Mere Supreme.  The law on marriage must emanate conjointly from the Supreme Father and the Supreme Mother, and it would be irregular and a usurpation for the Supreme Father to undertake alone to legislate on the subject.  Bazard would not submit, and went out and shot himself.  Most of the politicians abandoned the association; and Pere Enfantin, almost in despair, dispatched twelve apostles to Constantinople to find in the Turkish harems the Supreme Mother.  After a year they returned and reported that they were unable to find her; and the society, condemned by the French courts as immoral, broke up, and broke up because no woman could be found to be its mother.  And so they ended, having risen, flourished, and decayed in less than a single decade.

The points in the Saint-Simonian movement that arrested my attention and commanded my belief were what it will seem strange to my readers could ever have been doubted,—­its assertion of a religious future for the human race, and that religion, in the future as well as in the past, must have an organization, and a hierarchical organization.  Its classification of men according to the predominant psychological faculty in each, into artists, savans, and industrials, struck me as very well; and the maxims “To each according to his capacity,” and “To each capacity according to its works,” as evidently just, and desirable if practicable.  The doctrine of the Divinity in Humanity, of progress, of no essential antagonism between the spiritual and the material, and of the duty of shaping all institutions for the speediest and continuous moral, intellectual, and physical amelioration of the poorer and more numerous classes, I already held.  I was rather pleased than otherwise with the doctrine with regard to property, and thought it a decided improvement on that of a community of goods.  The doctrine with regard to the relation of the sexes I rather acquiesced in than approved.  I was disposed to maintain, as the Indian said, that “woman is the weaker canoe,” and to assert my marital prerogatives; but the equality of the sexes was asserted by nearly all my friends, and I remained generally silent on the subject, till some of the admirers of Harriet Martineau and Margaret Fuller began to scorn equality and to claim for woman superiority.  Then I became roused, and ventured to assert my masculine dignity.

It is remarkable that most reformers find fault with the Christian law of marriage, and propose to alter the relations which God has established both in nature and the gospel between the sexes; and this is generally the rock on which they split.  Women do not usually admire men who cast off their manhood or are unconscious of the rights and prerogatives of the stronger sex; and they admire just as little those “strong-minded women” who strive to excel only in the masculine virtues.  I have never been persuaded that it argues well for a people when its women are men and its men women.  Yet I trust I have always honored and always shall honor woman.  I raise no question as to woman’s equality or inequality with man, for comparisons cannot be made between things not of the same kind.  Woman’s sphere and office in life are as high, as holy, as important as man’s, but different; and the glory of both man and woman is for each to act well the part assigned to each by Almighty God.