living Being of Humanity itself. May we have grace to follow them in all virtuous and humane living, so that we may one day join them in the vast uprising into a higher civilisation on earth! It is a Heaven not confined to the elect. It is a Heaven without a Purgatory and without a Hell. It is a Heaven, or, more truly, an earthly Future on a nobler plane, to which all good men, all good women, children, slaves, outcasts, contribute and share, in which even the merely useful or the moderately virtuous share, provided their evil deeds do not positively outweigh their better deeds. It is a Future from which none are excluded but the utterly vicious or pernicious; which is divested of all cruel terrors, and accompanied by no lingering expiations. Those who have done evil-rest in peace. The worst that awaits them is this: that over their graves men say, They indeed are dead. Oblivion, annihilation, eternal Night and Silence in very deed do await them. These only are the really Dead. There is one side, and one side alone, whereon the thoughts of this day must recall to us the cruel aspect of Death. Necessary, inevitable, universal, and even blessed as is Death when regarded as part of the evolution of Humanity, it is cruel enough in the particular, for the time, for the individual, for the family. Birth also, though it be a joy, and a condition of life, is cruel too. And not all the belief that her infant is another Shakespeare or a Cromwell born into the world, can soften one pang in the mother's agony. Death - which is the condition of all progress to Humanity, through which only can the servants of Humanity rise to their highest dignity and power Death comes with a stunning blow on the bereaved household and the sorrowing friends. It would be worse than idle to attempt to mitigate this horror by fantastic promises or fine words, or to seek to bedizen and disguise the sharpest agonies which human nature knows. Some of us here, only a few hours ago, stood in our glorious Abbey, the most sacred spot in England, and saw the body of one whom we have known and loved for a generation laid in that thrice consecrated dust. Few men have had more friends, fewer enemies, more devoted admirers. It seems but the other day that we held his generous hand, heard his hearty laugh, and revelled in the light of his genius and his humanity. It was a burial, as the poet says, so noble, “that kings for such a tomb would wish to die." Yet it could not stifle the grief of the son who had lost his father, and the sister who had lost her brother, and the many friends who had lost their friend. No! though Death might seem to be robbed of his terrors by such sympathy in a whole nation, and such a perfect crown to a long life of glory and of goodness. It was not so. And to hundreds there the hot tears swelled into their eyes as they thought, not of glory or of honour, but of the good man whom they would see no more. How much more, then, when Death comes down with all its appalling weight on the private household, where it cuts off, it may be prematurely, one most necessary, most beloved, most wrapped round in the love of family, and without whom the family seems unable to live. It would be a mockery to pretend that when death comes thus, it is not a calamity under which the reason itself seems to reel. But only for the time. It is but two short weeks since many of us here stood beside the husband, the sons, the brothers and sisters, and the many friends of one who was dearly loved and widely known amongst us one whose mortal remains we committed to our mother earth in grief, resignation, and loving remembrance. It could not be but that on this day we should think in a special sense on a loss so recent and so deeply affecting us all on a calamity so entirely irreparable to one whom 1 Robert Browning, buried in Westminster Abbey, 31st December, 1889. we so greatly honour here, to the husband who survives the wife. Our thoughts about the meanings of this day, and our tributes of honour to the great ones of the past and the countless host of the unknown ones whereof Humanity is formed, must be deeply tinged by the near and personal sorrow which touches our own heart sorrow that, in a yet keener way, pierces the hearts of those who are so close to us. It would be idle, it would be inhuman, to pretend that this close and intimate pang can be absorbed at once in the wider and distant hope of Humanity. Such is the law of human nature. The one close tie touches us always more deeply than a thousand ties to the remote. We love the feeblest infant of our own begetting more dearly than the noblest character of our own age or of all the ages past. The disappearance of the friend whose hand we can no longer grasp pains us far more than the disappearance of the greatest statesman or poet. It is so; and it is indeed well for us that it is so. For we learn to love Humanity in the large only by first learning to love our own in the Home. But this personal pang for what we love is not, in all its intensity, perpetual. Time consecrates it, ennobles it, transfigures it. Slowly, but surely, the grander social influences of the personal calamity grow more plain and dominant. Humanity, in all its power, reflects back on our home desolation the higher uses of the great law of life. We learn to see in death the condition of all social progress, the real glorification of Humanity, as we come to learn how death itself may deepen, raise, and ennoble our own life. The memory of those we lose is no mere reminiscence. It transfigures to each of us the lost one. Never in life did they seem to us so tender, so pure, so steadfast, so wise; never was it in life so sweet to accept guidance, help, and consolation from them, as now that the voice of the loved one is heard only from out the silent depths of memory. What a profanation it seems to doubt or to reject the warning word that comes to us now only in imagination! How do we reflect a thousand times that we have never half known all that we have lost! How do we now see deeper and sweeter meaning in all that is meant by Home, and Family, by Friendship, and by Love! Now, indeed, we know that those who have gone before us are risen into a Heaven, shall we say? that word has been associated with a mass of fantastic incomprehensibilities - risen, rather, into a purer world, the world where the souls of the just become incorporate in the living action of Humanity. Now we know them to be not Angels, for that word has been given to unintelligible monstrosities - but men and women transfigured by the halo which dignifies the Past and all who dwell therein. This is the true future life. This is the real immortality. No good life dies or can die. The body dies. But the life, the activity, the love, the care, the teaching of every worthy man or woman must live in its effect in those whom their influence has touched, in the husband or the wife, the child, the brother, the friend, who survive - even in the unknown stranger who in any degree has been made stronger, better, happier, by their aid. This is what, in a visionary way, the great founder of Christianity saw as in a glass darkly. Since by man came death, by man came also the transfiguration of the dead. As in Adam all die, even so in Humanity shall all continue to live. This corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. Thus, in a real and certain sense, Death is swallowed up in Humanity. The victory is with Humanity, which has taken us up into herself for ever. I Moses, 99. XV DAY OF HUMANITY 1887 1 January, 1887. As we meet again on the New Year, we must take note of the fact that we are now in the thirtieth year since the death of Auguste Comte; in the fortieth year since he first publicly taught the belief, now known throughout the world as the Religion of Humanity. At his death, in 1857, his books were but little known; Positivism had no organised existence outside of his own study walls; it was not a factor in the religious, social, political, and intellectual life of the age. To-day it is. It holds the field. It grows, lives, and visibly acts. Churchmen, politicians, reformers, even the serene race of philosophers, have to reckon with it. It meets them face to face. Organised communities of Positivists in many places, in many countries, both of Europe and America, are living in what no one can deny to be a social and religious communion. But not to set too much store by the organised communities, what, I think, is far more really important, is this: — The movements of the day find Positivist ideas in the field, calling for a settlement. The preachers say: "How can we answer this claim of a religion of human duty?" "How can we get rid of this certain promise of a life after death, here on earth, and in the lives of the good and the loving and the brave who survive?" The social reformers say: "Why do these |