with the new ideas and accepted them as a matter of course.  Herbert Spencer, then deemed the greatest of English thinkers, was pointing out in portentous phraseology the enormous significance of Evolution.  Professor Huxley, in brilliant essays, was turning to ridicule the simple-minded credulity of Gladstone and his contemporaries.  Our parents, who read neither Spencer nor Huxley, lived in an intellectual world which bore no relation to our own; and cut adrift as we were from the intellectual moorings of our upbringings, recognising, as we did, that the older men were useless as guides in religion, in science, in philosophy because they knew not evolution, we also felt instinctively that we could accept nothing on trust from those who still believed that the early chapters of Genesis accurately described the origin of the universe, and that we had to discover somewhere for ourselves what were the true principles of the then recently invented science of sociology.

One man there was who professed to offer us an answer, Auguste Comte.  He too was pre-Darwinian, but his philosophy accepted science, future as well as past.  John Stuart Mill, whose word on his own subjects was then almost law, wrote of him with respectful admiration.  His followers were known to number amongst them some of the ablest thinkers of the day.  The “Religion of Humanity” offered solutions for all the problems that faced us.  It suggested a new heaven, of a sort, and it proposed a new earth, free from all the inequalities of wealth, the preventable suffering, the reckless waste of effort, which we saw around us.  At any rate, it was worth examination; and most of the free-thinking men of that period read the “Positive Polity” and the other writings of the founder, and spent some Sunday mornings at the little conventicle in Lamb’s Conduit Street, or attended on Sunday evenings the Newton Hall lectures of Frederic Harrison.

Few could long endure the absurdities of a made-up theology and a make-believe religion:  and the Utopia designed by Comte was as impracticable and unattractive as Utopias generally are.  But the critical and destructive part of the case was sound enough.  Here was a man who challenged the existing order of society and pronounced it wrong.  It was in his view based on conventions, on superstitions, on regulations which were all out of date; society should be reorganised in the light of pure reason; the anarchy of competition must be brought to an end; mankind should recognise that order, good sense, science, and, he added, religion freed from superstition, could turn the world into a place where all might live together in comfort and happiness.

Positivism proposed to attain its Utopia by moralising the capitalists, and herein it showed no advance on Christianity, which for nineteen centuries had in vain preached social obligation to the rich.  The new creed could not succeed where the old, with all its tremendous sanctions, had completely failed.  We wanted something fresh, some new method of dealing with the inequalities of wealth.