ABSTRACT
When the authors entered into possession of their new church, such as it was, in Eskdale Terrace, he had been for twenty-five years at work as a Positivist “apostle.” During fifteen of them he had been a sort of voluntary “lay-preacher,” or amateur; during the last ten he had—to use the Positivist word—been in receipt of a “subsidy.” According to the sentence which he have already quoted—a sentence which Comte did not originate, but repeated with approbation : “Our materials are disorder; out of them it is necessary to construct order.” In attempting to create order out of this threefold disorder, he had, as he have said, to reckon with the fact that he was himself a part of the disorder. It is, however, necessary to understand the nature and limits of that disorder.
