It is surely in this manner that much of that spirit of schism has been engendered, which has since turned its venom against ourselves. We should not see such disgraceful love of division, as is at this moment exhibited by certain episcopalian dissenters in Edinburgh, nor that fatal disregard of unity which is covering our land with conventicles, and destroying the social safety and moral life of our colonies, if the principle of unity were duly prized, and the evils of its loss conscientiously acknowledged.

And if we look higher, and, from its baneful effect upon the lowest, trace its influence upon the most exalted order of the Church, we shall see, in like manner, that an indifference to this great truth of the development among us of Christ's kingdom, as one glorious whole, is paralyzing the very vitals of our state. For hence it is that those who bear rule among us are so slow in assisting their real dignity and most efficient prerogative. The best thing that remains to us, the only method whereby each individual may still realize his hold on the unity of the Church, is, to retain connexion with that successor of the Apostles, under whose spiritual guardianship he is individually placed. Thus may each man carry back his thoughts along the chain of succession, till he feels himself linked to that early age, when the whole Christian body retained its unity, and its strength.

But how shall our people feel thus, unless the successors of the Apostles stand forth in their true character as possessors of a mysterious gift, as the centres of moral unity to mankind? By their means must the discordance of various minds be harmonized, and separate spirits be made sensible, that, by one common centre, they are truly at one among themselves. Shall this be attained by their appearance at certain triennial intervals, like the vagarious wanderers of the sky, or by the continual light and warmth of their presence? The people of England assuredly will never believe the rule-Ecclesia est in Episcopo, they will never understand the meaning of that unity of which every Bishop should be a central point, till they see this order resident continually among them, and discharging its superior duties with the same permanent attention as the inferior priesthood of the land. While confirmation is practically impeded, because the senate occupies the most seasonable portion of the year, while the consecration of churches is continually deferred, or still worse, dispensed with for a season,-while the Bishop is seldom seen, ministering the public service at the head of his clergy, it were idle to hope that the moral and mysterious nature of his office, and therefore, that the true principles of unity, can be comprehended in our land.

To accuse, indeed, our present rulers of inactivity, were no less absurd than unjust. No men toil more assiduously than they. But twenty-four bishops were not found too many in the days of Elizabeth, and are they enough, therefore, since our people have increased

fold? At the present moment, also, two of our bishops are sufg from incurable mental incapacity (the effect of age or sick

ness), and several others are very far advanced into the vale of years. If we impute blame, therefore, it is to the Church at large, which does not call for some adaptation of our system to the moral exigencies of the times. But for the want of some legislative power in the Church of England, we should not surely suffer helplessly under an evil which all considerate men deplore. Why do we not call with one voice upon our leaders to remove that obstacle by which the unfriendly spirit of the last century prevented the Church of England from giving utterance to her collective will? Why do we not implore our present rulers to exercise that power which they already possess; and by calling a body of suffragan bishops into existence to give stability and life to our moral power? Without this we may grow in bulk,-new churches and ministers may everywhere be planted, but unless the heart beat with a more generous impulse, our torpid limbs will never compass any vigorous and united efforts in the cause of Christ.

Fourier and his System. By MADAME GATTI DE GAMOND. Translated by C. T. WOOD, Junior, Esq. London. 1842. Théorie des Quatre Mouvemens et des Destinées générales. Par C. FOURIER. 1808.

Le Nouveau Monde Industriel et Sociétaire. C. FOURIER. 1829. The London Phalanx Magazine. Published Monthly. London. 1841-2.

The Biography of Charles Fourier, with a brief Sketch of his Theory of Attractive Industry. By HUGH DOHERTY, Esq. London. 1841.

