Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, April 1885. Various

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СКАЧАТЬ one feeling in our gathered mourners – a sense of loss that could ill be borne, honor to his gentle and upright career, sympathy with those whom he had left. The occasion will long be remembered, perhaps, as the first on which our body has ever been called on to take part in a purely Positivist burial service. Did any one present feel that the religion of Humanity is without its power to dignify, to consecrate, and to console in the presence of death? I speak not for others, but for myself. And, for my part, when I remember the pathetic chant of our friends at the grave, the reality of their reverend sorrow, the consolatory sense of resignation and hope with which we laid our brother in his peaceful bed, I feel the conviction that in this supreme office, the great test of religious power, the faith in Humanity will surpass the faith in the fictions – in beauty, in pathos, in courage, and in consolation, even as it so manifestly surpasses them in reality.

      The hand of death has been heavy on us both abroad and at home. The past year has carried off to their immortal life two of the original disciples and friends of our master, Auguste Hadery and Fabien Magnin. Both have been most amply honored in funeral sermons by M. Laffitte. Fabien Magnin was one of those rare men who represent to the present the type that we look for in the future. A workman (he was an engine-pattern maker,) he chose to live and die a workman, proud of his order, and confident in its destinies; all through his long life without fortune, or luxury, or ambition; a highly-trained man of science; a thoroughly trained politician, loyal unshakenly to his great teacher and his successor; of all the men I have ever known the most perfect type of the cultivated, incorruptible, simple, courageous man of the people. With his personal influence over his fellow-workmen, and from the ascendency of his intellect and character, he might easily in France have forced his way into the foremost place. With his scientific resources, and his faculty both for writing and speech, he might easily have entered the literary or scientific class. With his energy, prudence, and mechanical skill, he might easily have amassed a fortune. The attractions of such careers never seemed to touch by a ripple the serene surface of his austere purity. He chose to live and die in the strictest simplicity – the type of an honest and educated citizen, who served to make us feel all that the future has to promise to the workman, when remaining a workman, devoted to his craft and to his order, he shall be as highly educated as the best of us to-day; as courteous and dignified as the most refined; as simple as the ideal village pastor; as ardent a Republican as the Ferrys and Gambettas whose names fill the journals.

      We have this past year also carried out another series of commemorations, long familiar to our friends in France, but which are a real creation of Positivist belief. I mean those Pilgrimages or religious visits to the scenes of the lives of our great men. This is a real revival of a noble mediæval and Oriental practice, but wholly without superstitious taint, and entirely in the current of modern scientific thought. We go in a body to some spot where one of our immortal countrymen lived or died, and there, full of the beauty of the scene on which he used to gaze, and of the genius loci by which he was inspired, we listen to a simple discourse on his life and work. In this way we visited the homes or the graves of Bacon, of Harvey, of Milton, of Penn, of Cromwell, and of our William of Orange. What may not the art of the future produce for us in this most fruitful mode, when in place of the idle picnics and holidays of vacant sightseers, in place of the formal celebration of some prayer-book saint, we shall gather in a spirit of real religion and honor round the birthplace, the home, it may be the grave, of some poet, thinker, or ruler; and amidst all the inspiration of Nature and of the sacred memories of the soil, shall fill our hearts with the joy in beauty and profound veneration of the mighty Dead?

III

      In our Sunday meetings, which have been regularly continued excepting during the four summer months, we have continued our plan of dealing alike with the religious, the social, and the intellectual sides of the Positivist view of life and duty. The Housing of the Poor, Art, Biology, Socialism, our social Duties, the Memory of the Dead, the Positivist grounds of Morality, and our Practical Duties in Life, formed the subject of one series. Since our re-opening in the autumn, we have had courses on the Bible, on the religious value of the modern poets, and on the true basis of social equality. Amongst the features of special interest in these series of discourses is that one course was given by a former Unitarian minister who, after a life of successful preaching in the least dogmatic of all the Christian Churches, has been slowly reduced to the conviction that the reality of Humanity is a more substantial basis for religion to rest on than the hypothesis of God, and that the great scheme of human morality is a nobler Gospel to preach than the artificial ideal of a subjective Christ. I would in particular note the series of admirable lectures on the Bible, by Dr. Bridges, which combined the results of the latest learning on this intricate mass of ancient writings with the sympathetic and yet impartial judgment with which Positivists adopt into their sacred literature the most famous and most familiar of all the religious books of mankind. And again I would note that beautiful series of discourses by Mr. Vernon Lushington on the great religious poets of the modern world: – Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Wordsworth and Shelley. When we have them side by side, we shall have before us a new measure of the sound, sympathetic, and universal spirit of Positivist belief. It is only those who are strangers to it and to us who can wonder how we come to put the Bible and the poets in equal places of honor as alike the great organs of true religious feeling.

      The systematic teaching of science, which is an essential part of our conception of Positivism, has been maintained in this hall with unabated energy. In the beginning of the year Mr. Vernon Lushington commenced and carried through (with what an effort of personal self-devotion no one of us can duly measure) his class on the history and the elements of Astronomy. This winter, Mr. Lock has opened a similar class on the History and Elements of Mathematics. Positivism is essentially a scheme for reforming education, and it is only through a reformed education, universal to all classes alike, and concerned with the heart as much as the intellect, that the religious meaning of Humanity can ever be unfolded. The singing class, the expense of which was again assumed by Mr. Lushington, was steadily and successfully maintained during the first part of the year. We are still looking forward to the formation of a choir. The social meetings which we instituted last year have become a regular feature of our movement, and greatly contribute to our closer union and our better understanding of the social and sympathetic meaning of the faith we profess.

      The publications of the year have been first and chiefly, The Testament and Letters of Auguste Comte, a work long looked for, the publication of which has been long delayed by various causes. In the next place I would call attention to the new and popular edition of International Policy, a work of combined essays which we put forward in 1866, nearly twenty years ago. Our object in that work was to state and apply to the leading international problems in turn the great principles of social morality on which it is the mission of Positivism to show that the politics of nations can only securely repose. In an epoch which is still tending, we are daily assured, to the old passion for national self-assertion, it is significant that the Positivist school alone can resolutely maintain and fearlessly repeat its dictates of morality and justice, whilst all the Churches, all the political parties, and all the so-called organs of opinion, which are really the creatures of parties and cliques, find various pretexts for abandoning them altogether. How few are the political schools around us who could venture to republish after twenty years, their political programmes of 1866, their political doctrines and practical solutions of the tangled international problems, and who could not find in 1885 a principle which they had discarded, or a proposal which to-day they are ashamed to have made twenty years ago.

      Besides these books, the only separate publications of our body are the affecting address of Mr. Ellis On the due Commemoration of the Dead. The Positivist Society has met throughout the year for the discussion of the social and political questions of the day. The most public manifestation of its activity has been the part that it took in the third centenary of the great hero of national independence, William, Prince of Orange, called the Silent. The noble and weighty address in which Mr. Beesly expressed to the Dutch Committee at Delft the honor in which we held that immortal memory, has deeply touched, we are told, those to whom it was addressed. And it is significant that from this hall, dedicated to peace, to the Republic, to the people, and to Humanity, there was sent forth the one voice from the entire British race in honor to the СКАЧАТЬ