ly removed from that
special moral temper and tone of feeling which we can alone call
Christian--the former by its want of sympathy and tenderness, no less
than the latter by its want of purity and self-command. Reassertion of
nature through its negation, or to put it more simply, the purification
of the natural desires by the renunciation of their immediate
gratification, is the idea that is more or less definitely present in
all phases of the history of Christianity; and, though swaying from one
side to the other, the religious life of modern times has never ceased
to present both aspects. Even a St. Augustine recoiled from the
Manichaeism by which nature was regarded, not simply as fallen from its
original idea, but as essentially impure. And, on the other hand, even
Rousseau's Savoyard vicar, who has got rid of the negative or ascetic
element, as completely as is possible for any one still retaining any
tincture of Christianity or even of religion, and who insists so
strongly on the text that "the natural is the moral," is yet forced to
recognize that nature has two voices, and that the _raison commune_ has
to overcome and transform the natural inclinations of the individual. In
the life of its Founder, the Christian Church has always had before it
an individual type of that harmony of the spiritual and natural life,
which it is its ideal to realize in all the wider spiritual relations of
man; nor, till that ideal is reached, can it be said that the Christian
idea is exhausted, or that the place is vacant for a new religion,
however great may be the changes of form and expression through which
Christianity must pass under the changed conditions of modern life.

That Comte was not able to discern this, arose, as we have seen, from
the fact that he held a kind of Manichaeism of his own. To him the
egoistic and altruistic desires were two kinds of innate tendencies,
both of which exist in man from the first, though with a great
preponderance on the side of egoism. Moral improvement simply consists
in altering the original proportions in favour of altruism, and moral
perfection would be the complete extinction of egoism (which with Comte
would naturally mean the extinction of all the desires classified as
personal). Hence there is a distinctly ascetic tendency in some of the
precepts of the _Politique Positive_,--_i.e._, asceticism begins to
appear, not simply as a transitionary process through which certain
natural des