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philosophy is the doctrine. The purpose of his mission into this world was to found the kingdom of God on earth, which should be the Kingdom of kingdoms, and in which he should live and reign as King of kings. and Lord of lords. His apostles were able to build up this Kingdom, because he was with them, and they had him by whom all things are created, and were, therefore, able, through him, to do all things. There was with them, living in them, and acting through them, the very Creative Word which had framed the worlds, and by whose energy all creation is sustained, and by whose life all creatures live. Thus were they powerful; thus were they able to overcome the world, and to establish the kingdom of God. But if they had had only the doctrine, they could have founded no kingdom. What could they have done, as simple teachers, beyond what had been already done by the great philosophers and moralists of the Gentile world? Philosophy has never founded any thing, has never been an institutor. All its creations are confined to a narrow space, and limited to a brief period of time. Where are the institutions of the early sects, which undertook to build on doctrines? Where is a single institution that was founded on a doctrine? No greater constructive genius ever appeared than John Calvin. He undertook to organize the Reformation, and to found the Reformed Church. Where are his institutions now? Are they living realities? No; they are merely a heavy volume, called "Christian Institutes," lying on the shelves of a few theologians, rarely read, still more rarely studied. All Protestant sects undertake to build on doctrine, and they all fail, and universal Protestantdom complains of disorganization, of anarchy, chaos, and cries out, from the depths of its misery, for reform, for reorganization, for a living institution. We are authorized by all experience to say, that the power men need to work out their salvation, social or individual, must come through the communication of Truth, of God, not merely through the communication of a just view of God, or of God's Word. 24

VOL. I. NO. II.

"Except ye eat my flesh and drink my blood, ye have no life in you."

Assuming, now, that the speculative knowledge of truth, or a just view of truth, will not suffice, then we can receive the power we need only by some ministry which can communicate truth itself, the REAL PRESENCE. No scheme of reform, then, is, or can be, practicable, that does not bring along with it the "wisdom of God, and the power of God," for its own realization. It must be an institution embodying the Holy Ghost, and able to communicate the Holy Ghost. We say an institution. If it be a doctrine, it will be inadequate; if it is the truth uninstituted, it is beyond our reach. Truth, as pure spirit, is for us as if it were not. We ourselves, not being pure spirit, but the union of spirit and body, can come into immediate relation with spirit, and commune immediately with it, only as it is, like ourselves, the union of spirit and body; consequently, we can stand in immediate relation with the truth only as it is embodied. Here is the profound significance of the Incarnation, and wherefore it is always Immanuel, or God with us, "God manifest in the flesh," that redeems and sanctifies.

Let us try our Reformers by this test. We will take up, for instance, Fourierism. This proposes to reform the world by means of ASSOCIATION and ATTRACTIVE INDUSTRY. Well, is Fourierism truth, or is it only a doctrine of truth? It is a doctrine. Is the truth, of which it is a doctrine, embodied, instituted, on the earth? No. Then Fourierism, granting it to be a just view of truth, a true account, as it professes to be, of the laws of the Creator, will amount to nothing. Go even further; assert and establish its identity with Christian philosophy, it amounts to just as little, for Christianity is not efficacious as the philosophy of truth, but as the truth itself.

But assuming Fourierism to be truth, and not a mere theory of truth, it could not answer your purpose; for it is, at best, merely truth in the abstract, truth

unembodied. It was not born, as is the living child, the union of spirit and body; it was not born, as was the Church, the Spirit of Truth that leadeth into all truth embodied, or instituted, therefore, was not born. a living thing. It is not living truth, at least to us. How, then, can it give life? or accomplish a work of social renovation and growth?

