ABSTRACT
During the thirty years in which the author's had been at work in Newcastle, trying to form a Positivist Church, a movement had grown, and grown great, throughout the world which they in England call the Labour Movement. Its aims, of course, were no new aims to a Positivist. Long before it arose, Comte had declared that the two supreme connected tasks for us moderns were to give religion a new doctrinal foundation in positive science, and to raise the Proletariat—the vast mass of human society—to the level of life and culture hitherto reached only by the few. The “services” of the I.L.P.—that is to say, the ordinary weekly meetings of the Newcastle “Branch”—were a different thing. They were fixed to begin at half-past seven, and as Positivism, among other things that it had done for me, had educated him in the virtue of punctuality, he made a point of being present at that time.
