of spiritual pride.  There is, on the other hand, a full acknowledgment of the ordinary failings of unpretentious good people.  Nor do we mean to say that they were purely in the natural order—­who can be said to be that?  They were the descendants of the baptized Puritans whose religious fervor had been for generations at white heat.  They had, indeed, cut the root, but the sap of Christian principle still lingered in the trunk and branches and brought forth fruit which was supernatural, though destined never to ripen.

Christ was the model of the Brook-Farmers, as He had become that of Isaac Hecker.  They did not know Him as well as they knew His doctrine.  They knew better what He said than why He said it, and that defect obscured His meaning and mystified their understandings.  That all men were brethren was the result of their study of humanity under what they conceived to be His leadership; that all labor is honorable, and entitled to equal remuneration, was their solution of the social problem.  While any man was superfluously rich, they maintained, no man should be miserably poor.  They were reaching after what the best spirits of the human race were then and now longing for, and they succeeded as well as any can who employ only the selvage of the Christian garment to protect themselves against the rigors of nature.  Saint-Simon was a far less worthy man than George Ripley, but he failed no more signally.  Frederic Ozanam, whose ambition was limited in its scope by his appreciation of both nature and the supernatural, succeeded in establishing a measure of true fraternity between rich and poor throughout the Catholic world.

There can be no manner of doubt that although Father Hecker in after life could good-naturedly smile at the singularities of Brook Farm, what he saw and was taught there had a strong and permanent effect on his character.  It is little to say that the influence was refining to him, for he was refined by nature.  But he gained what was to him a constant corrective of any tendency to man-hatred in all its degrees, not needed by himself to be sure, but always needed in his dealing with others.  It gave to a naturally trustful disposition the vim and vigor of an apostolate for a cheerful view of human nature.  It was a characteristic trait of his to expect good results from reliance on human virtue, and his whole success as a persuades of men was largely to be explained by the subtle flattery of this trustful attitude towards them.  At Brook Farm the mind of Isaac Hecker was eagerly looking for instruction.  It failed to get even a little clear light on the more perplexing problems of life, but it got something better—­the object-lesson of good men and women struggling nobly and unselfishly for laudable ends.  Brook Farm was an attempt to remove obstructions from the pathway of human progress, taking that word in the natural sense.