John Stuart Mill, whose word on his own subjects was then
almost law, wrote of him with respectful admiration. His followers were
known to number amongst them some of the ablest thinkers of the day. The
"Religion of Humanity" offered solutions for all the problems that faced
us. It suggested a new heaven, of a sort, and it proposed a new earth,
free from all the inequalities of wealth, the preventable suffering, the
reckless waste of effort, which we saw around us. At any rate, it was
worth examination; and most of the free-thinking men of that period read
the "Positive Polity" and the other writings of the founder, and spent
some Sunday mornings at the little conventicle in Lamb's Conduit Street,
or attended on Sunday evenings the Newton Hall lectures of Frederic
Harrison.
Few could long endure the absurdities of a made-up theology and a
make-believe religion: and the Utopia designed by Comte was as
impracticable and unattractive as Utopias generally are. But the
critical and destructive part of the case was sound enough. Here was a
man who challenged the existing order of society and pronounced it
wrong. It was in his view based on conventions, on superstitions, on
regulations which were all out of date; society should be reorganised in
the light of pure reason; the anarchy of competition must be brought to
an end; mankind should recognise that order, good sense, science, and,
he added, religion freed from superstition, could turn the world into a
place where all might live together in comfort and happiness.
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