or even to find any pattern at all. Once described by Emerson as a "Cobbett of a scribe" (thanks to his rousing essay "The Laboring Classes"), Brownson ran through practically the whole range of Protestant sects— Presbyterianism, Universalism, free thought, Unitarianism—before converting to Catholicism in 1844, and his political views followed a similarly erratic path. An Owenite socialist in his twenties, he later embraced the cause of working-class radicalism, briefly called himself a Jacksonian Democrat, soured on democracy after the log-cabin, hard-cider campaign of 1840, allied himself for a time with John C. Calhoun, and finally settled down as a Catholic conservative in the last twenty-five years of his life.

Since Brownson never kept his opinions to himself or thought them over in private before committing them to print, he "gained a sneer," as he himself noted, for his "versatility and frequent changes of opinions." ^* He conducted his self-education in public, in the pages of magazines written entirely by himself. "The debate in my mind," he wrote in 1842, "has been going on for the last ten years." In fact it had been going on a good deal longer than that; nor did it stop with his conversion. As a Catholic, he continued to fill Brownson's Quarterly Review with dense, erudite, prickly, opinionated articles on theology, ethics, epistemology, law, and politics. More Catholic than the pope, he sometimes had to be disciplined by his clerical superiors, especially when his frequent pleas for the reunification of politics and religion threatened the precarious truce between the Catholic church and the state. The Catholic hierarchy understood its acceptance of the church-state separation as the essential condition of the church's existence in America, and Brownson's zeal for a public religion proved not a little embarrassing.

His inability to accept the separation of politics and religion provides the key, I think, to Brownson's otherwise baffling career—the one element of stability and continuity running through all his inconsistencies and contradictions. From the beginning, he took the position that reli‐

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Theodore Parker called Brownson "a man of unbalanced mind, intellectual always, but spiritual never: heady, but not hearty; roving from church to church; now Trinitarian, then unbeliever, then Universalist, Unitarian, Catholic—everything by turns but nothing long." Brownson, Parker said, was "not a Christian, but only a verbal index of Christianity—a commonplace book of theology."

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