e to worship the Savile Club; both are excellent
institutions to which we may happen to belong. But we perceive clearly
that the Savile Club did not make the stars and does not fill the
universe. And it is surely unreasonable to attack the doctrine of the
Trinity as a piece of bewildering mysticism, and then to ask men to
worship a being who is ninety million persons in one God, neither
confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.

But if the wisdom of Comte was insufficient, the folly of Comte was
wisdom. In an age of dusty modernity, when beauty was thought of as
something barbaric and ugliness as something sensible, he alone saw
that men must always have the sacredness of mummery. He saw that while
the brutes have all the useful things, the things that are truly human
are the useless ones. He saw the falsehood of that almost universal
notion of to-day, the notion that rites and forms are something
artificial, additional, and corrupt. Ritual is really much older than
thought; it is much simpler and much wilder than thought. A feeling
touching the nature of things does not only make men feel that there
are certain proper things to say; it makes them feel that there are
certain proper things to do. The more agreeable of these consist of
dancing, building temples, and shouting very loud; the less agreeable,
of wearing green carnations and burning other philosophers alive. But
everywhere the religious dance came before the religious hymn, and man
was a ritualist before he could speak. If Comtism had spread the world
would have been converted, not by the Comtist philosophy, but by the
Comtist calendar. By discouraging what they conceive to be the
weakness of their master, the English Positivists have broken the
strength of their religion. A man who has faith must be prepared not
only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. It is absurd to say that a man
is ready to toil and die for his convictions when he is not even ready
to wear a wreath round his head for them. I myself, to take a corpus
vile, am very certain that I would not read the works of Comte through
for any consideration whatever. But I can easily imagine myself with
the greatest enthusiasm lighting a bonfire on Darwin Day.

That splendid effort failed, and nothing in the style of it has
succeeded. There has been no rationalist festival, no rationalist
ecstasy. Men are still in black for the death of God. When
Christianity was heavily bombarded in the