I am no partisan of any sect, but I must rejoice in seeing any progress towards the conviction that Christianity is indeed "_glad tidings of great joy_," and that in its original purity it was a very different thing from the system that is popularly preached, and which is still received as reasonable and scriptural by men and women, who in other respects are sensible and correct in their judgments. When shall we learn that without the spirit of Christ we are none of us His? I trust I am not becoming a partisan or a bigot. I have suffered enough, and too much, in sustaining those characters, in earlier, more inexperienced, and more ignorant years; but I have no prospects of earthly happiness more inviting than that of preaching the truth, with the humble hope of impressing it on the mind with greater force, purity, and effect than I could do with any other than my present conviction. In 1840 the ministry was abandoned forever, for more secular pursuits. After 1849 his activities were wholly literary; he had no connection with theology, and none who did not know his past suspected that he had once been a clergyman. The same cast of thought, not "pale" in his case, suffused his action at Brook Farm and made a Utopia quiet, calm, dignified, pervaded by the radiance of mind, the gentle enthusiasm of the intellect. The heat came in the main from other sources. He was receptive rather than original, inflammable rather than fiery, brilliant rather than warm. The heat was supplied by those near him, by those he trusted, and by those he loved. Not that he was deficient in concern for society; far from it; but his interest was more philosophical than philanthropic. The subject of an association that should combine intellectual and mechanical labor and should diminish the distance between the tiller of the ground and the educator was agitated among the thinkers he was intimate with. Dr. Channing had such a project at heart. Mrs. Ripley burned with humane anticipations. Plans for social regeneration were in the air. It was impossible for one who lived in the midst of ardent spirits, or was sensitive to fine impressions, or was cultivated in an ideal wisdom that was not of this world, to escape the contagion of this kind of optimism; Emerson was saved by his belief in individual growth; Parker by his steady common-sense; others were protected by their conservatism of temperament or of association, by their want of courage, or their want of faith; but men and women of ideal propensities, like Nathaniel Hawthorne, W. H. Channing, J. S. Dwight, joined the community, which promised a new era for Humanity. Mr. Ripley would probably have left the ministry at any rate, for it had become distasteful to him, but it is not likely that he would have undertaken the management of Brook Farm unless he had been assured of its success; for he was a New England