Too timid to openly challenge the churches and the Christian doctrine, they endeavor to sap that upon which all religion is based—man’s faith in God and his own immortality. Their policy is to ridicule that which affords an unusual basis for such a faith—phenomenal Spiritualism. {77} Attacking it at its weakest side, they make the most of its lack of an inductive method, and of the exaggerations that are to be found in the transcendental doctrines of its propagandists. Taking advantage of its unpopularity, and displaying a courage as furious and out of place as that of the errant knight of La Mancha, they claim recognition as philanthropists and benefactors who would crush out a monstrous superstition. Let us see in what degree Comte’s boasted religion of the future is superior to Spiritualism, and how much less likely its advocates are to need the refuge of those lunatic asylums which they officiously recommend for the mediums whom they have been so solicitous about. Before beginning, let us call attention to the fact that three-fourths of the disgraceful features exhibited in modern Spiritualism are directly traceable to the materialistic adventurers pretending to be spiritualists. Comte has fulsomely depicted the “artificially-fecundated” woman of the future. She is but elder sister to the Cyprian ideal of the free-lovers. The immunity against the future offered by the teachings of his moon-struck disciples, has inoculated some pseudo-spiritualists to such an extent as to lead them to form communistic associations. None, however, have proved long-lived. Their leading feature being generally a materialistic animalism, gilded over with a thin leaf of Dutch-metal philosophy and tricked out with a combination of hard Greek names, the community could not prove anything else than a failure. Plato, in the fifth book of the _Republic_, suggests a method for improving the human race by the elimination of the unhealthy or deformed individuals, and by coupling the better specimens of both sexes. It was not to be expected that the “genius of our century,” even were he a prophet, would squeeze out of his brain anything entirely new. Comte was a mathematician. Cleverly combining several old utopias, he colored the whole, and, improving on Plato’s idea, materialized it, and presented the world with the greatest monstrosity that ever emanated from a human mind!