mere economy. This, to borrow one of the favorite technics of the Fourier school, is the "pivot" question, which, in the minds of all serious and religious men, should settle the whole matter. We know that association is regarded as having this effect by all the most consistent writers of the sect. They glory in it on this very account, as destroying a mischievous institution which they regard as the nursery of all narrow, and selfish, and unsocial feelings. There is, moreover, nothing in association which can be at all said to resemble or to take the place of the secluded household, -that ancient kingdom ordained of God, where the father is both king and priest, where the mother is the subordinate though counseling authority, and where the children, when taught as they should be taught, grow up into the idea and feeling of filial reverence and filial piety, as the earliest and most abiding types of the reverence due to the "God of families” and Father of the race. In the phalanx there can be no feeling of home, as the parents' home, with all the associations connected with that holy word. The nearest approach to it might consist in the temporary inhabitation of contiguous apartments, like the boarders in a large hotel; and even this would be liable every moment to be broken up by the distribution of the groups and series into which the anti-domestic band must constantly be arranged and rearranged in following out the law of passional attraction. Mothers, even, must be separated from their children, we are told by the best authorities, and immense nurseries take the place of that secluded apartment which is all the world to its tender inmates, and where God designed they should be taught those first lessons of authority which inculcate the doctrine that the highest good, and the most useful discipline, can only be secured by early putting their passional attractions under wholesome, although it may be severe, restraint. How can a man read his Bible, and its most solemn declarations respecting the duties of husband and wife, parent and child, master and servant, without feeling that God does most expressly sanction the family institution? And who that has any thorough experience of mankind but must confess, that the early associations of home, and its wholesome authority, are the great defense of almost all the virtue there is in the world, and one chief cause which prevents earth from presenting a picture of hell?

It is the holy institution which secures to us at the same time the blessings of society and seclusion; the one as the rule, the other as the salutary exception. The best of all possible conditions for the human soul, is found in that blessed state in which the most of our time is passed in the retirement of the family to

which we belong, as head or members, with the occasional meeting of our fellow-men in the friendly visits of social intercourse, or in the transactions of necessary public business, or in the house and worship of God on the holy sabbath. In this condition, one mode of life sweetly tempers and relieves the other. The social feelings are cultivated without interfering with the discipline which requires meditation, either in solitude or surrounded only by those whom we can almost regard as part of ourselves, and to whom our inmost thoughts may be communicated without restraint. "It is good for man that he sit (or dwell) alone;" and that he be thus much in the company of his own thoughts. It is the great evil of the present day that this is almost reversed. Society, with its many means of frequent and public intercourse, is becoming the rule, and family seclusion the exception. In proportion, however, as this gets to be the case, the effects are found to be most pernicious, not only on the minds of children, but even of the older members of the family. A man might better suffer many privations, and the inferior comforts of a much inferior dwelling, and of a much plainer table, than to bring up his children in a boarding-house, even if much cheaper; or in any condition in which they never strongly form the idea of home, or of the wholesome conservative associations connected with it. At the utmost peril to their offspring do parents follow a mode of life that ever prevents their feeling the force of that word and that impression.

It is ever found that even the best men lose some of the restraints of virtue when abroad in the world, and away from the bosom of their families. They feel themselves without restraint, because all around them are relatively in a like condition, unfettered by domestic duties, and therefore irresponsible. Hence life in cities is ever more relaxed than in the country; and just in proportion as we approach the anti-domestic and public state required in association, vice is ever found to increase. The same men are ever worse when acting in masses and phalanxes than when alone. A public or corporation conscience is ever weaker than the individual Without the family and the family altar, the church, we verily believe, would not long be continued on earth; and without this imperium in imperio, which is the nurse of all the social affections, and of the first ideas of authority and obedience, the state would soon cease to exist, as a power ordained of God. Even a heathen philosopher could say-In aris et focis est respublica; and the earliest religions, in their symbols of the eternal fire, intimated that all political life came from ever cherishing the fructifying warmth of the sacred domestic feelings of the family hearth. We cer

tainly would not bring back the worship of the Lares and Penates, but we would rather have our children deeply imbued even with superstition, than see them given up to the ungodly influences of the anti-domestic, and therefore—notwithstanding all its contrary pretensions-the really and ultimately anti-social phalanx.

We know that the home does not always realize the picture that has been drawn; and nothing is more common than for the enemies of the "isolated household" to talk of the "domicils of wretchedness" that are often found in large cities. Even these poor homes, we contend, are better than none; but they have no right to resort to the Five Points for illustrations of what God intended the family should be, and what, with all its imperfections, it ever tends to be, when the furthest removed from that crowded state in which it becomes more and more assimilated to the opposing system.

If association, then, must, in its practical operation, break up the household, it is enough for every serious and religious man. This point once established, and there is no need of rambling over any wide extent of collateral argument. Its advocates may paint in the most gloomy colors the miseries of the present social state; yet still, if their remedy require the dissolution of the family, it is worse than any aspect of the disease. Whatever advantages of a physical or economical kind it may offer are too dearly paid for. That such is its tendency and inevitable result, we need not stop. to prove. It is not only admitted as one of the best-established facts in respect to association, but is even gloried in by Fourier and his most consistent disciples, as one of the chief excellences of his scheme. There is nothing against which they exhibit a more violent dislike than what they are fond of terming the "narrow," the "selfish," the "anti-social," "isolated household."

