The educational features of the community were, from all testimony, a great failure and disappointment. It was one thing to assemble distinguished scientists, and quite another to organize them into an effective teaching corps. The school taught by d’Arusmont lasted but a short time, and Robert Dale Owen, who was himself a teacher in one of the community schools, while admitting the man’s good qualities, described him as “a wrong-headed genius, whose extravagance and wilfulness and inordinate self-conceit destroyed his usefulness.” Neef had been an officer under Napoleon, and his rough military habits had not been wholly corrected by his subsequent association with Pestalozzi. The Duke of Saxe-Weimar gives a lively picture of him, drilling his boy pupils in military tactics as he led them to the performance of certain labors in the village. Maclure, Say, and Troost did not engage actively in teaching. Paul Brown stated, in a pamphlet assailing the society, that he began teaching in the boarding-school in September, 1826; but from his own story Brown was chiefly employed with meditations on the evils of the place, and his manifestations of temper argue against his value as a teacher. Madame Fretageot was associated with Neef, and the two had charge of the boarding-school. Madame Neef was not regularly employed as a teacher, but sometimes assisted her husband. Robert Owen’s unfriendly attitude toward religion had awakened hostility in England before he came to the United States. Packard, one of his biographers, expresses no doubt as to Owen’s disbelief in the inspiration of the Bible and in the divine origin of Christianity. Lloyd Jones, the writer of another life of Owen, seeks to mitigate the effect of some of the statements in Owen’s “New Moral World”; but it is sufficiently clear that when he was at the height of his fame and usefulness in England, Owen estranged many of his most influential friends and admirers by his flings at religion, which were serious enough to arouse the wrath of an occasional heresy-hunting bishop. Sargent, the author of “Robert Owen and his Philosophy,” says that Owen suffered for his religious opinions “neglect, hatred, contempt, calumny, and all the evils that follow the excommunicated man.” In his “Declaration of Mental Independence” at New Harmony, July 4, 1826, Owen inveighed against “a trinity of the most monstrous evils that could be combined to inflict mental and physical evil upon the whole race. I refer to private or individual property, absurd and irrational systems of religion, and marriage founded on individual property combined with some of these irrational systems of religion”--a statement that was somewhat advanced for the Wabash Valley of that period. He seemed to ignore the spiritual element in man, though, according to Sargent, he expressed in his old age his belief that a Divine Providence had guided him through his long career; and late in life he became a convert to spiritualism.