Christian Sympathy; a Sermon, preached at Horbling, Lincolnshire, on behalf of the Distrest Manufacturers; with an Appendix, containing a Sketch of the Industrial System of Fourier. By E. R. LARKIN, M.A., Curate of Horbling. London. 1842. WITH Monsieur Fourier, and his male and female followers and annotators in France and America, we should most probably have never meddled, had this new movement in the social and political world been confined to those two countries, by nature and prescription the abiding places of panto-logical crotchets and vagaries. In France, the land of its birth, persons have been found not only to believe in the theory, but to attempt to reduce it into practice. Near Citeaux, there is the first Phalansterian colony in the world. In America, all at present is periodical talk: the Democratic Review, the Boston Quarterly, the Dial, and some few other publications, have called the attention of the public to the scheme of attractive industry. And now the attempt is being made in this country to bring the theory into favour with our half-starved manufacturing population: books are being sold and circulated at a very cheap rate

publications, of many closely printed pages, that of Madame de Gamond, one hundred pages, for a shilling, or even less; a Monthly Magazine advocates its adoption; and, at last, one priest of the Church has been pressed into the service of the Phalansterians, and has taken the opportunity of the late distress to propose the system of Fourier as a remedy for our social evils. We think we have now given sufficient reasons for at once gratifying our own and our friends' curiosity with a peep into this wondrous remedy for "every ill that society is heir to;" whilst at the same time we perform the duty we owe to society in laying bare the scheme which many well-intentioned and many more evil intentioned persons are striving, heart and hand, to render popular, especially among the lower classes of our countrymen. We will first speak of the wondrous philosopher himself, who professes to have at last discovered the true and natural principles upon which societies should be based to secure peace, plenty, and happiness to mankind.

Charles Fourier, the younger son of a woollen-draper at Besan-. çon, in Franche-Comté, was born in April, 1772. From his earliest infancy he seems to have been very obstinate, or, as his biographer states it," manifested an indomitable tenacity of opinion when he believed himself right, notwithstanding the opposition he might meet with on the part of prejudiced authority." His sisters merely said he was very obstinate: according to the antagonistic principle, he imbibed a hatred of falsehood from having been well thrashed for telling a customer the truth, instead of the white lie his father had concocted. As a boy, he seems to have been considered the prodigy of Besançon, and to have deserved the title from his studiousness and general quickness of apprehension. After leaving school, Fourier entered as a clerk in a commercial house at Lyons, and after a few years at the desk, was promoted to the situation of traveller, a place in those days of higher standing than a bagman's of the present time. For some years he seems to have travelled in this capacity through Germany, Holland, Switzerland, the Low Countries, and France, and to have acquired an extensive but very superficial kind of knowledge. The nature of his mind is shewn in the following extract from his biography :

"He studied almost every branch of science, so as to acquire, at least, a general knowledge of each, and their relative degrees of importance in a universal point of view. The mathematical, musical, chemical, and natural sciences were those which he cultivated most: the metaphysical, political, moral, and economical sciences he mistrusted as soon as he found their doctrines were based on arbitrary and uncertain principles. He discarded every thing which was not rigorously derived from the laws of nature, deeming it absolute loss of time to study arbitrary rules, even where they are more or less indispensable, as in languages; he paid little or no attention to rules of grammar and logical sophistry. He had a correct knowledge of Latin, but he gave himself no trouble to learn modern languages; he neglected even to acquire a critical knowledge of his native idiom, the French. This neglect of languages, was caused more by a positive knowledge of their imperfections, than by a natural distaste for the acquisition of words; one of his earliest discoveries revealed to him the natural scale of

variety in the sounds of the human voice, and, as the most simple sounds were forty-eight in number, he saw the confusion which must necessarily arise, from the fragmentary attempts to represent a compound multiplicity of these distinct sounds, by means of twenty or thirty simple letters. Having also discovered the natural laws by which names should be given to things, he was aware of the inconveniences which must arise from an arbitrary system of forming words that different persons would attach different meanings to the same word, appeared to him a natural consequence of the arbitrary formation of languages; and, as it is impossible for one man, or one generation, to remedy evils of this nature, he contented himself by indicating the natural process of reform, when society should be sufficiently advanced to think of undertaking such an operation. One of his principal rules of study was, 'to observe Nature as she reveals her laws, rather than delude himself by imagining or learning arbitrary doctrines.'

