One feature of Mr. Greig's entertaining sketch deserves notice in passing, viz., his cheerful boast of the multiplicity of religions in the Clarkson Association, and the wonderful harmony that prevailed among them. The meaning of the boast undoubtedly is, that religious belief was so completely a secondary and insignificant matter, that it did not prevent peaceful family relations, even between the atheists and the orthodox. This kind of harmony is often spoken of in the accounts of other Associations, and seems to have been a general characteristic, or at least a desideratum, of the Owen and Fourier schools. It is this harmonious indifference, which we refer to when we speak of the Associations of those schools as non-religious.
The primary Massachusetts Communities, however, were hardly so free from religious limitations, though they issued from the sects commonly called liberal. The Brook Farmers, we have seen, covered the National Convention all over with the mantle of piety, insisting that they were at work as devout Christians, and that Fourierism, as they held it, was Christianity. And Hopedale was even more zealous for Christianity than Brook Farm. Collins's Community at Skaneateles, on the other hand, went clear over to exclusive anti-religion; and actually barred out by its original creed, all kinds of Christians, tolerating nobody but sound Atheists and Deists.
The Northampton Association, which we have termed Nothingarian, seems to have invented the happy medium of the Clarkson platform, and in that respect may be regarded as the prototype of the whole class of Fourier Associations. The mixture of religions, however, at Northampton, was not so harmonious as at Clarkson. The historian of the Northampton Community says: "The carrying out of different religious views was perhaps the occasion of more disagreement than any other subject; and this disagreement, operated to general disadvantage, as in consequence of it several valuable members withdrew." We shall meet with similar disagreements and disasters in the Sodus Bay Phalanx and other Associations, to be reported hereafter. So that it does not seem altogether safe to huddle a great variety of contradictory religions together in close Association, notwithstanding the apparent results in the Clarkson case. And it occurs, as a natural suggestion, that possibly the Clarkson Association did not last long enough to fairly test the results of a general mixture of religions.
CHAPTER XXIV.
THE SODUS BAY PHALANX.[ToC]
This Association originated about the same time as the Clarkson Association (February 1844), and in the same place (Rochester). The following description of its domain is from the Herald of Freedom:
"We have at this place about 1,400 acres of choice land, three hundred of which are under improvement. It borders on Sodus Bay, the best harbor on Lake Ontario, and for beauty of scenery, is not surpassed by any tract in the State. We have on the domain two streams of water, which can both be used for propelling machinery. We number at present about three hundred men, women and children. The buildings on the place were nearly enough to accommodate the whole, the place having formerly been occupied by the Shakers, who had erected good buildings for their own accommodation."