And circumscribing harmony, unplanned,
But from the breasts of all things good and great
Where’er the flame of thought and feeling played,
Issuing divine, a universal birth,
Before the first-born zephyr sang its ode,
Before pines grew on mountains of the north,
Before the greater light, or less, had flowed
O’er the glad bosom of the new-shaped earth
“THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY.”[[132]]
The strangest and saddest commentary upon that dreary religious sentimentality known as positivism, or the Religion of Humanity, was the infatuation of Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill with regard to two very commonplace women whom these men, one the founder and the other the ablest exponent of the religion, foolishly loved and worshipped in life, and actually deified after death. Guizot says that Comte was crazy, but Mill was confessedly a man of rare logical acumen, thoroughly-trained intellectual powers, and with no trace of mental alienation. One does not know whether to laugh at or to pity the maudlin sentimentalism of his love for his wife, the idolatrous honors he paid to her portrait and bust, and the painful conflict of his soul, halting between a frantic wish to believe in the presence and intimations of her disembodied spirit, and the necessity of rejecting, according to his theory, all hope or belief in the hereafter. There is something at once ludicrous and shocking in this, the only religious sentiment that such a mind as Mill’s would admit—the worship of a woman’s memory as the full satisfaction and highest reach of religion. The worship of woman irresistibly suggests the crowning of the Goddess of Reason by the French Revolutionists; and we trust our reflection will not be misconstrued when we say that woman holds her true and rightful position only in the Catholic Church. The tolerance of divorce in Protestantism is an injury to the sex, and when we glance at woman’s relations to most of the philosophico-moral systems that have been the outgrowth of the religious rebellion of the sixteenth century, we see how wise and tender the church has ever been in her treatment of the weaker vessel. St. Paul has laid down for all time the true idea of woman in her religious relations, and every attempt to change those conditions has resulted in failure and shame.