is frail and fickle, that his heart
is full of delusions, and that his lips are a distillery of falsehood?
_Omnis homo meudax_. Whether we will or no, we all serve for a time as
instruments of this truth, whose kingdom comes every day.

God alone is immutable, because he is eternal.

That is the reply which, as a general rule, an honest man is entitled
always to make, and which I ought perhaps to be content to offer as an
excuse; for I am no better than my fathers. But, in a century of doubt
and apostasy like ours, when it is of importance to set the small and
the weak an example of strength and honesty of utterance, I must not
suffer my character as a public assailant of property to be dishonored.
I must render an account of my old opinions.

Examining myself, therefore, upon this charge of Fourierism, and
endeavoring to refresh my memory, I find that, having been connected
with the Fourierists in my studies and my friendships, it is possible
that, without knowing it, I have been one of Fourier's partisans. Jerome
Lalande placed Napoleon and Jesus Christ in his catalogue of atheists.
The Fourierists resemble this astronomer: if a man happens to find fault
with the existing civilization, and to admit the truth of a few of their
criticisms, they straightway enlist him, willy-nilly, in their school.
Nevertheless, I do not deny that I have been a Fourierist; for,
since they say it, of course it may be so. But, sir, that of which my
ex-associates are ignorant, and which doubtless will astonish you, is
that I have been many other things,--in religion, by turns a Protestant,
a Papist, an Arian and Semi-Arian, a Manichean, a Gnostic, an
Adamite even and a Pre-Adamite, a Sceptic, a Pelagian, a Socinian, an
Anti-Trinitarian, and a Neo-Christian; [72] in philosophy and politics,
an Idealist, a Pantheist, a Platonist, a Cartesian, an Eclectic
(that is, a sort of _juste-milieu_), a Monarchist, an Aristocrat,
a Constitutionalist, a follower of Babeuf, and a Communist. I have
wandered through a whole encyclopaedia of systems. Do you think
it surprising, sir, that, among them all, I was for a short time a
Fourierist?

For my part, I am not at all surprised, although at present I have
no recollection of it. One thing is sure,--that my superstition and
credulity reached their height at the very period of my life which my
critics reproachfully assign as the date of my Fourieristic beliefs.
Now I hold quite other views. My mind no l