feeling that they should be true to the right; and that to be manly, is to be ready to follow the truth under whatever guise it may come, to whatever it may lead, to the loss of reputation, to poverty, to beggary, to the dungeon or the scaffold, to the stake or exile. I have had my faults, great and grievous faults, as well as others, but I have never had that of disloyalty to principle, or of fearing to own my honest convictions, however unpopular they might be, or however absurd or dangerous the public might regard them. Give me rather the open, honest unbeliever, who pretends to believe nothing more than he really does believe, than your sleek, canting hypocrite, who rolls up his eyes in holy horror of unbelief, and makes a parade of his orthodoxy, when he believes not a word in the Gospel, and has a heart which is a cage of unclean beasts, out of which more devils need to be cast than were cast out of the Magdalen. The former may never see God, but the latter deserves the lowest place in hell. There is hope of the conversion of a nation of unbelievers; of the conversion of a nation of hypocrites none. Sincerity in error is respectable; insincerity in the truth is of all things the most reprehensible, for it proves the heart is wholly false, a mass of corruption, in which even divine grace can find, I was about to say, nothing to work upon, certainly nothing likely to concur with it.

If my conscience would have let me pretend to be a Christian, after it became clear I was no Christian believer; if I could, without suffering its reproaches, have continued to profess myself a Universalist, after I had ceased to believe in revelation, though writing or preaching nothing which I did not really believe, I doubt if the grace of God would ever have rescued me from my errors; and I must think it was his grace that would not suffer me to do so. My honest avowal of unbelief was, under the circumstances, a step that brought me nearer the kingdom of God. I believe that the mass of my countrymen will make little advance towards the Gospel till they come back to honest nature, and consent to own to themselves and to the world what they really are. It is necessary, first of all, to make away with all shams,to use one of Carlyle's terms,-to get rid of all illusions, and to believe a lie is a lie, and that no lie shall stand. W live in an age of shams, of illusions; and the saddest thing of all is that, while we have no faith in reality, we believe in shams, we trust illusions, and say, These be thy gods, O Israel! that have brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.

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If we have not advanced to faith in the Gospel, let us return to simple nature, and have at least the natural order, which, after all, is real, on which to plant our feet.

The end of man, as disclosed by "my creed" of 1829, is obviously an earthly end, to be attained in this life. Man was not made for God, and destined to find his beatitude in the possession of God, his supreme good, the supreme good itself. His end was happiness, not happiness in God, but in the possession of the good things of this world. Our Lord had said: "Be not anxious as to what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, or wherewithal ye shall be clothed, for after all these things do the heathen seek." I gave him a flat denial, and said: Be anxious, labor especially for these things, first for yourselves, then for others. Enlarging, however, my views a little, I said: Man's end for which he is to labor, is the well-being and happiness of mankind in this worldis to develop man's whole nature, and so to organize society and government as to secure all men a paradise on the earth. This view of the end to labor for, I held steadily and without wavering from 1828 till 1842, when I began to find myself tending unconsciously toward the Catholic Church. The various systems I embraced or defended, whether social or political, ethical or æsthetical, philosophical or theological, were all subordinated to this end, as means by which man's earthly condition was to be meliorated. I sought truth, I sought knowledge, I sought virtue for no other end, and it was not in seeking to save my soul, to please God, or to have the true religion, that I was led to the Catholic Church, but to obtain the means of gaining the earthly happiness of mankind. My end was man's earthly happiness, and my creed was progress. In regard to neither did I change or swerve in the least, till the truth of the Catholic Church was forced upon my mind and my heart. During the period of fourteen years, for the greater part of which I was accused of changing at least once every three months, I never changed once in my principles or my purposes, and all I did change were my tools, my instruments, or my modes of operation.

In renouncing Universalism, which with me was only a stage in my transition from the religion of my childhood to socialism, I had renounced all fear and all hope in regard to another world; and though subsequently, as a Unitarian, I held to a future existence, it was merely a continuation of our natural life, a natural immortality, which did not include. the resurrection of the flesh, or rewards and punishments in

