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Yet we are slanderers, if we question at all your Christian character!

"But these are all pure-minded, pure-hearted, spiritual, lofty, all but saintly men; admitting that they may err in some of their views, you must own that they are Christians, at least, in their lives." What mean you by men's lives? The whole of what they think, say, and do? If so, how can you call that man a Christian in his life, who uses the whole weight of his character and talents to bring Christianity into disrepute, and who proclaims boldly, in tones of earnestness, and of apparent philanthropy, doctrines which legitimate, nay, sanctify, the foulest lust, and the grossest passions of our corrupt and fallen nature? The man, who, in his private life, in secret, breaks every commandment in the decalogue, is a saint in comparison with him who corrupts the public conscience, perverts the principles of men and women, and under cover of morality, of a Divine Law, authorizes all that the revealed law of God forbids. We hold no man to be a Christian man in his life, who promulgates anti-Christian or immoral doctrines. God has revealed to us the truth; he has instituted an interpreter of his Word; and error of doctrine is without excuse. A man may always know, if he will, what is the truth. If he will not, if he will not suffer himself to learn of God, and to be decided by God's Word, it is from the pride of his own heart, it is from moral depravity, it is from setting himself up against God; and no man who sets himself up against God is or can be a Christian.

Then, again, this Fourierism is nothing but a disguised Epicureanism. The chief end of man is, according to it, pleasure, or happiness. The end proposed is, simply, to enable man to enjoy all his natural instincts and passions, so that he shall experience no evil, be exposed to no jar or discord, and never find any cross; and this, not by purifying his heart, and bringing

so that thou canst." This is its great ethical rule, and whoso is not prepared to adopt it, in its fullest extent, should not undertake to be a Fourierist.

him into harmony with nature and with God, but by bringing all out of man into harmony with man. What, according to Fourierism, is duty? Simply to enjoy, to provide for satisfying the passions. What is it to obey God? To constitute the town or parish so that man shall find, in its organization, no restraint on any of his passions or desires. Where, we demand, is duty in the Christian sense, duty to love man, to love God, to live for God, and give one's self up to the commands of God? Nowhere. I find in your teaching nothing which appeals to any other motive in man than interest, or love of pleasure. I see nothing incompatible with the most perfect Epicureanism, save that the individuals who are seeking to introduce the reform are not necessarily selfish, but may be disinterested. But what, save Epicurean motives, do they hold out to induce us to join them? What in us do they address? Do they appeal to our sense of duty? No. They undertake to show the capitalist that it will be a profitable investment of capital, and the laborer that it will be a profitable investment of labor, and the voluptuary that he will there find a pleasing gratification for all his senses. The devil has grown bold, in very sooth, and no longer takes even the trouble to put on a disguise.

It ceases to be neces

sary for him to put on the guise of an angel of light; he may venture forth in his own person, with his cloven foot and trident tail and all, and men will follow him in crowds, and swear he is a Divinity; nay, the Divinity; and cry, "All hail, great Prince of Darkness! Welcome, thrice welcome among us!" Wealth and pleasure are the baits with which the devil allures us to our ruin, and wealth and pleasure are the attractions held out by our Fourierists. Yet, in the face and eyes of the command, "Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth," and of what our Lord says, "If a man seek to save his life he shall lose it," they are good Christians, and we are slanderers if we intimate any discrepancy between Fourierism and Christianity.

We know very well that Fourierists speak of God, of Christ, of revelation, and even of the Church; but what

do they mean by these awful, sublime words? Mean? Why, God is the force acting in our passions and instincts, blossoming in the trees, glowing in the stars, and constituting the sum and substance of what is; Christ is the ideal of perfect manhood, which, at the same time, is the ideal of perfect Godhood, and his significance is the identity of the human nature with the Divine; and revelation means, that, inasmuch as the force acting in us, in our instincts, passions, &c., is God, what these crave must needs be the revelation or manifestation of the will of God. The Church is the house which man builds for God, not the house which God builds for man. Some men are to promenade their eyes over all existing sects, select out the true, and mould it into one complete and harmonious whole. Thus you will have the one faith; this one faith, working in the minds and hearts of men, will gradually gather around it, or rather build up around it, an institution which will represent or express it to the world, and that will be the one Catholic Church! So they are not only Christians, but Catholics; who, then, shall dare, henceforth, to question their orthodoxy, or hesitate to receive them as competent witnesses and judges of the orthodoxy of Fourierism? Fourierism is Christian in their sense, and if they are Christians. But, my good friends, the Church, that is, the Church of God, if it be any thing, is an institution founded by God himself for man, not an institution developed from man, or gradually formed through the workings of men's notions of Christian truth. The one Catholic Church is this divinely founded and sustained institution, and if you do not mean this institution by your Church, then call your Church by another name; if you are not Catholics, in the sense defined by the Catholic Church herself, then, do not deceive yourselves and others by calling yourselves Catholics.

