Religion teaches that we have our being in a Power whose character and purposes are indicated to us by our moral nature, in whom we are united and by the union made sacred to each other, whose voice conscience however generated, is whose eye is always upon us, sees all our acts, and sees them as they are morally, without reference to worldly success or to the opinion of the world, to whom at death we return, and our relations to whom, together with his own nature, are an assurance that according as we promote or fail to promote his design by self improvement and the improvement of our kind, it will be well or ill for us in the sum of things. This is a hypothesis evidently separable from belief in a revelation, and from any special theory respecting the next world, as well as from all dogma and ritual. It may be true or false in itself, capable of demonstration or incapable. We are concerned here solely with its practical efficiency, compared with that of the proposed substitutes. It is only necessary to remark, that there is nothing about the religious hypothesis as here stated, miraculous, supernatural, or mysterious, except so far as those epithets may be applied to anything beyond the range of bodily sense, say the influence of opinion or affection. A universe self-made, and without a God, is at least as great a mystery as a universe with a God; in fact the very attempt to conceive it in the mind produces a moral vertigo which is a bad omen for the practical success of Cosmic Emotion. For this religion are the service and worship of Humanity likely to be a real equivalent in any respect, as motive power, as restraint, or as comfort? Will the idea of life in God be adequately replaced by that of an interest in the condition and progress of Humanity, as they may affect us and be influenced by our conduct, together with the hope of human gratitude and fear of human reprobation after death, which the Comtists endeavor to organize into a sort of counterpart of the Day of Judgment?