"The original founders of this Association, no doubt actuated by good motives, but lacking discretion, held out such a brilliant prospect of comfort and pleasure in the very infancy of the movement, that hundreds, without any correct appreciation of the difficulties to be undergone by a pioneer band, rushed upon the ground, expecting at once to realize the heaven they so ardently desired, and which the eloquent words of the lecturers had warranted them to hope for. Thus, ignorant of Association, possessed, for the most part, of little capital, without adequate shelter from the inclemency of the weather, or even a sufficient store of the most common articles of food, without plan, and I had almost said, without purpose, save to fly from the ills they had already experienced in civilization, they assembled together such elements of discord as naturally in a short time led to their dissolution." One feature of Mr. Greig's entertaining sketch deserves notice in passing, viz., his cheerful boast of the multiplicity of religions in the Clarkson Association, and the wonderful harmony that prevailed among them. The meaning of the boast undoubtedly is, that religious belief was so completely a secondary and insignificant matter, that it did not prevent peaceful family relations, even between the atheists and the orthodox. This kind of harmony is often spoken of in the accounts of other Associations, and seems to have been a general characteristic, or at least a _desideratum_, of the Owen and Fourier schools. It is this harmonious indifference, which we refer to when we speak of the Associations of those schools as _non-religious_. The primary Massachusetts Communities, however, were hardly so free from religious limitations, though they issued from the sects commonly called liberal. The Brook Farmers, we have seen, covered the National Convention all over with the mantle of piety, insisting that they were at work as devout Christians, and that Fourierism, as they held it, was Christianity. And Hopedale was even more zealous for Christianity than Brook Farm. Collins's Community at Skaneateles, on the other hand, went clear over to exclusive anti-religion; and actually barred out by its original creed, all kinds of Christians, tolerating nobody but sound Atheists and Deists.