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    The first article in the last number of the Westminster Review is on a subject whose title will appear to many at first sight very like a contradiction in terms — 'The Religion of Positivism . ' It consists of two parts , contributed by different writers ; the first being an outline of the religious idea and effort of the positivists in its more general scope and aim , the second an analysis of M . Comtb ' s Cate ' chisme de la Religion Positive , recently translated by Mr . Congreve . While repudiating M . Comte ' s minute and dictatorial elaboration of his scheme , the writers believe that the religious notions of Positivism will constitute , in some modified form , the Church of the future . Many who cannot share this anticipation , ¦ will readily admit the importance of the truth which the faith of Positivism reflects , though in a distorted and exaggerated form , and which the writers of the article strongly insist on—the necessity of connecting religion more closely with humanity , of finding for it a deeper social root , and investing with its sacrcducss the complex whole of human nature and human life . In this point of view the article in the Westminster strikingly coincides with a kindred one in the new number of the National , entitled ' Religion and Society : Paley and Channiug . ' Both signalize the supreme importance of developiug the social or human side of religion ( which , in the pages of the National , is . Christianity ) that Protestantism has so much neglected } and both in this faithfully represent the reaction to that one-sidedness which is the great religious aspect of the day : The article in the National starts from the French translation of Channing ' s Life and Works , ' which has recently been published in Paris , with a preface by M . Remus at , mainly for the purpose of quickening the deadened sense of spiritual and personal freedom in , France . The following passage indicates the weakness not only of Ciiannin g ' s point of view , but of more than half the religious teaching of the present day : — A common life must be the ground of cJflse social union . Channing ' s teaching tended to make each man conscious of his own individuality—alike in its noblest and its most painful phases—more and more profoundly . He spoke of spiritual life too much as an aspiration , too little as a reality . He sometimes made men feel the infinite distance between themselves and God—the spiritual immensity across which the poor human . will must cheerfully work its way—more keenly than the power which , if they would but recognize it , already worked in them . His was often the teaching of want : the aim was distant , the way was long , and for each roan solitary . Even the fact of God ' s help had to be painfully realized by an effort of thought . He is apt rather to tell men what they ought to feel on the hypothesis of religion , than to explain to them what they do feel in the light of religious certainties . The ' thought of God ' frequently takes the place in his writings of God . Of course this is often the state of any sincere man ' s mind . But realities , not thoughts of realities , are the basis of all union ; facts , not hopes . And Channing , by the ideal cast which he teaches us to give to every spiritual influence that acts on the mind , —keeping it at arm ' s length till we have weighed and estimated its value , —often turns a certainty into an aspiration . We know how easy it is to doubt the existence even of the material universe , if we will not follow our first instinct to assume it , but begin instead to discuss what value we are to attach tq our impressions ; and it is certainly not less easy to turn spiritual realities into shadows or mere foretastes of the future , by holding aloof from the influence they bring . We quote the following short passages , the first from the Westminster , the second from the National , to show the general identity of view in the two articles : — The religion of the Positivist , then , is pre-eminently that which has man for its object , which believes in man , serves man , and reverences man , man , not as a personal and unrelated being , but man as that collective and independent existence made up of many lives and many men , which has lived in the Past , which lives in the Present , and will live in the Future . For individual man is a chimera . Man can only exist as a member of society . The -wisdom , the wealth , the decoration and grandeur of life , are the inherited capital of past generations . As the natural blood of our forefathers circulates through our bodily frames , so the moral and intellectual blood of the ancient world has passed into our spirituul veins . The collective life of Humanity is the true religious idea Is not the greater part of our spiritual life as a matter of fact , still conditioned by the individual channels of human influence through which we have drawn it ? Would ' progress' — would life , wo understand it , —that is , the R rowth of thoughts and faculties , all of which lmvo immediate and direct concern with the society in which ¦ we arc placed , —bo longer possible if the very law of our being , the very condition of our conscience , the very spring of our piety , were annihilated by the annihilation of tho other members of that living body of which we are part ? It is the condition of human life that we could not bo children at all without also being brothers . Tho social law of our being reaches , wo are confident , to the deepest deptli of our most solitary life . A man ' s individual Ufo could not grow , nay , could not bo that of a man at all , could ho bo truly cut ofl' from the community of m « n ; oven in solitude and isolation it is tho life of a social being so long as it is human . We have said that tho ' Religion of Positivism' is a reaction against the onesidedncss of existing l ' uiths , but it is a reaction as extreme and erroneous us that to which it is opposed . Tho reformer , tho puritan , tho mystic , the religious enthusiast of every « go and country , reacting against tv dead faith and a sensuous system , soya " There is nothing but the Divine ; wo must become partakers of the Divine Nature . " To such this blooming earth , so full of ' 4 ) eauty ~ and ~ glndnessr-iB- ^ lHit ~ a-J ^ wustcwto ^^ tears ; " this richly-furnished frame " a vilo body , " " sinful and accursed " day . " Such n partial faith , however strong and wide-spread , must ' soon manifest its iusuflicicnoy . Outraged Nature will avenge herself 5 and on this partial exhibition Christianity has been loft exposed to assaults , which , oil a broadcr . nnd truor interpretation , she might have supooaafully resisted . Itcaotion was inevitable , and wo sco it on all hands , and in

    many various forms , that of Positivism being the most extreme . The Positivist-j taking exactly opposite ground to the mystic , says , " There is nothing but the Human ; there is no God but Humanity , and M . Comte is bis prophet ; " and thus falls into error equally extreme and still more fatal . While the mystic destroys man the Positivist dethrones God , and each is guilty of unconscious blasphemy against the truth . Both God and man exist , and no faith , can be really catholic which does not recognise and adjust these essentials of religion . The Westviinster has also a graphic and well-written article on the 'Boscobel Tracts , ' and a striking one on ' Party Government / to which we should probably revert in another place . Amongst other literary articles of interest in the National we may note as specially worth reading—the first , on Matthew Arnold ' s Merope , and the last , The Waverley Novels . '

