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But by this time all the new ideas, Sabbatical, no-government, perfectionist, non-resistance, as well as women's rights, were within the anti-slavery arena, and fencing and fighting for a chance to live, with the old ideas and the old order. Garrison championed all of the new ideas, and in doing so arrayed against himself all of the special champions of the existing establishments.
Noyse, that the snake or the dragon is the Holy Ghost who comes from the depth of his Printing Office and inspires his readers with such infernal delusion, as appeared in his "Perfectionist" against my mission, and I left directly his place. The man who has brought me to Mr. Noyse, left soon after that spectacle his own wife, a good natured woman, and went with another "Lady" to unknown regions.
He was a good deal of a perfectionist, and evidently looked upon himself with no small satisfaction, as a living illustration of his favorite doctrine. "St. John says," this was the style of his discourse, "St. John says, 'He that is born of God, doth not commit sin' Now, if I am born of God, I do not commit sin."
That goal cannot mean for each man simply the developing to the utmost of all the capacities which he possesses. There are men rich in the possibilities of sloth, of indifference to future good, of egoism, even of malignant feeling. Nor does the average man furnish the pattern of perfection. The perfectionist does not regard the average man as the embodiment of his ideal. He seeks to better him.
In 1848 the Oneida Community was founded in America to carry out a resolution arrived at by a handful of Perfectionist Communists "that we will devote ourselves exclusively to the establishment of the Kingdom of God."
"First thing you know you'll be dizzy," warned the moralist, Merle. "Ho, I will not!" She laughed in scorn, and valiantly puffed on the noisome thing. Thus stood Ben Blunt and the Wilbur twin, their faces together about this business of lighting up; and thus stood the absorbed Merle, the moral perfectionist, earnestly hoping his words of warning would presently become justified.
The only difficulty in our day is why any man should have any difficulty about his own indwelling sin at all. But neither Beattie, nor Rutherford, nor any of the masters who remain to us had got so far as we. And as for the Antinomian, perfectionist, and higher-life preachers of that day, they are all so dead and forgotten that you would not know their names even if I repeated them.
A perfectionist, my guru was hypercritical of his disciples, whether in matters of moment or in the subtle nuances of behavior. "Good manners without sincerity are like a beautiful dead lady," he remarked on suitable occasion. "Straightforwardness without civility is like a surgeon's knife, effective but unpleasant. Candor with courtesy is helpful and admirable."
No sensible evolutionist would maintain that a creature of a given species should act in defiance of all the instincts of creatures of that type, merely on the ground that species may be involved in a process of progressive development. Nor need the perfectionist abandon his perfectionism in view of any such consideration.
J. H. Noyes, the founder of the Perfectionist communes, gives, in his book on "American Socialisms," brief accounts of not less than forty-seven failures, many of them experiments which promised well at first, and whose founders were high-minded, highly cultivated men and women, with sufficient means, one would think, to achieve success. Now, why these successes in the face of so many failures?