be supported by her husband or her male relations, and if she has none of these, by the State.  She is to have no powers of government, even domestic, and no property.  Her legal rights of inheritance are preserved to her, that her feelings of duty may make her voluntarily forego them.  There are to be no marriage portions, that women may no longer be sought in marriage from interested motives.  Marriages are to be rigidly indissoluble, except for a single cause.  It is remarkable that the bitterest enemy of divorce among all philosophers, nevertheless allows it, in a case which the laws of England, and of other countries reproached by him with tolerating divorce, do not admit:  namely, when one of the parties has been sentenced to an infamizing punishment, involving loss of civil rights.  It is monstrous that condemnation, even for life, to a felon’s punishment, should leave an unhappy victim bound to, and in the wife’s case under the legal authority of, the culprit.  M. Comte could feel for the injustice in this special case, because it chanced to be the unfortunate situation of his Clotilde.  Minor degrees of unworthiness may entitle the innocent party to a legal separation, but without the power of re-marriage.  Second marriages, indeed, are not permitted by the Positive Religion.  There is to be no impediment to them by law, but morality is to condemn them, and every couple who are married religiously as well as civilly are to make a vow of eternal widowhood, “le veuvage eternel.”  This absolute monogamy is, in M. Comte’s opinion, essential to the complete fusion between two beings, which is the essence of marriage; and moreover, eternal constancy is required by the posthumous adoration, which is to be continuously paid by the survivor to one who, though objectively dead, still lives “subjectively.”  The domestic spiritual power, which resides in the women of the family, is chiefly concentrated in the most venerable of them, the husband’s mother, while alive.  It has an auxiliary in the influence of age, represented by the husband’s father, who is supposed to have passed the period of retirement from active life, fixed by M. Comte (for he fixes everything) at sixty-three; at which age the head of the family gives up the reins of authority to his son, retaining only a consultative voice.

This domestic Spiritual Power, being principally moral, and confined to a private life, requires the support and guidance of an intellectual power exterior to it, the sphere of which will naturally be wider, extending also to public life.  This consists of the clergy, or priesthood, for M. Comte is fond of borrowing the consecrated expressions of Catholicism to denote the nearest equivalents which his own system affords.  The clergy are the theoretic or philosophical class, and are supported by an endowment from the State, voted periodically, but administered by themselves.  Like women, they are to be excluded from all riches, and from all participation in power (except the absolute