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    SHELLEY . The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley . By Thomas Jefferson Hogg . In Four Volumes . "Vols . I . and II . Moxon . We have already spoken of this work as being valuable on account of the materials of which it is composed . Mr . Hogg knew Shelley intimately for some years ; be possesses several letters from the poet to himself ; he recollects many anecdotes of his life and habits ; and the friends and relatives of the departed genius have placed in his hands various documents which help to confirm what we already knew less perfectly . But here our commendation of the work must end . Of the spirit in -which it is written we can only speak in terms of the severest reprehension . Mr . Hogg has chosen to turn a biography o one of the best and most generous of men into an occasion f or snarling at and vili f ying the friends of that man ; and he has introduced into a work which should have been written in the largest and most liberal spirit a tone of petty egotism , a habit of depreciating all noble effort for the advancement o the world , such , as would have wakened Shelley ' s astonishment and contempt . Mr . Hogg , the gentleman who apparently esteems himself the only fit biographer of the Republican Shelley , is a Tory , —one who seems proud of that preposterous appellation ; a thorough Church and State man ; and a holder o the grotesque opinion that it was a pity the poet of Liberty did not take kindly to the five-bottle gentry , instead of mixing himse lf up with " vulgar , needy" Radicals ! Well , perhaps in that case Lord Eldon would not have deprived the poet of his children ; but the world would have lost one of the most fiery , seraphic , and golden-tongued advocates of human rights , one of the noblest utterers of divine dreams of progress . Mr . Hogg would have been all the more pleased , and posterity all the less . " The poor fellow , " writes Thomas Je erson , compassionately , " was vei'y unfortunate in his political connexions . " Perhaps , however , Shelley himself was the best judge of that matter , after all . Very astounding is it to be told that the clergy of the Church of England were well affected towards ShelUy , knowing , as we all do , that the High Church organs in the press maligned him by every artifice of exaggeration , misrepresentation , and falsehood . And it is equally startling to find it asserted that the son-in-law and disciple of Godwin was essentially nristocratical in his feelings and opinions — a dreamer who took r , o interest in existing politics , but who merely amused himself with fanciful republics after the Platonic model . The ' Masque of Anarchy , ' and the pamphlet in favour of Parliamentary Reform , shall settle that question . In the latter work , Shelley speaks of thrones and aristocracies as symbols of the world ' s childhood , necessary for a time , but doomed to perish . It is impossible , indeed , to conceive any one more ludicrously unfit to be the biographer of the author of The Cenci than he who now comes forward , asserting his pretensions with such a huffing air . Whatever Shelley was , that Mr . Hogg is not ; whatever Shelley was not , that Mr . Hogg is . The antithesis is complete ; and of this we are certain—that the book before us would have given Shelley the deepest pain . It is the production of a very worldly-minded man . Great is the biographer ' s worship of fj ower , position , and success ; immense his contempt for any one below the evel of a baronet or of an heir to landed property . To be poor is to be rascally ; to work for your living—especially with your pen—is base and wretched ; to be a Radical is to be " necessarily vulgar . " The profession of the law bus been degraded by the invasion of sordid middle-class people . Mr . Hogg writes in the spirit of a footman , and smiles with complacent admiration at his own plush . His pen distils venom with a cruel disregard of the pain it may give or the injury it may cause ; and he makes cowardly attacks under cover of a pretended delicacy which refuses to mention names while indicating persons , and which thus bars the opportunity of reply . A blighting cynicism crawls over the page , and darkens tho beauty of the poet ' s character by its intercepting shadow . A biographer should be able to sympathize with tho mind of him whose Life he writes ; but Mr . Hogg , though a professed admirer of Shelley , has clearly no identity of feeling with him . Nor docs he possess any of the other requisite qualifications . Ho is a washy critic and u clumsy writer , who apparently considers that the functions of a biographer are sufficiently discharged if ho can spangle liia narrative with paltry sarcasms and feeble wit . Mr . Hogg speaks with astonishing insolence and presumption of several famous reputations ; and often in a perfectly gratuitous manner . The members of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge ( among whom were such , men as Lord Brougham , Lord penman , Lord John Russell , Lord Althorp , Mr . Hallum , Mr . Rowland Hill , &e . ) are described as n , set of " conceited , solf-autisfiod" pcraons— " a knot of people who lnlSi < Srd ™ tbomselves ~ for-a-tiine ^ phluts , what they accounted useful knowledge ; " nnd greatly does Mr . Hogg rejoice that " the soup-kitchen of ecionco" was " eoon shut up — winch , however , it was not . Leigh Hunt is " a pert journalist" for having dared to call the Prince Regent " an Adonis of fifty . " Sydney Smith was «« a noisy , impudent , shallow , clerical jester , " who " shot out cartloads of rubbish , witn an overpowering din , " but sometimes said a good thing by acoi-

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    t fo . , Aprii 17 , 1858 . ] TH E LEADER . 377

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    w brines are not the legislators , but the judges and police of literature . Theydo not ¦ makelaws—they interpret and try to enforce them . —Edinburgh Review .

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• Citation
  • Leader (1850-1860), April 17, 1858, page 377, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2239/page/17/