Inside, the almost luxurious edifice, “sea-green in color, as if one were bathed in hope, and with the high ceiling essential to lofty thoughts,” still somewhat resembles a Catholic church. Around the walls of the nave are fourteen “chapels” containing as many busts, each representing one of the “saints” of Positivism and an abstract idea. They are Moses—Initial Theocracy; Homer—Ancient Poetry; Aristotle—Ancient Philosophy; Archimedes—Science; Cæsar—Military Civilization; St. Paul—Catholicism; Charlemagne—Feudal Civilization; Guttenberg—Modern Invention; Dante—Modern Epic; Shakespeare—Drama; Descartes—Modern Philosophy; Frederick the Great—Modern Politics; Bichat—Modern Science, and lastly, Eloïse, or Feminine Sanctification. It would be easy, of course, to quarrel with the Positivists on several of their choices as world leaders, were they of a quarrelsome disposition. These personages also give their names to the fourteen months of the Positivist calendar, which begins with the French Revolution. Among the decorations are the “flags of the five nations”—Brazil, China, Turkey, Chile and Haiti! Only two South American countries are represented because “these are unfortunately the only ones in which the Positivist faith as yet counts fervid adepts.” China wins place as the “most vast nation of the Orient;” Turkey as the “most cultured people of the East” (!), and Haiti is admitted “in honor of the greatest of negroes, Toussaint L’Ouverture,” whose portrait is the only non-Caucasian face among the many about the walls. There are of men of all ages and nations, whom the Positivists consider of world importance,—Camões, Lavoisier, Cervantes, St. Gall, Cromwell, and many others, the only American among them being an atrocious chromo print of Washington. Higher still, in decorative letters and the simplified spelling of Positivist Portuguese, are scattered the words,—Space, Industry, Architecture, Painting, Earth, Music, Poetry, Politics, Proletariat, Priesthood, Monotheism, Astrology, Family, Humanity, Patriotism, Fetishism, Polytheism, Woman, Morality, Sociology, Biology, Soil, Chemistry, Physics, Astronomy, Logic. Above what, for want of a better name, might be called the altar or the main chapel, runs the inscription:

No Catholic church was ever more crowded with images than the “Temple of Humanity.” In fact, the more closely one looked the more did certain forms and beliefs of Catholicism peer through the outward modern mantle of Positivism, as if either the founder or his disciples had not been able to divest themselves entirely of their inherited faith. The most Catholic beata in South America could scarcely have shown greater reverence for the sacred pictures, graven images, and “relics of the faith” with which the temple was crowded. Above the “pulpit” was a bust of Comte on a column, its upper portion covered with green cloth embroidered with white silk “by one of our young female proselytes.” Portraits of Comte and his mistress, Clothilde de Vaux—both painted in China and depicting them with almond eyes—hung in the main chapel, where there were also paintings of each of them on the death bed. Pictures of the Bastille, of Dante and Beatrice, of the Sistine Madonna surmounted by a cross, “because she was an ardent Catholic,” were among the many which a roving eye gradually discovered. Most astonishing of all was the likeness of “Humanity,” a virgin figure with the features of Clothilde de Vaux, dressed as a bride, with a green band at her waist and holding in her arms a pretty boy who grasped a handful of daisies and pansies, the Positivist flowers, and gazed up into the woman’s face, the whole patently inspired by the Catholic madonnas which it closely resembled. In the background were the Panthéon and Père Lachaise cemetery, where Comte is buried.

Like all religions, the new creed already tended to harden into set forms, the failure to carry out which was evidently a more grievous sin than the disobeying of the general principles of the order. Their veneration of pictures of the dead was almost medieval; the railing of the tomb of Clothilde had been brought from Paris and as much fuss was made over it as ever devout peasants did over the shin-bone of a saint; “first sacraments” were administered in the temple; “the faithful” were urged to visit the “sacred places of Positivism;” they had a substitute for crossing oneself, “a sacred formula of our faith in which it is customary for all believers to stand up out of respect for Our Master.” There was even a hint of Mohammedanism, a mark in the cement floor of the porch under the pillars indicating the direction of Paris—the thought of Paris as a sacred city was a trifle startling—“toward which all Positivistic Temples should have their principal axes.”

In the basement of the temple was a printing plant from which issues a constant stream of Positivist pamphlets, books, biographies of Benjamin Constant, and similar forms of propaganda. Here, too, is the original flag of republican Brazil, painted in crude colors on pasteboard by order of Teixeira Mendes. The story of its designing is not without interest. Having been assigned the task by the leaders of the revolution, the present head of the Positivists of Brazil determined to keep the general form of the existing national banner. João VI had given the kingdom a coat-of-arms set in a golden sphere on a blue background. Mendes changed the blue to green, basic color of the Positivist banner and meant also to symbolize the tropical vegetation of the land, as the yellow sphere does the gold in its soil. Then he called in an astronomer, and taking the twenty principal stars of the southern firmament at noon of November 15, 1889, to represent the twenty states of Brazil, he placed nineteen below the equator-like band across the golden sphere, and one above it to indicate that part of the country north of the equator, or of the Amazon. The sphere was inclined on the horizon according to the latitude of Rio, the tobacco and coffee on the old royal coat-of-arms were removed, as “mere commercial things not fit for a place on the national banner,” and along the equatorial band was run a line from the Positivist motto.

The women of the congregation sat on a platform in front of the “altar” rail, the men down in the body of the “church.” Women should love Positivism, according to its disciples, for it dignifies, venerates, and raises them to their due elevation. The “3rd of Guttenberg” on which the temple was dedicated is also the “Feast of Woman” day, on which Positivists celebrate the “transformation of the cult of the Catholic Virgin into the cult of Humanity.” Teixeira Mendes, long the head of the sect in Brazil, sat in the “pulpit” beneath the bust of Comte and “preached,” if his un-sermon-like remarks uttered in a weak, thin voice barely heard through an immense white mustache may be so called. His diminutive form was covered by a dark robe, with a green cord about the neck and embroidered with the Positivist flowers. The “sermon” emphasized the Positivist conception of the “virgin mother” as combining the two great qualities of the feminine type,—purity and tenderness. Like many other religions, this modern creed clings to the legend of a virgin mother. As the gathering marched out to the tune of the “Marseillaise,” I asked my cicerone to explain the frequent recurrence of the “virgin mother” motif in temple and sermon. He replied that it was the Positivist belief that humanity would gradually be educated up to the point where “woman will be able to reproduce alone, without the necessity of ‘sin’ with man!”