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But, waiving this, and taking Fourier to be merely a seer of truth, and recorder of what he saw, then, Fourierism is only a theory. Grant, if you will, that it is a true theory, though this is more than we believe, it is only a theory, and can change nothing in human affairs, save as it is reduced to practice. It is not yet the actual solution of the social problem, but merely its theoretical solution, and must be applied before it can be an actual solution. Where, then, is your power to apply it? This power is not in the theory itself; otherwise it would not remain a theory. Then it must be obtained, if obtained at all, from abroad. The life is not in your theory, and, therefore, you must obtain, from some other source, the power to give it life. Whence will you obtain this power? From the human heart? Not at all; for has not our falsely organized society perverted the human heart, and is it not expressly to rectify this perverted human heart, to bring it into harmony with what you call the laws of the Creator, that you propose the practical realization of Fourierism? If the human heart, all perverted as you allege, has the power to realize Fourierism, then Fourierism is not needed. If it is needed, then the human heart cannot give you the power you need to realize You must look, then, elsewhere, or abandon its realization.

Will you obtain the power from man, without stopping to specify whether from head or heart, or both combined? You then assume that man, in case he has the true theory of life, has, in himself, the power to realize it. That is, teach a man what he ought to do, and he has the power, without further assistance, to do it. This, we suppose, is the doctrine of the Fourierists,

as of all reformers; for they all tell us that ignorance is the cause of all vice and evil. Let us see if this be so. We have seen that the history of the race, thus far, gives no support to this hypothesis. But, Platonists as we are, we shall not question the fact, that all ideas, whether human or otherwise, have a certain potency, and can, and do, produce certain effects. Nor shall we deny that man has, within given limits, the power to realize his own ideas, or views of truth; for we hold, that man was created in the likeness of his Maker, and is, therefore, essentially creative. But all man's creations must be inferior to what he himself is, at the moment of creating. He can, then, realize no ideas, the realization of which transcends himself.

But Fourierism is proposed as a scheme of Reform, and its realization is intended to be something superior to what man now is. To say, then, that he has power to reduce it to practice, must be either to deny that its realization would be a reform, or else to assert that man's creations may surpass himself, the stream rise higher than the fountain, the creature be greater than the creator. If, then, your Fourierism is to be the introduction of something superior to what is, you cannot obtain from man the power to introduce it. Whence, then, will you obtain the power?

Do you reply, that, to admit our objection, is to deny to man the inherent power of progress? Admitted. What then? This inherent power of progress is precisely what we have all along been denying, and that man does not possess it is the very thing we are endeavouring to demonstrate. From man you can get only man, and from perverted man, only perverted man. In order to get a product surpassing society as it now is, one of your factors, at least, must be superior to what society, as it now is, can furnish. Granted, your Fourierism sees a truth superior to what now is, yet the seeing, the conception itself, does not transcend what is, and, therefore, brings into society no power which it has not already. You can have in your product only the sum of the powers of your factors;

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and, if the factors are both taken from existing society, how can the product transcend existing society? Add, abstract, multiply, and it is always existing society, and nothing else. Man, we say very positively, and on a higher than human authority, is never able, of himself alone, to work out his own redemption. Nor is he, in himself, inherently progressive. This innate capacity of improvement, about which we talk so much in modern times, is all moonshine. Man is progressive, indefinitely progressive, but only by virtue of a wisdom and a power not his own, and which are graciously communicated to him from Him "who is made unto us wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption."

Suppose you undertake to realize Fourierism; either your phalanx cannot get into operation at all, or it will only reproduce, under another form, all the evils of the existing social order. Aggregate your sixteen hundred and eighty persons in your phalanx, arrange them in your groups and series, and what have you got? Simply, the sum of moral life they brought with them. You have obtained no accession of life, no increase; and how, without an increase of moral life, are you to obtain a result superior to what you had to begin with? Will you say, "In Union there is strength"? So there is, but only the sum of the strength of the parts. In the union of aggregation there is nothing more.

Here is the fundamental vice of all modern schemes of reform. All our reformers proceed on the false assumption, that man is sufficient for his own redemption, and, therefore, are trying always with man alone to recover the long lost Eden, or to carry us forward to a better Eden. Here is the terrible sin of modern times. We vote God out of the State; we vote him out of our communities; and we concede him only a figurative, a symbolical relation with our Churches, denying almost universally the REAL PRESENCE, and sneering at it as a Popish error; we plant ourselves on the all-sufficiency of man, and then wonder that we fail, and that, after three hundred years of efforts at reform, nothing is gained, and a true state of society

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