youth by birth and by disposition, prudent, careful, thrifty; his very enthusiasm was of the New England type, the product of theological ideas, a creation of the gospels, a desire to introduce the "Kingdom of Heaven," a continuance of the prophetic calling. New England is as noted for its fanaticism as it is for its theology. Its fanaticism is the offspring of its theology, and in proportion as its theology disappears its fanaticism decreases. In Mr. Ripley's case the theology had reached very near to its last attenuation and the fanaticism had tapered off into a gentle enthusiasm. He undertook to establish a kingdom of heaven on earth because he had given up the expectation of a kingdom of heaven in the skies; and he undertook to establish a kingdom of heaven on earth by rational, economic means, not by religious interventions. He was subject to that peculiar kind of excitement that comes to a few people in connection with the keen exercise of their intellectual powers, when they have laid hold of what seems to them a principle--an excitement that is easily mistaken for moral earnestness even by one who is under its influence, which, indeed, lies so close to moral earnestness as to feel quickly the effect of moral earnestness in others, notwithstanding the checks applied by practical wisdom. Mr. Ripley had struck on a theory of society, which at that time was passing from the phase of feeling into the phase of philosophy. The theory was in the air; the most susceptible spirits were full of it; all noble impulses were in its favor, it belonged to the order of thought he had attained; it was native to the aspirations that inflamed the men and women with whom he was most intimate; their feelings awoke his intellect, and he was carried away by a stream whereof he appeared to himself to be a tributary and whereof he appeared to others as the main current, on account of his impetuosity, and the vigor with which he proceeded to put the idea into practice. In his own mind he was realizing the dream of the New Testament, but, in fact, he was testing a principle of which the New Testament was quite unconscious, the modern principle of the equal destinies of all men. He had abandoned the New Testament ground of allegiance to Jehovah, and had adopted the human ground of fidelity to social law. He was still under the spell of religious emotions, but they had become merged in the abstractions of rationalism and merely lent an added glow to his ideas, so that he could readily imagine that he was actuated by spiritual convictions when, in fact, he was doing duty as a disciple of socialist philosophers. His own interest in Brook Farm was in the main speculative, though through his personal sympathies he was moved toward an enterprise that had moral ends in view.