eyelids, and the human sky Be gathered like a scroll within the tomb Unread for ever.  This is life to come, Which martyred men have made more glorious For us who strive to follow.  May I reach That purest heaven, and be to other souls That cup of strength in some great agony, Enkindle generous ardour, feed pure love, Beget the smiles that have no cruelty, Be the sweet presence of a good diffused, And in diffusion ever more intense; So shall I join that choir invisible Whose music is the gladness of the world.

Here is the positive religion of benevolence and progress, as preached to the modern world in the name of exact thought, presented to us in an impassioned epitome.  Here is hope, ardour, sympathy, and resolution, enough and to spare.  The first question is,—­How are these kindled, and what are they all about?  They must, as we have seen, be about something that the science of sociology will not discover for us.  Nor can they last, if, like an empty stomach, they prey only upon themselves.  They must have some solid content, and the great thing needful is to discern this.  It is quite true that to suffer, or even to die, will often seem dulce et decorum to a man; but it will only seem so when the end he dies or suffers for is, in his estimation, a worthy one.  A Christian might be gladly crucified if by so doing he could turn men from vice to virtue; but a connoisseur in wine would not be crucified that his best friend might prefer dry champagne to sweet.  All the agony and the struggles, then, that the positivist saint suffers with such enthusiasm, depend alike for their value and their possibility on the object that is supposed to cause them.  And in the verses just quoted this object is indeed named several times; but it is named only incidentally and in vague terms, as if its nature and its value were self-evident, and could be left to take care of themselves; and the great thing to be dwelt upon were the means and not the end:  whereas the former are really only the creatures of the latter, and can have no more honour than the latter is able to bestow upon them.

Now the only positive ends named in these verses are ’the better self,’ ‘sweet purity,’ and ‘smiles that have no cruelty.’  The conditions of these are beauteous order,’ and the result of them is the ‘gladness of the world.’  The rest of the language used adds nothing to our positive knowledge, but merely makes us feel the want of it.  The purest heaven, we are told, that the men of any generation can look forward to, will be the increased gladness that their right conduct will secure for a coming generation:  and that gladness, when it comes, will be, as it were, the seraphic song of the blessed and holy dead.  Thus every present, for the positivist, is the future life of the past; earth is heaven perpetually realising itself; it is, as it were, an eternal choir-practice, in which the performers, though a little out of tune at present, are becoming momently more and more perfect.  If this be so, there is a heaven of some sort about us at this moment.  There is a musical gladness every day in our ears, our actual delight in which it might have been a heaven to our great-grandfathers to have anticipated in the last century.