The prospects of man would be dark indeed on the supposition of
its being abolished. "There might remain among a few of the more
enlightened some occasional glimpses of religious truth, as we find to
have been the case in the Pagan world; but the degradation of the great
mass of the people to that ignorance, and idolatry, and superstition,
out of which the Gospel had emancipated them, would be certain and
complete. This retrograde movement might be retarded by the advantages
which we have derived from that system, whose influence we should
continue to feel long after we had ceased to acknowledge the divinity of
its source. But these advantages would by degrees lose their efficacy,
even as mere matters of speculation, and give place to the workings of
fancy, and credulity, and corruption. A radiance might still glow on
the high places of the earth after the sun of Revelation had gone down;
and the brighter and the longer it had shone, the more gradual would be
the decay of that light and warmth which it had left behind it. But
every where there would be the sad tokens of a departed glory and of a
coming night. Twilight might be protracted through the course of many
generations, and still our unhappy race might be able to read, though
dimly, many of the wonders of the eternal Godhead, and to wind a dubious
way through the perils of the wilderness. But it would be twilight
still; shade would thicken after shade; every succeeding age would come
wrapped in a deeper and a deeper gloom; till, at last, that flood of
glory which the Gospel is now pouring upon the world would be lost and
buried in impenetrable darkness."[85]

M. Comte's theory is liable to another objection, the force of which he
seems, in some measure, although inadequately, to have felt and
acknowledged. The three states or stages, which he describes as
necessarily _successive_, are, in point of fact, _simultaneous_. They do
not mark so many different eras in the course of human progress,--they
denote the natural products of man's intelligence, the constituent
elements of his knowledge in _all_ states of society. The Theological,
the Metaphysical, and the Scientific elements have always coexisted.
Diverse as they may be in other respects, they resemble each other in
this,--they are all the natural and spontaneous products of man's
intelligent activity. That they were, to a certain extent,
_simultaneous_ at first, and that they are _simultaneous_ still, is
actu