Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Lectures and Other Theological Papers
Let us take the Comtists. Now, to the Comtists, every one of those inner wants and affections, which I mentioned just now as forming the introduction to Christian truth and making it reasonable and probable to us, is wanting. The Comtist says first, that to assert there is any sense of or feeling after a God in our nature is a total mistake; that it does not exist, and that the whole notion of our having it is an unfounded supposition put into our heads by theorists. Accordingly they erase this religious instinct altogether from the mind, and they st0p at humanity. They deny of course, consistently with this, the instinct of prayer, and instead of praying they contemplate humanity. They do not acknowledge again a sense of sin or guilt in man as we understand it. N or do they acknowledge an instinctive longing for, or expecta tion of, immortality in man. That instinctive feeling is com pletely obliterated in their system. The Comtists therefore are clearly without, as a felt thing, that whole foundation of mind upon which belief in Christianity arises. The conclusion of the Comtists therefore against Christianity is no perplexity to a Christian mind, because with them the premisses are wanting. The Comtists then avowedly and formally maintain as tenets those several denials of our instinctive feelings and instincts of which the Christian is convinced to begin with but Comtism, after all, only lets out a secret of the substantial state of mind of a large number of those who do not call themselves Comtists; and only gives formal expression to negations which are practically entertained by a much more numerous portion of society than the Comtist sect. Comtism indeed is, in its blanks and erasures, the informal and unconscious philosophy of all who are absorbed in the sense of life, and to whom this world is the whole of existence.
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