s ultimately return. Nothing shall be lost of these words
of life which have fallen from Wisdom's lips; they are treasured now in
many hearts, and some day, near or distant, they will be one and all
incorporated in some diviner gospel than any which has yet been heard,
and preached in some church, vast enough, catholic enough, for the
inspiration of the race. _Reposita est haec spes in sinu meo_.

In the meantime, we must attempt something of a succinct statement of
the ethical, social and religious system with which the name of Auguste
Comte is associated.

It is clear that he was early impelled to a study of the principles on
which society rests by the disorganisation into which his country had
fallen, after the upheaval of the Revolution and the disasters of the
Napoleonic era which succeeded it. It may even be the truth that his
bold and subversive teaching in religious matters was due to a profound
conviction that the virtue of the old ideals had been completely
exhausted, and that if society was to be regenerated, it must be by a
radical reformation of the theoretic conceptions on which it had been
held to repose. Certainly there was a vast deal in the contemporary
history of France to confirm Comte in his belief that Catholicism had
spent its force. At a period of crisis in a nation's history, thinking
men naturally look about them for some strong influence, for some
commanding ideal which can serve as a rallying point in times of social
dispersion, and help to keep the severing elements of the body politic
together. But what had religion done for France in the hour of her
trial? So little, that the country had to wade through blood in order
to reach a measure of political emancipation which England had long
enjoyed. In fact, it was the corruption of religion in the person of
its official representatives, its intellectual degradation in the eyes
of the thinkers, which helped to provoke the catastrophe. What wonder,
then, that a mind so penetrating and alert as Comte's early arrived at
the conclusion that the _ancien regime_ in religion, no less than in
politics, must be abolished if progress was to be possible among men?

Comte, then, was essentially a social philosopher. His work, indeed,
is encyclopaedic--not one whit less so than Spencer's--but the aim he
persistently kept in view was the service of man by the reconstruction,
through philosophy and religion, of the foundations on which
civilisation