If required here to define absolute success, we should say that at the lowest it includes not merely self-support, but also self-perpetuation. And this attainment is nearly precluded by the ascetic method of treating the sexual relation. The adoption of foreign children can not be a reliable substitute for home-propagation. The highest ideal of a successful Community requires that it should be a complete nursery of human beings, doing for them all that the old family home has done, and a great deal more. Scientific propagation and universal culture should be its ends, and money-making only its means. The causes of the comparative success which the ascetic Communities have attained, we have found in their religious principles and their freedom from marriage. Jacobi seems disposed to give special prominence to _leadership_, as a cause of success. He evidently attributes the decline of the Beizelites, the Rappites and the Zoarites, to the old age and death of their founders. But something more than skillful leadership is necessary to account for the success of the Shakers. They had their greatest expansion after the death of Ann Lee. Jacobi recognizes, in his account of the Ebenezers, another centralizing and controlling influence, cooperating with leadership, which has probably had more to do with the success of all the religious Communities than leadership or anything else; viz., _inspiration_. He says of the Ebenezers: "They call themselves the inspired people. They believe in the Bible, as it is explained through their mediums. Metz, the founder, and one of the sisters, have been mediums more than thirty years, through whom _one_ spirit speaks and writes. This spirit guides the society in spiritual and temporal matters, and they have never been disappointed in his counsels for their welfare. They have been led by this spirit for more than a century in Germany. No members are received except by the consent of this controlling spirit." Something like this must be true of all the Communities in Jacobi's list. This is what we mean by _afflatus_. Indeed, this is what we mean by _religion_, when we connect the success of Communities with their religion. Mere doctrines and forms without afflatus are not religion, and have no more power to organize successful Communities, than the theories of Owen and Fourier.