gion was far too important to remain a purely private concern; no doubt it was this conviction, in part, that led him to make such a public issue of his own religion, doubts and all. Even during his free-thought phase, he insisted that society needed religion more than ever—the religion of humanity, as he then hoped, that would take the place of Christianity. By the mid-thirties, he had repudiated the man-made religion advocated by the Saint-Simonians. ^* He wrote his New Views of Cbristianity, Society, and the Church (1836) expressly to refute the contention that society needed a new religion in place of the old one. In the same work, however, he continued to attack the separation of church and state, which rested, he now argued, on a philosophical separation of spirit and matter, mind and body, that ran counter to the doctrine of the Incarnation and to the whole Christian tradition. Three years later, he criticized the idea that clergymen should not "meddle in politics" on the grounds that "all man's duties are intimately connected," that "religion and politics run perpetually into one another," and that "a religion which neglects man's social weal, is defective in the extreme," while a politics set apart from religion

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In his autobiography, published in 1857, Brownson explained that he was attracted to the Saint-Simonians because, unlike other radical sects, they foresaw a "religious future for the human race" and held that religious feeling, moreover, had to be embodied in a "hierarchical organization." He found the same ideas in Benjamin Constant, the French liberal whose writings, he said, helped to bring into clearer focus his misgivings about Protestantism—though not yet, of course, to push him toward Catholicism. "The work of destruction, commenced by the Reformation, which had introduced an era of criticism and revolution, had, I thought, been carried far enough. All that was dissoluble had been dissolved. All that was destructible had been destroyed, and it was time to begin the work of reconstruction,—a work of reconciliation and love." Since "no doubt had as yet risen in my mind as to the truth of the doctrine of progress," Brownson assumed, in the early I830s, that the religious institution humanity required would take the form of a "church of the future." He took the position that although "Catholicity was good in its day," the mere fact of the Reformation "proved that there were wants and lights which Catholicity did not meet." It was equally obvious to Brownson at this time—or at least in retrospect—that Protestantism had completed its own historical assignment and that the world now cried out for "union." He interpreted the work of Carlyle, among others, as such a cry. "Carlyle, in his Sartor Resartus, seemed to lay his finger on the plague-spot of the age. Men had reached the centre of indifference, ... had pronounced the everlasting 'No.' Were they never to be able to pronounce the everlasting 'Yes'?"

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