But if the wisdom of Comte was insufficient, the folly of Comte was wisdom. In an age of dusty modernity, when beauty was thought of as something barbaric and ugliness as something sensible, he alone saw that men must always have the sacredness of mummery.
He saw that while the brutes have all the useful things, the things that are truly human are the useless ones. He saw the falsehood of that almost universal notion of to-day, the notion that rites and forms are something artificial, additional, and corrupt.
Ritual is really much older than thought; it is much simpler and much wilder than thought. A feeling touching the nature of things does not only make men feel that there are certain proper things to say;it makes them feel that there are certain proper things to do.
The more agreeable of these consist of dancing, building temples, and shouting very loud; the less agreeable, of wearing green carnations and burning other philosophers alive.
But everywhere the religious dance came before the religious hymn, and man was a ritualist before he could speak. If Comtism had spread the world would have been converted, not by the Comtist philosophy, but by the Comtist calendar. By discouraging what they conceive to be the weakness of their master, the English Positivists have broken the strength of their religion. A man who has faith must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool.
It is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictions when he is not even ready to wear a wreath round his head for them.
I myself, to take a corpus vile, am very certain that I would not read the works of Comte through for any consideration whatever.
But I can easily imagine myself with the greatest enthusiasm lighting a bonfire on Darwin Day.
That splendid effort failed, and nothing in the style of it has succeeded.
There has been no rationalist festival, no rationalist ecstasy.
Men are still in black for the death of God. When Christianity was heavily bombarded in the last century upon no point was it more persistently and brilliantly attacked than upon that of its alleged enmity to human joy.
Shelley and Swinburne and all their armies have passed again and again over the ground, but they have not altered it. They have not set up a single new trophy or ensign for the world's merriment to rally to.
They have not given a name or a new occasion of gaiety.
Mr. Swinburne does not hang up his stocking on the eve of the birthday of Victor Hugo. Mr. William Archer does not sing carols descriptive of the infancy of Ibsen outside people's doors in the snow.
In the round of our rational and mournful year one festival remains out of all those ancient gaieties that once covered the whole earth.
Christmas remains to remind us of those ages, whether Pagan or Christian, when the many acted poetry instead of the few writing it.
In all the winter in our woods there is no tree in glow but the holly.
The strange truth about the matter is told in the very word "holiday."A bank holiday means presumably a day which bankers regard as holy.
