The only organized cultus without a God, at present before us, is that of Comte. This in all its parts--its high priesthood, its hierarchy, its sacraments, its calendar, its hagiology, its literary canon, its ritualism, and we may add, in its fundamentally intolerant and inquisitorial character--is an obvious reproduction of the Church of Rome, with humanity in place of God, great men in place of the saints, the Founder of Comtism in place of the Founder of Christianity, and even a sort of substitute for the Virgin in the shape of womanhood typified by Clotilde de Vaux. There is only just the amount of difference which would be necessary in order to escape servile imitation. We have ourselves witnessed a case of alternation between the two systems which testified to the closeness of their affinity. The Catholic Church has acted on the imagination of Comte at least as powerfully as Sparta acted on that of Plato. Nor is Comtism, any more than Plato's _Republic_ and other Utopias, exempt from the infirmity of claiming finality for a flight of the individual imagination. It would shut up mankind for ever in a stereotyped organization which is the vision of a particular thinker. In this respect it seems to us to be at a disadvantage compared with Christianity, which, as presented, in the Gospels, does not pretend to organize mankind ecclesiastically or politically, but simply supplies a new type of character, and a new motive power, leaving government, ritual and organization of every kind to determine themselves from age to age. Comte's prohibition of inquiry into the composition of the stars, which his priesthood, had it been installed in power, would perhaps have converted into a compulsory article of faith, is only a specimen of his general tendency (the common tendency, as we have said, of all Utopias) to impose on human progress the limits of his own mind. Let his hierarchy become masters of the world, and the effect would probably be like that produced by the ascendency of a hierarchy (enlightened no doubt for its time) in Egypt, a brief start forward followed by consecrated immobility for ever.