deep earnestness of purpose and thorough convictions of his personal
duty in the case, set himself at work to evolve a way to extricate at
least some of humanity from their vicious surroundings; and finally
proposed to the Club a plan which he urged with his customary vigor and
eloquence.

This plan was, in short, to locate on a farm where agriculture and
education should be made the foundation of a new system of social life.
Labor should be honored. All would take part in it. There should be no
religious creeds adopted. The old, feeble and sick were to be cared
for, the strong and able bearing the greater burden of the labor. There
would be no rank, to entitle the owner of it to superior considerations
because of the rank; and truth, justice and order were to be the
governing principles of the society.

The theologians and philosophers of Europe, with whose writings and
logic Mr. Ripley was well acquainted, had impressed him with the truth
of the divinity of man's nature, or had convinced him more thoroughly
that his own ideas of it were right. He had wrestled with progressively
conservative giants, professors of colleges--notably Andrews Norton--
and had won well-earned laurels. Norton was professor of sacred
literature at Harvard, one of his own professors, sixteen years his
senior, and made a point that the miracles of Christ and the writings
of the gospel were the only sure proofs existing of spiritual truths.

The Transcendental philosophy to which Mr. Ripley had become a convert,
claimed that there was in human nature an intuitive faculty which
clearly discerned spiritual truths, which idea was in contradistinction
to the beliefs of the day, which declared that spiritual knowledge came
by special grace, and was proven by the divine miracles; this latter