her
development, led to the adoration of the saints, and above all of the
Virgin Mother, in whom Christian devotion really worshipped humanity, in
its simplest and tenderest affections. Finally, if benevolent sympathies
were denied to nature, St. Paul found a place for them by attributing
them to grace, "which Thomas a Kempis admirably defines as the
equivalent of love--_gratia sive dilectio_--divine inspiration being
substituted for human impulse."[36] And the struggle between egoism and
altruism was expressed in the doctrines of the Fall and Redemption of
mankind.[37] Thus the social passion, which, according to the theory,
could not be found in humanity, was conceived to flow from a divine
influence, and became ennobled, at least as a means of salvation, in the
eyes of those who would otherwise have suppressed it. At the same time,
as Comte also contends, these additions or corrections of the original
doctrine were inconsistent or imperfect in themselves, and inadequate to
the social purpose for which they were destined; and they naturally
disappeared whenever, by the emancipation of the intelligence, the
immense egoism, which Monotheism consecrated in God and favoured in man,
was let loose from the bonds in which the Church had confined it.
Protestantism was the first indication of this change; for Protestantism
is but an organized anarchy, in which the only elements of order are
derived from an instinctive conservatism, clinging to the fragments of a
past doctrinal system, which, in principle, has been abandoned. It
contains no organic elements of its own--no positive contribution to the
progressive life of humanity; it is simply the first imperfect result of
that metaphysical individualism which, in its ultimate form, freed from
all the limits of the Catholic system, expressed itself theoretically
in Rousseau and Voltaire, and practically in the French Revolution. The
hope of mankind, however, lies in the new synthesis of Positivism, which
alone can give due value to the innate altruistic sympathies of man, and
which therefore alone can place on a permanent scientific basis that
social order which the mediaeval Church attempted in vain to found on the
essentially egoistic and anarchic doctrine of Monotheism.

The fundamental conception, then, which underlies Comte's view of
progress is, that every past religion, with the partial exception of
Fetichism, has been an amalgam of two radically inconsistent elements,
on