Probably there is not one among those rules so familiar and so universally approved by the prudent, as that which advises men and women not to marry without agreement in religion This rule has nothing to do with bigotry. It does not look at the supposed truth or falsehood of different religious creeds. It simply says: Let the Catholic marry the Catholic; the Orthodox, the Orthodox; the Deist, the Deist; the Nothingarian, the Nothingarian; but don't match these discords together, if you wish for family peace. Now this is the precept which the Fourier Associations, as we see, deliberately violated; and yet they expected peace, and complained dreadfully because they did not get it! There is latent quarrel enough in the religious opposition of a single pair, to spoil a family; and yet these Socialists ventured on hundred-fold complications of such oppositions, with a heroism that would be sublime, if it were not desperately unwise. It is useless to say that religion is an affair of the inner man and need not disturb external relations. It did disturb the external relations of the Socialists at Sodus Bay, and could not do otherwise. They quarreled about the Sabbath. It did disturb the external relations of the Northampton Socialists. They quarreled about amusements. Religion always extends from the inner man to such external things. It is useless to say, as Collins evidently wished to insinuate, that the bigoted sort of religionists, those of the orthodox order, were alone to blame. In the first place this is not true. All the witnesses say, Collins among the rest, that both parties pushed and hooked. And in the next place, if it were true, it would only show the importance of excluding the orthodox from Associations, and the value of the rule that forbids marrying religious discords. Even Collins, with all his liberality, had originally too much good sense to attempt Association in the promiscuous way of the Fourierists. His first idea was to make his Community a sort of close-communion church of infidelity; and, as it turned out, this was his brightest idea; for in abandoning it he succumbed to his more religious rival, Johnson, and admitted quarreling and weakness that ruined the enterprise. His advice also to the liberal party at Sodus Bay to withdraw, shows that his judgment was opposed to the heterogeneous mixtures that were popular among the Fourierists.