e find that Comte is fairer towards Catholicism than he is
towards Protestantism, or towards that individualism which grew out of
Protestantism, and which he is pleased to call Metaphysics. The latter
he sees solely on their destructive side, as successive stages in the
modern movement of revolt, without appreciating the constructive
elements involved in them. Hence also he is led, in his attitude towards
this great movement, to all but identify himself with Catholic writers
like De Maistre; and his own scheme of the future is essentially
reactionary. The restoration of the spiritual power to its mediaeval
position was a natural proposal for one who saw in the Protestant revolt
nothing more than an insurrectionary movement, which might clear the way
for a new social construction, but which in itself was the negation of
all government whatever.

For what was Protestantism? To the Protestant it seemed to be simply a
return to the original purity of the Christian faith; to the Catholic,
it seemed to be a fatal revolt against the only organization by which
Christianity could be realized. Really it partook of both characters. It
involved at once a dangerous misconception of the social conditions,
under which alone the religious life can be realized and developed, and
a deeper and truer apprehension of that religion, which first recognized
the latent divinity or universal capacity of every spiritual being as
such, and which, therefore, seemed to impose upon every individual man
the right or rather the duty of living by the witness of his own spirit.
Comte saw only the former of these aspects of it. Hence he regarded the
French Revolution as a practical refutation of the individualism which
grew out of the Protestant movement, and not, as it was in truth, a
critical event, which should force men to distinguish and separate its
true and its false elements. And he drew from it the lesson that the
individual has no moral or religious life of his own, but that it is
only in proportion as he transcends his own individuality and lives the
life of humanity, that his own spiritual life can have any depth or
riches in it. Like Burke he could say, "We are afraid to put men to live
and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect
that the stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do
better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations
and of ages." But because he discerned this, he re