de la formule positiviste a representer toujours la condition humaine, il convient ordinairement de l’enoncer en touchant successivement les principaux organes que la theorie cerebrale assigne a ses trois elements.”  This may be a very appropriate mode of expressing one’s devotion to the Grand Etre:  but any one who had appreciated its effect on the profane reader, would have thought it judicious to keep it back till a considerably more advanced stage in the propagation of the Positive Religion.

As M. Comte’s religion has a cultus, so also it has a clergy, who are the pivot of his entire social and political system.  Their nature and office will be best shown by describing his ideal of political society in its normal state, with the various classes of which it is composed.

The necessity of a Spiritual Power, distinct and separate from the temporal government, is the essential principle of M. Comte’s political scheme; as it may well be, since the Spiritual Power is the only counterpoise he provides or tolerates, to the absolute dominion of the civil rulers.  Nothing can exceed his combined detestation and contempt for government by assemblies, and for parliamentary or representative institutions in any form.  They are an expedient, in his opinion, only suited to a state of transition, and even that nowhere but in England.  The attempt to naturalize them in France, or any Continental nation, he regards as mischievous quackery.  Louis Napoleon’s usurpation is absolved, is made laudable to him, because it overthrew a representative government.  Election of superiors by inferiors, except as a revolutionary expedient, is an abomination in his sight.  Public functionaries of all kinds should name their successors, subject to the approbation of their own superiors, and giving public notice of the nomination so long beforehand as to admit of discussion, and the timely revocation of a wrong choice.  But, by the side of the temporal rulers, he places another authority, with no power to command, but only to advise and remonstrate.  The family being, in his mind as in that of Frenchmen generally, the foundation and essential type of all society, the separation of the two powers commences there.  The spiritual, or moral and religious power, in a family, is the women of it.  The positivist family is composed of the “fundamental couple,” their children, and the parents of the man, if alive.  The whole government of the household, except as regards the education of the children, resides in the man; and even over that he has complete power, but should forbear to exert it.  The part assigned to the women is to improve the man through his affections, and to bring up the children, who, until the age of fourteen, at which scientific instruction begins, are to be educated wholly by their mother.  That women may be better fitted for these functions, they are peremptorily excluded from all others.  No woman is to work for her living.  Every woman is to