In 1793, Fourier succeeded to his share of his father's property, about four thousand pounds; commenced business at Lyons, and lost every thing in the revolutionary tempest that followed. Our young philosopher, "the implacable enemy of falsehood," saved his life on the surrender of Lyons to the conventionalists, by telling three different lies in one day; and, as his biographer informs us, "never felt the slightest remorse for having made that exception to the heavenly laws of truth." Like the rest of his countrymen, he served in the armies of the revolution, though but for a short time, on account of the interest of a Colonel Bricour, who had married one of his cousins. He now returned to his commercial pursuits, and devoted all his leisure time to develope the true theory of society. As far back as the year 1790, having been obliged to pay sevenpence to an old woman at Paris for an apple he had often purchased at Besançon at three farthings a dozen, his mind had been forcibly driven to the consideration of commercial extortion; from that time he laboured nine years with his theory, and at last discovered in the ninth year" the laws of universal unity and the essential destiny of humanity on earth." These be great words, Madame Gamond; reader, they are not ours. We give his discoveries in the words of his friends, because, as we hardly know what they mean, we think the story had better be told by themselves.

"His first inquiries concerning commerce, led him to discover the evils of incoherence and jarring individual interests. He perceived that the only possible mode of introducing truth, equity, and economy in productive and distributive industry, was by means of agricultural association and wholesale trade. He found that attraction and repulsion were the two principal laws by which the Creator governs the world; and in order to obtain a complete knowledge of these laws, he resolved to study simultaneously the highest and lowest orders of creation in the universe. He considered the stars as the highest order of creation, mankind as the middle term, and the inferior orders of the creation as the lowest step in the scale. He supposed that there must be certain general laws of unity common to these three orders of existence, or it would be impossible for them to compose one harmonious whole; and he hoped that by studying all that was known in the positive sciences concerning them, he might discover the natural laws of correlativeness, which bind them together in unity and eternity. His

principal lever in the work of discovery was a sort of algebraical calculation, by which he supposed every law that was common to any two of these general terms, must be common to the third; and he never abandoned, any branch of study until he had discovered those principles of nature which were common to the medium and the two extremes.

"His first discovery was the universality of distribution, according to a law of ascending and descending progression, in every order of the creation, from the highest to the lowest degree of animate and inanimate beings. This law of progressive distribution he termed series: accordingly, the first grand axiom which he established was this,- All the harmonies of the universe are distributed in progressive series.'

"Having observed a perfect correspondency between the various orders of creation in the universe, he was led to infer, that, as the Creator was one and the same being, infinite and eternal, in his attributes, there must necessarily be a principle of unity in all his works; that the creation must necessarily be a reflection of the attributes of the Creator; that the Creator being all in all, it was impossible for him to paint or represent any thing but himself in the creation. If he had represented any thing foreign to his own attributes, that something must exist independently; and, in that case, the Deity would not be infinite. Such an hypothesis being perfectly absurd, we must admit that the Creator is infinite, and that it would be impossible for him to create any thing which was not analogous to some of his own attributes. From these considerations, Fourier derived his second axiom,— "The Creator being one infinite harmonious being, everything in nature must be an imitation of his attributes, and therefore there exists in every order of creation, similarity or universal analogy.'

"Considering attraction and repulsion as the universal laws of nature, and God as the original distributor of all sorts of attraction, it is perfectly rational to infer, that the respective faculties or impulses of attraction and repulsion in all orders of beings, are distributed exactly in proportion to their respective functions in the general harmony of the universe: the affinity which binds the atom to the atom, the attractive power which rules the movement of the planets the affections which bind human beings to each other in society, are only so many different modes of the one universal law of attraction and repulsion; and from this self-evident induction, Fourier derived his third general axiom, The permanent attractions and repulsions of every being in creation, are exactly in proportion to their respective functions and their final destinies in the universe.'

Such are the three foundation stones of the Phalansterian system which the Curate of Horbling wishes to introduce among his people. Does the Reverend Mr. Larken agree with his pet philosopher, that "theology and arbitrary science are false philosophy, erroneous and one-sided interpretations of scriptural and natural revelation?" Or has this Lincolnshire curate a fellow-feeling with the sceptic who penned the following paragraph, with which the seventh page of the biographical sketch is ornamented?

"Those who take an interest in oddities, may find a subject of curious remark in the history of four apples: a striking contrast between the influence of two apples in antiquity, and two in modern history. According to tradition, the two first were the causes of original sin, and the celebrated Trojan war: the other two have been instrumental in causing the discovery f the universal laws of attraction: the material branch by Newton, the ritual by Fourier. Those of antiquity were the causes of discord and ering; those of modern date highly influential in effecting harmony and piness."