Christum was a fact not a taunt. And if the Seven had demolished the old dogma - Extra ecclesiam nulla Salus —, it was by substituting for it - Intra ecclesiam nulla veritas. The Creeds became a matter of open opinion. Comte usually spoke of our Church as l'hypocrisie Anglicane. The Establishment, a creature of Tudor monarchy and Hanoverian aristocracy, still continues to enjoy its vast revenues and its exclusive ascendency; whilst still sheltering all and any opinions from veiled Catholicism to a vague Deism, and all the shades intermediate between both.

THE NEW THEOLOGY

I now reissue my review, which for forty-seven years I have refused to do; for I was unwilling to censure men who, however uncandid both intellectually and morally, were no doubt trying to do what satisfied their conscience, and also because I had no taste for destructive criticism, and was absorbed in the task of a positive reconstruction of belief. These reasons no longer apply. The Essayists are all now gone, full of honours and public repute; they left no successors or school; the party they formed or led is no longer active. But the same intellectual double-dealing in things theological exists and is far wider spread. Men who fancy themselves still to be Christians, Churchmen, even preachers of the Gospel, treat it as immaterial whether the Bible be God's truth or a dubious compilation of Oriental documents; whether there be really three Persons who are each God, or there be only one God; whether the son of the carpenter of Galilee was or was not the Creator of the Universe. Crowds of lay Christians, and even some beneficed priests, seem to think it hardly fair to have such questions put to them.

Until the religious world can bring itself to feel that true

religious conscience requires these plain questions to be answered, it is essential to insist on them as antecedent to all honest belief. We have all heard enough of the saving faith of "honest doubt." "Honest doubt" means "facing-bothways," deceiving self, deceiving others, "making the best of both worlds." In the meantime many of us see an enormously wealthy and privileged Church blessing wanton wars of aggression in the name of the Prince of Peace, bolstering up Prerogative, Monopoly, Reaction, of the rich and privileged orders by invoking the Sermon on the Mount, stinting and starving the education of the people in order to keep the children in their Church control in effect doing what the orthodox church in Russia does for the bureaucracy of the Tsar. Whilst sacerdotalism does all this, religious reformation requires that serious men should speak words of plain, if unpalatable truth.

From time to time I still look into what is called the "advanced" theology of Anglican divines, and I find it a world of evasion, double entendre, and verbose Theosophy. Each philologist destroys the "new theology" of the latest disquisition, and announces wild guesses of his own. It is a world of phantasmagoric surprises, in which everything is something else, and every one has been quite misled. Whether Abraham, Moses, and Joshua represent not persons but tribal myths, remnants of antique totems or primitive astrology — all this is matter for endless debate; every man, woman, and child is, in a "spiritual sense," an incarnation of "the Supreme Logos"; the Creeds really teach "the immanence of the Divine Goodness" in Humanity. The only fixed point is that the Church never was so beneficent or so powerful.

An honest, manly, intelligent judgment about the old faith is indispensable for any solid formation of the new faith.

Whilst men are ever imploring each other not to unsettle hesitating minds, to avoid all controversy, to respect venerable traditions, the masses will easily stagnate in the old obscurantist habits of mind with all their moral and social evils. The great maxim is true "He only destroys who can replace." And it is as true also that no one can replace till he has cleared the ground for new foundations. The Faith of Humanity admits no Voltairean criticism, with wit as its weapon and humiliation as its purpose. It is far less inclined to destroy than any one of the religions the world has seen: - far more respectful of those it supersedes; for it not only respects them, but embraces their true essence and nobler spirit whilst lopping away their rotten accretions. It will not storm Churches and ruin their works of art, as did Puritan fanaticism. It will not torture Protestants as Catholicism did. It will not extirpate Polytheism as Christianity did; nor engage in furious Crusades as did both Christendom and Islam. But it must make clear the broad difference between a religion founded on Science, in order to idealise Human Nature, and a religion founded on obsolete traditions, in order to glorify a metaphysical hypothesis which is ever assuming some new cloud-shape.

My critical essay of 1860 is therefore now reissued with hardly any change; for the same incoherences are common to-day. After full reflection of nearly half a century, I fail to see that it was either ill-timed, unjust, or overstated. I am more convinced than ever that Essays and Reviews represented a real combination to throw off the bonds of Scripture, Creed, and Articles, even for beneficed priests within the Established Church. And I have never seen any refutation of the specific charges of heterodoxy that our Review set forth. The able historian of Rationalism strangely enough suggests that the article of 1860 exaggerated the arguments

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of the Essayists; but he admits that the effects of their teaching have since become plain. That indeed this historian himself has amply proved.' The Reviewer in fact truly foresaw the logical results of the Essayists' doctrines. They were all either patent or latent in the book. And they are now the views of most cultivated laymen.

The critical essay which follows must speak for itself. As criticism it will stand alone. The remainder of this volume, like the essential part of everything I have said or written on the religious problem, will be found to be directly reconstructive, non-controversial, positive. We entirely repudiate all the negations; be they atheistic, agnostic, secularist, Protestant, or non-conformist. Positivism is always and in everything Positive. And Auguste Comte chose the word Positive to condense the seven ideas of real - useful — certain precise - organic - relative sympathetic. I trust that this volume will not be found to derogate from that manifold ideal, even though in seeking to establish the real, it has to point to the crumbling and decaying props on which the unreal still struggles to maintain its reign, -nay still presumes to claim the obsolete ascendency with which the State for its own ends invested it in Tudor ages.

CONVERSION TO POSITIVISM

I declined all invitations to continue theological criticism, and in the following years I was occupied with law, economics, and history. I studied the Middle Ages and the great Catholic thinkers, especially St. Augustine, St. Bernard, Aquinas, À-Kempis, Bossuet, De Maistre, the Catholic Hymns and Lives of the Saints. Dr. Congreve published

1 History of Rationalism in England. A. W. Benn. 2 vols. 8vo. London, 1906.

his translation of Comte's Catechism, and Dr. Bridges his translation of Comte's General View. The four volumes of the Positive Polity, the six volumes of the Positive Philosophy, Comte's Popular Astronomy and his Subjective Synthesis, became my constant companions in the original. I obtained the books named in the Positivist Library, and studied most of them; and I collected engraved portraits of some hundred of the leading names in the Positivist Calendar. My small gallery of Heroes, and the busts of great men, have always been around me and beside me at my work.' I made frequent visits to Paris, and there made the acquaintance of Pierre Laffitte, Comte's pupil and successor, of Dr. Robinet, Comte's physician and biographer, and of the leading men and women in the Positivist circle. During the ten years between 1860 and 1870 I had steadily assimilated the whole scheme of Auguste Comte, was doing what I could to remedy my defective education in science, and was using the Library and the Calendar as a guide to study, but I did not seek affiliation to the body in Paris, which still seemed to me premature, nor did I make any attempt to take part in a propaganda of Positivism as a religious system.

On the contrary, I continued to follow Christian worship in many forms Catholic, Anglican, Unitarian, Baptist. I often heard sermons by Frederick Maurice, Dr. Goulburn, Dr. Liddon, Mr. Stopford Brooke, Dr. Martineau, Mr. Spurgeon, and the Jesuit fathers at Farm Street which I constantly attended. I had an almost morbid craving for Choral services, such as those of the Abbey, St. Paul's, the Temple, or Lincoln's Inn. I made a study of Gothic architecture, and in one way or other have visited with care and the requisite

1 Especially Aristotle, Descartes, Bacon, Comte: Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Cervantes, Goethe, Scott and Burns: Cæsar, Cromwell, Frederick, Richelieu, Henry IV., Washington.