This universally applicable. The immort ality of women. Our patrons, guardian angels, or household gods. The legitimate hope of such prolongation must be our special encouragement to the service of posterity, as it is from posterity that we expect a reward, the purer as it is not paid to ourselves immediately, but to the beings through whom we deserve it. At the present day, such a reward would be judged the exclusive appanage of exceptional merit, no religion but the Positive being able, by systematic appeal to social gratitude, to extend its due influence. But when the habits sprung from a selfish worship shall have been overcome by the habits and feelings formed by Sociolatry, all true servants of Humanity will be warranted in aspiring to this legitimate return, by which the grateful recognition of their services goes back to the main source of their own glory. The humblest citizen will be conscious that he can give his patrons a degree of immortality corresponding to his own merits, a degree summarily expressed at times by the fusion of names. As the last aid to our full appreciation of this indispensable addition to the personal worship, we must not forget that woman is an essential constituent of the fundamental patronage. More keenly alive to the charm of self-sacrifice, woman feels less than man the want of subjective immortality. It would even seem that it is essentially denied her, in consequence of her exclusion normally from public life, the principal source of all immediate claims to honour. But even granting women to be wholly insensible individually to the attraction of a noble eternity, their instinct of sympathy should make them wish their moral providence carried on and not confined to those who are its direct objects. Each woman, then, will look beyond the immediate return for her holy services, and cherish the additional hope of an indefinite extension of those services. This is the normal form of woman's indirect participation in the immortality due to the services, whether of the theorician or practician, in which she cannot take a direct part. It is to the affective sex that the Great Being entrusts its most important and most difficult function, the function of forming all its servants. Each woman will ultimately be judged by her work; she will share the immortality accorded it by the future generations, who will know how to distinguish the merit of the training amidst the imperfections of the result. Such is the normal basis in Sociolatry of private worship, the adoration, viz., of our own personal patrons, our guardian angels or household gods; either term may be used, according as we compare them with one or other of their prototypes. Although the more modern term is destined to prevail at the present day, the earlier will ultimately be most generally adopted, as it answers better the nature of the institution as a Positive institution. For the guardian angels of Catholicism were but a feeble substitute for the household gods of Fetichism, and by Fetichism handed down to Polytheism; gods who stood in a more direct and individual relation to their worshipper, gods therefore exercising a stronger influence, nay one which appealed more sensibly to the feelings. Admitting this superiority, we must remember, that the transition from the objective to the subjective effected by Catholicism was an unconscious preparation for the definitive form of personal worship. Still more capital, however, was the precedent set by Islam when it introduced the idea of the homogeneity, in suitable degree, of the worshipper and the worshipped. Mohammed left, it is true, no formal command on this point, but his august example, as one of the most eminent organs of Humanity, will smooth the way for the universal adoption of the Positive form. All the types he chose were women; he chose them within the family; and he chose them, some from the living, others from the dead; all this conspires to place him, though a noble exception, in as full accordance with our definitive systematisation of personal worship, as the similar instances in chivalry, where they are the natural result of that system. PRAYER. I have now to complete the exposition of the personal DAILY worship by an explanation of the whole system of daily exercises, which alone can make it really efficacious. Prayer is the proper term for all of them; restricting this word, which admits of no substitute, to the noble sense which it came more and more to bear for worshippers of deep feeling, even under the selfish influences of Theology. So restricted, it always stands Definition of for a commemoration followed by effusion. prayer. prayer. the morning In private worship these two essential constituents of Posi- Divisions of tive prayer take, almost in equal degree, a concrete character, as directed to an individual object, that object being especially the principal patron, the better to concentrate our emotions. Although the phase of prayer which calls for exertion on our part, has a more immediately decisive influence than that in which we are, as it were, passive, this latter is habitually the Degree of subjectivity in prayer. Oral prayer. Daily Prayer a work of art. basis of the former, which would otherwise be inevitably deficient in depth. Hence, in the principal daily prayer, the effusion is only half the length of the commemoration. But then we divide the act of commemoration into two equal parts: the first, proper to the day of the week, as recalling the associations of that day; the second, common to all the days, in order to bring before us the whole of our social relations reviewed in their true order of succession. Though it thus embraces a larger field, the latter part need not be longer than the former, as in it we use mainly signs, in the other mainly images. Thus, two stages of contemplation, one more vivid, the second more comprehensive, precede and prepare effusion; this, invariably synthetical in character, is directed to the general object of our personal worship. Such is the normal distribution of private prayer into three phases of equal length, which together constitute a progressive action of the brain, in which images, signs, and feelings prevail in succession, the result of the whole being the subjective evocation, which shows that the act of adoration has attained its end. The image evoked,-the