Another of these fundamental positions in the Fourier theory, the proper decision of which disposes of the whole matter, is found in their favorite doctrine of "passional attraction;" and to this, too, the respondent, in the discussion under review, has directed. his attention in a manner worthy of its supreme importance. The other party is evidently disposed to regard it as "mere theory," or as one of those incidental speculations which have little or no bearing on what he would style the "practical" aspect of association. Now if there is any one thing fundamental in the scheme of Fourier, it is this doctrine of passional attraction. We do not mean by this, however, that it is anything new or peculiar. It is the old form of error pervading almost every system of irreligious philosophy or sensual ethics. It is the old Epicureanism, appear

ing under the more alluring guise of the sentimental school of Rousseau. According to it, the great end of existence is enjoyment. Man's chief end is to enjoy himself. It is, as some of the old heathen taught, vivere secundum naturam-"to live according to nature," as the highest rule of action, revealing itself, not in the conscience, but in the prompting desires of the individual; or, as it has been termed by a leading writer of the Fourier school, "the decrees of the heart." We certainly do Fourierism full justice, and fairly state its leading doctrine, when we say that it designs to discover a method in which every passion of every individual shall promptly find its gratification, with no obstruction, or the least possible obstruction, to the full gratification of the desires of others. In regard to the society taken collectively, as one existence, it is true without any qualification whatever. Its great end is the most intense enjoyment, unmeasured and unchecked by anything but its ability, and means of gratification. Of such a state, even if it could be secured, and secured to all eternity, we hesitate not to say, that instead of being a blessing, no greater curse could ever be inflicted by Heaven on those whom it had wholly abandoned to themselves. If enjoyment be the end, it must of course give the law, if law it can be called, to all below. Virtue, then, if there be any virtue, can only exist in the subordinate station of a means; and as this implies a contradiction-as virtue must be an end or nothing-it follows that, in such a scheme, there can be no true morality, which always must have regard to a law above nature, of which enjoyment is the reward and not the end. Fourierism would, in fact, destroy licentiousness, by making all things licit.

The respondent has given a most thorough examination to this main feature in the Fourier doctrine of association. He regards it as containing, more than any other part, the concentrated poison of the whole scheme, and as presenting a polar opposition to the cardinal precept of Christianity. It is in this point that the two systems directly repel each other. The doctrine of passional attraction is the direct antithesis of the self-denial of the gospel. Christianity and the Scriptures treat man as being now lost, because he is in that state of nature, which—if by some scheme it can only be enjoyed without interruption-Fourier regards as his perfection. He is now turned away from God to the following of his own will, and this will follows instead of governing his passional attractions. His voluntas is ever in some shape voluptas, whether in a higher or lower, a more gross or a more refined, manifestation; whether it be the "lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, or the pride of life." This in his natural state he calls his

freedom; the Scriptures style it-"walking after the desires and imaginations of his own heart." Now the design of Christianity is to bring man back from this state of nature into a state of graceto deliver him from the cruel bondage of the flesh and the desires thereof, and from the tyranny of his own will, itself held captive by the passional attractions of things without. It aims to introduce him to the "perfect law of liberty," or that liberty which is only found in the voluntary submission of the soul to a law out of itself as its highest and most blessed state. To this state of grace, so utterly unknown to the Fourier philosophy, Christianity has respect in its leading article of faith, and in its leading practical precept in harmonious combination. The first is the cross of Christ as the sole ground of justification, and the other the doctrine of selfdenial. The soul is justified through the self-denial of Him who, although "in the form of God, humbled himself to the form of a servant," that we might be exalted; who became poor that we might be rich; who died that we might live. And this life into which he saves us is the new life of the soul, denying the passional attractions of the flesh, and the world, and nature, and ever rising above them into higher and higher degrees of freedom, until it reaches the "glorious liberty of the sons of God"—that liberty which finds deliverance from the tyranny of nature in a voluntary submission to a law above it.

The self-denial of the gospel, then, is a very different thing from that Epicurean counterfeit which might have place, for a time, even in the Fourier ethics, and which simply consists in refusing a present enjoyment as a means to a higher future gratification; or, to use a homely yet just comparison, might induce a man to go without his dinner that he might have a better appetite and a larger enjoyment in his supper. Instead of this refinement of Epicureanism, the self-denial of the gospel is a good per se; it is an end in itself, although ever advancing to a higher valuation of the essential good contained in it. It is good for the soul thus to live a life above nature. It is its health, its well-being, its blessedness, thus to be in harmonious subjection to a law out of and above itself, instead of being under the never-satisfied and never-yielding tyranny-the kóλaoiv alíviov—of its own raging passions, or passional attractions.

Hence it must begin its Christian course by opposing nature, and opposing itself. It must go back to God by reversing the steps it took at its departure, when it was induced by the serpent temptation to seek that good in nature which can only be found in obedience and in law. Ever since it desired to have its portion of goods