idea
which, as he declares, had occurred to him before he was ten years old
that there was something radically wrong in all religions. Whether
this opinion had come to him from the diffused rationalism of his
time, or was congenial to the practical and prosaic temperament which
was disquieted by the waste of energy over futile sectarian squabbles,
or was suggested by his early study of Seneca--the only author of whom
he speaks as having impressed him in early years--it became a fixed
conviction. He had been an early supporter of Lancaster and
'unsectarian' education. When his great meeting was to be held in 1817
it occurred to him that he might as well announce his views. He
accordingly informed his hearers that the religions of the world were
the great obstacles to progress. He expected, as he assures us, that
this candid avowal would cause him to be 'torn in pieces.' It provoked
on the contrary general applause, and Owen congratulated himself
rather hastily on having struck the deathblow of superstition.

Owen's position, at any rate, was a significant symptom. It showed
that the Socialist movement sprang from motives outside the sphere of
the churches. Owen's personal simplicity and calmness seems to have
saved him from any bitter animosity. He simply set aside Christianity
as not to the purpose, and went on calmly asserting and re-asserting
his views to Catholics and Protestants, Whigs, Radicals, and Tories.
They agreed in considering him to be a bore, but were bored rather
than irritated. Owen himself, like later Socialists, professed
indifference to the political warfare of Whigs and Tories. When, at
the height of the Reform movement, he published a paper called the
_Crisis_, the title referred not to the struggle in which all the
upper classes were absorbed, but to the industrial revolution which he
hoped to bring about. He would have been equally ready to accept help
from Whig, Tory, or Radical; but his position was one equally
distasteful to all. The Tory could not ally himself with the man who
thought all religions nonsense; nor any of the regular parties with
the man who condemned the whole industrial system and was opposed to
all the cherished prejudices of the respectable middle classes.

Owen's favourite dogma is worth a moment's notice. He was never tired
of repeating that 'character is formed by circumstances'; from which
he placidly infers that no man deserves praise or blame for his
conduct. The infe