his existence to be destined, and finally by man's dependence on Humanity, and the reverence and awe with which he must regard this Providence. RELIGIOUS CELEBRATIONS Meetings and addresses have been continued regularly on Sundays throughout the year, except during the summer months, when out-door pilgrimages and visits to distant places were substituted for meetings in the Hall. There has been no regular attempt to institute any formal ritual, and no invocations answering to the litanies of theology have ever been used by us. From time to time, the leading ideas of the Positivist faith have been embodied in specific maxims; the reading of selected passages from masterpieces of poetry and prose has been frequent; and a choir has been trained to sing with organ accompaniment selected sets of hymns, anthems, and songs, exclusively idealising the human conception of religious emotion. But the essential purpose of these Sunday gatherings has been to promote a systematic understanding of the history and course of human civilisation, to awaken the sense of man's dependence on Humanity, his duties towards Humanity, and to stimulate the study of the moral and material conditions of man's being on earth. These meetings and addresses have had a religious character in that they have been designed to deepen our understanding of human nature, of personal and social duty, and to kindle the sense of devotion to all forms of human duty. We have not sought to give them the character of adoration by way of set formularies, nor have we spoken of them as services in any special sense other than what we understand as the service of Man. We have never prejudged the question as to how far the future may succeed in adapting the invocations and the effu sions familiar to modern Christianity to the honour of an ideal assemblage of human beings, living, dead, and unborn, and (presumably) without any collective personality or consciousness for this is what Humanity represents to us. It seems to us premature to attempt any such adaptation - even if it were practicable. We have never tested the problem. On the one hand it seems unscientific to invoke that which is not believed to be reciprocally conscious. On the other hand, poetry, rhetoric, and all emotion are habitually prone to attribute feeling to moral and even to material organisms. The ancients endowed with life their tribe, their founding, their State, their society. Israel, Rome, the Church, the Republic, the Revolution, the Future, have led men to death, self-devotion, and fervid apostrophes. And it is reasonable that Humanity, which is infinitely greater and absorbs all these, may in a regenerated society do the same. But for ourselves we have not ventured to suggest a ritual or direct cult of that sort. Devotional expression on the model of modern rituals has always seemed to us wholly insufficient to represent the worship of the future as conceived by Auguste Comte, by which we understand the collective commemoration of all that is wise, beneficent, beautiful, and creative in the history and endowments of Man. Indeed, the repetition of prearranged forms of expression and the utterance of invocations, is a totally different thing from the habitual cultivation of heart, of character, and of imagination, to which Comte applied the untranslatable term of Culte. Mere imitations of the formularies and devotional symbols of Monotheism could only retard the rise of social and artistic worship in a healthy and ample form. And it has often tended to mislead others by withdrawing their attention from the scientific and practical character of the Positivist system. The Sunday discourses have dealt with the history of the past, the public and social duties of citizens, and the philosophical and religious truths on which the harmony of personal and social life depends. For history, Professor Beesly in the twenty years has delivered a series of lectures, in a succession of epochs, covering the entire period from the dawn of civilisation to the nineteenth century. The late J. Cotter Morison, Dr. Bridges, Mr. Vernon Lushington, Mr. Swinny, Mr. Marvin, the late Mr. Charles Fyffe, and myself, have treated, in systematic courses, various epochs of ancient and modern history. In Sociology, the principles of Positivist Ethics, Social Economics, the theory of Politics, of Industry, of International Comity, have been constantly presented in a series of lectures. The maxims, education, worship, and ideals of the human faith have been also expounded and developed. And the moral and social problems involved in the crucial questions of the day, apart from any question of party, have been continually insisted on from the standpoint of a systematic scheme of political and social reorganisation. COMMEMORATIONS -- One of the most typical modes of what Auguste Comte understood by the term Culte is the commemoration of the great servants of Humanity, and the due exposition of their lives and achievements. This is a great amplification of the useful but very narrow institution of the Church the celebration of the lives of Saints and Martyrs. New Year's Day (the Day of Humanity), New Year's Eve (the Day of All the Dead), and the anniversary of the death of Comte (September 5), have been regularly observed in this Hall by appropriate meetings, chants, and discourses. The centenaries, or secular anniversaries of the great men specially marked in the Positivist Calendar have been constantly observed as these occasions came round. The year 1881, corresponding to the year 1300 in the Musulman era, was the occasion of a review of the character and work of Mahomet, who represents, as do Buddha, Confucius, and Numa, one type of theocratic civilisation, in company with Moses in the historical calendar. The millenary of Alfred, the great Saxon hero, was specially celebrated in 1901; and it had been proposed many years earlier in the pilgrimage we made to Winchester in 1890. Other centenaries observed were those of William the Silent, Cromwell, Frederick II., Washington, the French Revolution, Calderon, Corneille, Burns, Gutenberg, Diderot, Condorcet, John Hunter, Comte, — Raffaelle, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven - the musicians being commemorated by vocal and instrumental performance of some of their principal works, as was also the case for the songs of Shakespeare and of Burns. Other musical commemorations were those of Bach and the founders of modern music, and on the Day of the Dead, 1883, was presented the typical poem of George Eliot, "Oh, may I join the choir invisible," as a cantata for voices and stringed instruments. PILGRIMAGES During the summer months it has been our custom to visit the tombs, homes, or birthplaces of great men, historic buildings, the national museums, picture galleries, and there to hold lectures on the history of men, places, art, science, and literature. In some cases these visits have extended over several days, as did those made to Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, and Stratford-on-Avon. Others were to Canterbury, Winchester, Ely, St. Alban's, Hampton Court, Chalfont, Jordans, Rolls, Hampstead, Laver, Highgate, Dawn. The public galleries of all kinds: the Museums, the Tower, the Temple, Westminster Hall, and other ancient buildings of London, have been systematically studied by means of courses of lectures given on the spot. On the anniversary of the death of Comte, when our Parisian colleagues visit Père la Chaise, it has been our annual practice to visit the tombs and monuments of great men in Westminster Abbey, and to precede this visit by an historical lecture, for which facilities have been afforded by the Dean and Chapter. Such collections as those of the British Museum, the South Kensington, and Natural History Museum, the National Gallery, the Tate Gallery, and the National Portrait Gallery, have usually been taken in periods or sections specially selected, and the party conducted by a competent student of the subject chosen. Pilgrimages of the kind were originally a French institution, mainly promoted by Pierre Laffitte; and we have been glad to see that the practice has widely spread amongst educational and religious bodies here. They afford an occasion for combining historical and artistic instruction with the spirit of reverential gratitude that we are bound to cultivate towards the great men and the memorable heroisms of the past. They are at once education and religion — in the sense in which religion is understood in this place. When we stand beside the birthplace of Shakespeare or of Cromwell, or at the tomb of Milton or Newton, the genius loci colours with a new emotion the interest that may be kindled as we study in a lectureroom their works or their deeds. And days spent in visits to the spots made sacred by great memories - whether in Paris, in Oxford, Cambridge, or Stratford - may teach more than the perusing of academic text-books. Amongst those whose services to mankind have thus been recorded in presence of their actual dust, or of the homes in which they lived, on the spots with which they are associated, we may |