That Religion in all its successive forms, from the rudest Fetishism up to the sublimest Christian Monotheism, has been the natural and genuine product of human intelligence, working ever onward and upward to a still higher stage of development,--that its existence was inevitable, and its influence, on the whole, highly beneficial,--and that, even when it shall have passed away, society will still be largely indebted to it for the impulse, yet unspent, which it has imparted to the cause of civilization and progress,--all this is admitted and even maintained by M.Comte, in direct and often derisive opposition to the theorists who once ascribed its origin to fraud, and its prevalence to priestcraft; nay, he elevates it to the rank of a primordial and indispensable element of human progress, a necessary and legitimate result of the great law of human development.

We know of no parallel instance of a change of opinion so great and sudden, unless it be the marvellous transition of certain modern Rationalists who were wont to ridicule the doctrine of the Trinity as absurd and incomprehensible, but who have now arrived at the conclusion that it is the fundamental law of human thought![68] Still, with all this outward homage to Religion, considered as a mere matter of history, the theory of M.Comte is essentially and even avowedly Atheistic.

It is mainly designed to account for the origin of all Religion, whether Natural or Revealed, without having recourse to the supposition either of the existence of God, or of his interposition at any time in the affairs of men.

He seems to have proposed to himself a twofold object: _first_, to account for the prevalence of the various forms of natural religion and superstition, without recognizing any valid evidence for the existence of supernatural powers; and, _secondly_, to account for the origin of Judaism and Christianity, or, as he calls it, of Monotheism, without recognizing the reality of any Divine Revelation.

And he attempts to accomplish _both_ objects by means of the same law--a law of development which, in primitive times, produced Fetishism--which then produced Polytheism; then Monotheism; then the Metaphysical transition era, during which all Theology is undergoing a process of disintegration and decay; and, last of all (the noblest, because the latest, birth of time), the Positive Philosophy, under whose predicted ascendancy all Theology must die and be buried in everlasting oblivion.