But we did not intend to go so fully into the religious, or rather, irreligious, character of Fourierism. We referred to it, merely as one of the evidences of how completely the sense of religion has been lost; so com

pletely, — and we say it with deep humiliation, for the charge we imply might but a few years since have been brought with equal justice against ourselves, - that men of no mean intelligence, and of honest intentions, and even benevolent aims, fancy themselves firm believers in the Gospel of our blessed Lord, when rejecting it entirely as the kingdom of mediatorial Grace, when denying its fundamental dogmas and precepts, and admitting it at all only as a bungling statement of the veriest Naturalism. The patient is never in a more dangerous condition than when he believes himself to be in perfect health. The last century was characterized by open, avowed, unblushing infidelity; the present century, thus far, has to no inconsiderable degree been characterized by an infidelity equally intense, and all the more dangerous from its believing itself to be faith. The German Rationalism of Paulus, Röhr, and others, is worse than the Deism of Voltaire, or the Atheism of d' Holbach; and Rationalism itself is comparatively orthodox by the side of the mawkish Sentimentalism of De Wette, the pantheistic Spiritualism of Schleiermacher, and the Naturalism of Strauss and his feeble echoes in this country. Infidelity, using, and with apparent sincerity, the language of faith and piety, is the most dangerous species of infidelity the devil has as yet succeeded in inventing. Our age is full of this species of infidelity. Our literature is full of it; our speculations overflow with it; it drops from the sanctuary; it flows out in the political oration, and penetrates even the decision of the judge. We are all good believers; we are all enlightened, liberal believers; we believe in all sacred books; we hold the sacred books of all nations to have been inspired, all religions to be of God; for they are of man, and man is God; and wherefore, then, call us unbelievers? Sure enough. Nevertheless, a great work is to be done, not merely to bring men back to the simplicity of the Gospel, but to make them perceive even a fundamental difference between the New Testament and the Koran, the Christian Church and the institutions of the Arabian impostor.

The worst feature of our age is its miserable eclecticism. It reads all, collects and accepts all, and comprehends nothing. It starts with the notion, that all religions, all worships, all symbols, all rites, are symbols of facts, of partial truths; or, in other words, that each represents a correct, but partial, view of truth. Thus, Paganism has its truth; Mahometanism its truth; Christianity its truth; Catholicism its truth; Protestantism its truth; Calvinism its truth; Arminianism its truth; Trinitarianism its truth; Unitarianism its truth; but no one is the truth, the whole truth. Christianity is a special department of religion in general, and of course can comprehend only a part of what is essential to religion. Alas! Where is this to end? Did not Jesus say, "I am the way, THE TRUTH, and the life?" Do you credit him? Then how dare you say that Paganism or Mahometanism has a truth which is not in all its integrity in Christianity? Are all the so called Christian. denominations merely sects? Or shall we say, that, in point of fact, among these, after all, is the one true Catholic Apostolic Church? Does the true Apostolic Church still subsist? If you say it does not, you give the lie to Christ, who declared that he would build his Church upon a rock, and the gates of hell should not prevail against it; if you say it does exist, can you conceive it possible for there to be any truth, in any the sects, which it has not in its purity and in its integrity? Do, then, take some position; either accept the Son of God, or reject him; either accept the Church as it is, or reject it altogether. For if it has become corrupt, it is a false Church, was always a false Church, and always must be a false Church; and if it be not corrupt, but the true Church, then to refuse to accept it is to refuse to submit to God.

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We press this point upon those who are demanding social ameliorations. We showed in the article in our April number, headed, No Church, No Reform, that there is no reform possible without the ministry of the Church, which not only represents our faith in the supernatural, but which actually embodies supernatural

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