and incomprehensible, but who have now arrived at the
conclusion that it is the fundamental law of human thought![68]

Still, with all this outward homage to Religion, considered as a mere
matter of history, the theory of M. Comte is essentially and even
avowedly Atheistic. It is mainly designed to account for the origin of
all Religion, whether Natural or Revealed, without having recourse to
the supposition either of the existence of God, or of his interposition
at any time in the affairs of men. He seems to have proposed to himself
a twofold object: _first_, to account for the prevalence of the various
forms of natural religion and superstition, without recognizing any
valid evidence for the existence of supernatural powers; and,
_secondly_, to account for the origin of Judaism and Christianity, or,
as he calls it, of Monotheism, without recognizing the reality of any
Divine Revelation. And he attempts to accomplish _both_ objects by means
of the same law--a law of development which, in primitive times,
produced Fetishism--which then produced Polytheism; then Monotheism;
then the Metaphysical transition era, during which all Theology is
undergoing a process of disintegration and decay; and, last of all (the
noblest, because the latest, birth of time), the Positive Philosophy,
under whose predicted ascendancy all Theology must die and be buried in
everlasting oblivion. His theory is not merely Anti-Protestant, although
it is bitterly so;[69] nor merely Anti-Christian, as opposed to all
Revelation; but it is Anti-Theological, as opposed to all Religion. It
pr