e" (Horace).

XII.

THE ETHICAL CHURCH AND POSITIVISM.

The appearance within the last hundred years of different philosophical
attempts to produce a synthesis which should combine at once a system
of thought for the guidance of the mind, and a source of enthusiasm for
the inspiration of the heart, is significant of many things, but
chiefly of two. In the first place it is evidence that the present has
outgrown the past; that the religion of medievalism is inadequate to
modern needs; that

Still the new transcends the old,
In signs and tokens manifold.

And, next, it would appear to indicate the serious disposition of the
new Age. If we find the thinkers of humanity uniformly tending towards
a given direction, we may be sure there is an undefined, perhaps
unconscious, though none the less real, desire on the part of the age
to be led thither. Thus, at the close of the last century, Immanuel
Kant, while undermining the ground on which the faith of old rested,
attempted that new presentation of religion, as essential and sovereign
morality, with which we are so familiar. And, within half a century of
the foundation of the new Church, we meet with another bold and
comprehensive effort to revivify religion, which had grown cold in the
heart of his country, by showing that its chief expression is to be
found in that "love of the brotherhood" whereby Jesus Christ declared
his own truest followers would ever be known. "We tire of thinking and
even of acting," this foremost of the thinkers of his age declared, but
"we never tire of loving". I need not say that these are the words of
Auguste Comte, one of the two men in this nineteenth century who had
learning enough to grasp the universal knowable, and genius enough to
express it in a clearly defined philosophic system. His fellow and
compeer, of course, is our own Herbert Spencer.

Now, no one will be able to even dimly appreciate the significance of
the work of Immanuel Kant and Auguste Comte unless he realises that the
inspiration which moved them both was that which we call religion. As
the rivers flow into the sea, so the streams of knowledge converge at a
point which marks the limits of the finite, the boundaries of the
Infinite. There never was a system of thought yet which did not
culminate in the sublimity of religion. From the first system of all,
the immortal Aristotle's, down to Kant's, Comte's and Spencer's in our
own times, the issue is