recognising, as we did, that the older men were useless as guides in
religion, in science, in philosophy because they knew not evolution, we
also felt instinctively that we could accept nothing on trust from those
who still believed that the early chapters of Genesis accurately
described the origin of the universe, and that we had to discover
somewhere for ourselves what were the true principles of the then
recently invented science of sociology.

One man there was who professed to offer us an answer, Auguste Comte. He
too was pre-Darwinian, but his philosophy accepted science, future as
well as past. John Stuart Mill, whose word on his own subjects was then
almost law, wrote of him with respectful admiration. His followers were
known to number amongst them some of the ablest thinkers of the day. The
"Religion of Humanity" offered solutions for all the problems that faced
us. It suggested a new heaven, of a sort, and it proposed a new earth,
free from all the inequalities of wealth, the preventable suffering, the
reckless waste of effort, which we saw around us. At any rate, it was
worth examination; and most of the free-thinking men of that period read
the "Positive Polity" and the other writings of the founder, and spent
some Sunday mornings at the little conventicle in Lamb's Conduit Street,
or attended on Sunday evenings the Newton Hall lectures of Frederic
Harrison.

Few could long endure the absurdities of a made-up theology and a
make-believe religion: and the Utopia designed by Comte was as
impracticable and unattractive as Utopias generally are. But the
critical and destructive part of the case was sound enough. Here was a
man who challenged the existing order of society and pronounced it
wrong. It was in his view based on conventions, on superstitions, on
regulations which were all out of date; society should be reorganised in