the new religion was much weakened, and he often talked to me of the old Church, and assured me that he felt at times that he must return to her bosom.  I owe him many hints which turned my thoughts toward Catholic principles, and which, with God’s grace, were of much service to me.  These and many others were in the sect; whose chiefs, after the death of its founder, were—­Bazard, a Liberal and a practical man, who killed himself; and Enfantin, who after the dissolution of the sect sought employment in the service of the Viceroy of Egypt, and occupies now some important post in connection with the French railways.

The sect began in 1826 by addressing the working classes; but their success was small.  In 1829 they came out of their narrow circle, assumed a bolder tone, addressed themselves to the general public, and became in less than eighteen months a Parisian mode.  In 1831 they purchased the Globe newspaper, made it their organ, and distributed gratuitously five thousand copies daily.  In 1832 they had established a central propagandism in Paris, and had their missionaries in most of the departments of France.  They attacked the hereditary peerage, and it fell; they seemed to be numerous and strong, and I believed for a moment in their complete success.  They called their doctrine a religion, their ministers priests, and their organization a church; and as such they claimed to be recognized by the State, and to receive from it a subvention as other religious denominations [did].  But the courts decided that Saint-Simonism was not a religion and its ministers were not religious teachers.  This decision struck them with death.  Their prestige vanished.  They scattered, dissolved in thin air, and went off, as Carlyle would say, into endless vacuity, as do sooner or later all shams and unrealities.

Saint-Simon himself, who as presented to us by his disciples is a half-mythic personage, seems, so far as I can judge by those of his writings that I have seen, to have been a man of large ability and laudable intentions; but I have not been able to find any new or original thoughts of which he was the indisputable father.  His whole system, if system he had, is summed up in the two maxims “Eden is before us, not behind us” (or the Golden Age of the poets is in the future, not in the past), and “Society ought to be so organized as to tend in the most rapid manner possible to the continuous moral, intellectual, and physical amelioration of the poorer and more numerous classes.”  He simply adopts the doctrine of progress set forth with so much flash eloquence by Condorcet, and the philanthropic doctrine with regard to the laboring classes, or the people, defended by Barbeuf and a large section of the French Revolutionists.  His religion was not so much as the Theophilanthropy attempted to be introduced by some members of the French Directory:  it admitted God in name, and in name did not deny Jesus Christ, but it rejected all mysteries, and reduced religion to mere socialism.