calling into active exercise the three social sentiments, veneration, attachment, and kindness.  We are to regard them, whether dead or alive, as our guardian angels, “les vrais anges gardiens.”  If the last two have never existed, or if, in the particular case, any of the three types is too faulty for the office assigned to it, their place may be supplied by some other type of womanly excellence, even by one merely historical.  Be the object living or dead, the adoration (as we understand it) is to be addressed only to the idea.  The prayer consists of two parts; a commemoration, followed by an effusion.  By a commemoration M. Comte means an effort of memory and imagination, summoning up with the utmost possible vividness the image of the object:  and every artifice is exhausted to render the image as life-like, as close to the reality, as near an approach to actual hallucination, as is consistent with sanity.  This degree of intensity having been, as far as practicable, attained, the effusion follows.  Every person should compose his own form of prayer, which should be repeated not mentally only, but orally, and may be added to or varied for sufficient cause, but never arbitrarily.  It may be interspersed with passages from the best poets, when they present themselves spontaneously, as giving a felicitous expression to the adorer’s own feeling.  These observances M. Comte practised to the memory of his Clotilde, and he enjoins them on all true believers.  They are to occupy two hours of every day, divided into three parts; at rising, in the middle of the working hours, and in bed at night.  The first, which should be in a kneeling attitude, will commonly be the longest, and the second the shortest.  The third is to be extended as nearly as possible to the moment of falling asleep, that its effect may be felt in disciplining even the dreams.

The public cultus consists of a series of celebrations or festivals, eighty-four in the year, so arranged that at least one occurs in every week.  They are devoted to the successive glorification of Humanity itself; of the various ties, political and domestic, among mankind; of the successive stages in the past evolution of our species; and of the several classes into which M. Comte’s polity divides mankind.  M. Comte’s religion has, moreover, nine Sacraments; consisting in the solemn consecration, by the priests of Humanity, with appropriate exhortations, of all the great transitions in life; the entry into life itself, and into each of its successive stages:  education, marriage, the choice of a profession, and so forth.  Among these is death, which receives the name of transformation, and is considered as a passage from objective existence to subjective—­to living in the memory of our fellow-creatures.  Having no eternity of objective existence to offer, M. Comte’s religion gives it all he can, by holding out the hope of subjective immortality—­of existing in the remembrance and in the posthumous