triumph of private prayer,-never can equal, in clearness or in vividness, the impressions of sense. But as this ideal limit of subjectivity is reached, at times passed, under the excitement of disease, so in health we may come more and more near to it, in proportion as by our assiduous practice of daily prayer we increase its power over our brain. Nobler natures may thus procure themselves satisfactions unknown to those who leave their hearts uncultivated, nay even to those who address their homage to beings of a different nature from themselves. To give additional energy to our daily exercises, it is a great point to introduce a judicious combination of the most sympathetic with the most synthetic of our senses, calling in sounds to help forms. Though oral prayer seems confined to social worship, there has always been a sense that the practice tends to perfect solitary adoration, often spoken of as invocation. In any case, however, it suits better with the effusion than the commemoration, the first phase of which, in particular, should be sparing in its use of it. It follows from the indications given, when taken in connection, that the daily prayer of Positivists is a work of art; each worshipper having to compose his own prayer, as he alone can judge what combination of sounds and forms will give the true expression of his feelings. This spontaneous combination of the two modes of artistic utterance gains in efficiency if, undeterred by groundless scruples, we bring in the Fetichist to perfect the Positive spirit, and give life quite naturally to all such objects as are really connected with our worship. It is indispensable, in all cases, that our prayers should be original compositions, but we may embellish them by a judicious recourse to the poetical accumulations of Humanity. Provided that the general forms we there find correspond adequately to our individual feelings, their use in moderation should give increased power to our emotions, active or passive equally, thus placed under the sanction of a great poet, and besides in sympathy, by the power of imagination, with all whom he has influenced. The aid from this source will receive an addition from the completeness esthetically of Positive education, which will qualify us, in subordination to poetry, to employ its two most close allies, when singing and drawing shall have become as familiar as speech and writing. Their great use in the worship will be to compensate the inevitable uniformity of each prayer; for once formed it should in substance remain the same, so as to gain the ease of expression which habit gives; allowing for the rare introduction of improvements when a want has been long felt. The only variation admissible being the developement, either by song or drawing, of the forms consecrated by use, the two special arts will give this greater completeness and life, if, at the time, they involve no effort. Number and daily prayers. As we have more than one daily prayer, the first point is to recognise the superior importance normally attaching to the duration of morning prayer, devoting as it does the first hour of each day to place the whole day under the protection of the best representatives of Humanity. It is in this first prayer that we make the largest use of all secondary means to perfect each of the three phases of our personal worship. At the approach of sleep, an appropriate prayer, of half the length, protects the harmony of the brain from disturbance during the night. Lastly, about noon, for the shortest of our daily prayers, we interrupt our studies, or our business, in order to recall, by an exertion of feeling, the great primary object of our life which our work tends to put out of sight. Such are the three daily prayers of the true Positivist, and he should be able to graduate duly Weekly and annual worship. Uniform introduction of conti nuity. commemoration and effusion, as he should be able to avail himself in judicious proportion of subsidiary resources, without there being any necessity for detailed explanation on such easy points. But these daily exercises, which should have as their central object the chief patroness, are incomplete without a weekly prayer, where the mother's presidency, with the two other essential types as her assessors, allows us to give suitable expression to the respect we owe as individuals to all whom we associate with them. The numerical properties which led the instinct of the race to institute this subjective period, the week, will introduce it into private worship, though in itself more adapted to the public services. On some of these weekly services each one will lay greater stress than on others, and so form for his own use annual festivals, thus completing his personal worship by bringing it into regular relation with the year, the second objective element in the division of time. As a rule, it were waste of labour to institute monthly festivals, as the universal adoption of the Positivist calendar, to be explained later, will bring the dates of the week and the month, the two periods of man's institution, into harmony. In the private, as in the public worship, there are in the normal state only three degrees daily, weekly, and yearly prayers in the private; weekly, monthly, and yearly services in the public worship. To ensure continuity in Sociolatry, in our chief daily for the sake prayer we must habitually take precautions to guard against the difference arising from its having a different beginning for each day of the week. We avoid this break by adopting an uniform introduction, consisting of a short invocation, in which the principal part is assigned to one of the subordinate associations connected with the previous day. Supposing that day to have left practically only one memory, we shall soon learn to draw the others from the subjective impressions to which the habit of worship will of itself give rise; its more marked influences becoming events to us personally. Vision suspended. In the second place, the power we have of suspending sight at will enables us to give to the images we evoke an increase of vividness unattainable by the impressions of hearing. It is wiser however not to close our eyes in order to secure a clearer internal vision by the exclusion of external objects, if there happens to be sufficient obscurity already. For the effort |