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a Christian sense. I felt easy in regard to the future, and was in the habit of maintaining that the best way to secure a heaven hereafter is to create a heaven for mankind in this world. For years I held this maxim, and never troubled myself at all in regard to what might be my fate or that of others after death. I had a firm belief in progress, full confidence in philosophy, and a strong desire to contribute to the welfare of my fellow-men, to reform the world, and create an earthly paradise for the human race; but I had very little thought or sense of my duty to God, and no serious care for any thing beyond the service of my neighbor in relation to this life. I recognized God, but only in man, and I held that he exists for us only in human nature. For years I went no further in my thoughts, and thirsted for nothing higher or broader. I had schooled my feelings and my imagination to my narrow carnal-Judaism, and experienced nothing of that craving for an unseen and spiritual good, that secret longing for God and religion, of which so much use is made in our arguments against unbelievers. I felt none of that trouble which I felt formerly when I found my childhood's belief escaping me. convinced by my own experience that our philanthropists and world-reformers may become so engrossed in their plans that they do not experience that aching void within, that emptiness of all created things, which we sometimes imagine. Their philanthropy is a religion unto them. Even failures do not at once discourage them, for they find their relief in their doctrine of progress. It is idle to tell them that the good they seek is bounded, and that the soul craves an unbounded good; for, holding to progress, to the indefinite perfectibility of man, they are unable to assign any limits to the good to which they are wedded; and as progress implies imperfection, they have a ready excuse for their failures. We have failed to-day, but we shall succeed tomorrow. I was mistaken, my experiment was not successful, but I shall do better next time. Or, if I die without succeeding, the human race is progressive, each new generation is wiser than the last, and the generation coming after me will succeed, and my labors, my experiments, my failures even, will perhaps contribute to its success. So they will not be in vain. Individuals die, but the race survives, is immortal. Thus hope revives from failure; and the individual consoles himself with the belief that what he cannot accomplish, the race in its march through the ages will

VOL. V.-4

effect, and his labors meet their reward in the increased virtue and happiness of mankind.

We cannot reach the socialist, who has made a religion of his socialism, by appeals to his love of happiness, or to the failures of his undertakings. I would that I could feel the fervor, the enthusiasm, in the cause of the truth, which at one period I felt in the cause of socialism. The fact is, the socialist is not all wrong. You may declaim against him as much as you please, but it will be none the less true that he is often governed by noble instincts, by generous sentiments, which Christianity does not disown, but accepts and consecrates. He has also certain aspects even of Christian truth, or aspects of truth which, without the Christian revelation and the operations of Christian charity, he never would have beheld. In those aspects of truth which he has, and to which he is devoted, we must take our point of departure in leading him to renounce his errors.

CHAPTER VI.-METHODS OF WORLD-REFORM.

I had fixed the end for which I was to labor,-the creation of an earthly paradise; but the means of gaining it were not well determined. My own mind was very nearly balanced between two contradictory theories: the theory of individualism, and that of communism. I had read, had, in fact, studied with great assiduity, one of the most remarkable works in our language, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Political Justice, if I recollect the title aright, by William Godwin, originally a Calvinistic dissenting minister, at Stowmarket, England, whence, in 1787, he removed to London, where he devoted himself to literature. He was the author of Caleb Williams, St. Leon, Fleetwood, Mandeville, Cloudsley, a work on Population in reply to Malthus, A History of the Commonwealth of England, The Life and Times of Chaucer, and several other works, the titles of which I forget. He married, in 1797, Mary Wollstonecraft, a writer of some distinction, best known as the author of a work entitled, Rights of Woman, a pendant to Paine's Rights of Man, and which may be regarded as the Bible of our Women's Rights party. She was the mother of Mary Godwin, who wrote Frankenstein, a most fearful story, fitted to give one the nightmare for three weeks after reading it; and who, after his divorce from his wife, was regarded as married to the poet Shelley. Godwin's novels

were much read in their day, and it is easy to trace their influence in the productions of Charles Brockden Brown, one of our earliest American novelists, who merits a higher rank in American literature than has been commonly assigned him. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton owes, in his earlier novels, much to those of Godwin, and Caleb Williams and St. Leon are still read. As a writer, for calmness and strength, for repose and energy combined, Godwin has scarcely a rival in the English language; and his style deserves to be studied by every one who would master the purity, elegance, and force of our mother-tongue. I know no other English writer who, unmoved himself, so powerfully moves his readers; and he is almost the only English writer, since Burke's unhappy influence on the language, who has written truly classical English, or our language according to its real genius.

The work on Political Justice was first published in 1792, and was republished in a second edition, much modified from the first, in 1794. My edition was the second. I have it not now, and have not seen it these twenty years, but I remember its contents very distinctly. It was inspired by the enthusiasm created by the French Revolution of 1789 in a large class of the civilized world, and contains nearly all the false and dangerous principles of that revolution, systematically arranged, developed, and pushed to their last consequences with a merciless logic, and a chasteness, vigor, grace, and elegance of language, which I have never seen surpassed. I had read this book when quite a lad, but without understanding it; and I had read it again as a Universalist, and appropriated many of its ideas. I now read it still again as a socialist, and I think it has had more influence on my mind than any other book, except the Scriptures, I have ever read. There is scarcely a modern error that it does not contain; and he who has mastered it, may regard himself as in possession of nearly every error the human mind is capable of inventing. It denies as unjust all punishment, except restraint from actual violence, and consequently all capital punishment, and all penitentiaries. The author contends that the only law is justice, and justice requires us to treat every man according to his intrinsic worth, although he forgets to tell us how we are to discover it; and therefore, that if my neighbor has more intrinsic worth than I, I am to love him more, if less, I am to love him less, than myself. If his father, mother, sister, brother, wife, or child, is more worthy than mine, then am I to love