But Christianity not content with commanding, and encouraging marriage, as did the Old Testament, must forsooth go beyond it, and therefore encourages celibacy, as the state of perfection God says, in Genesis, "it is not good that man should be alone.

I will make a companion for him." And he blessed all his creatures, saying, " increase and multiply." But the gospel annuls this law, and represents a single life to be most pleasing, to the very being, whose very first command was, "increase and multiply"! It advises a man to die without posterity, to refuse citizens to the state, and to himself, a support for his old age.
"It is to no purpose to deny that Christianity recommends all this; I say, it substantially does! and I boldly appeal,--not to a few Protestant Divines,--but to the New Testament; to the Homilies of the Fathers of the Church; to the History, and Practice of the Primitive Christians; to the innumerable Monasteries of Europe, and Asia; to the immense multitudes who have lived, and died hermits; and, finally, (because I know very well, the Protestant divines attribute these follies to the influence of Platonism, Pythagoranism, and several other isms upon pure Christianity) I appeal to living evidence now in the world, to the only thoroughgoing Christians in it, viz., to the Society of the Shakers, who I maintain, and can prove, to be true, genuine imitators of the Primitive Christians, and a perfect exemplification of their manners, and modes of thinking.

I adduce them the more confidently, because, being simple, and unlearned, their character has been formed by the spirit of the New Testament, and perfectly represents the effects of its principles fully carried out, and acted upon.

They never heard of Platonism, or of Pythagoras in their lives, and, consequently, the polemic tricks, and evasions, which have been, as hinted just now, resorted to by Protestant divines, to shift from the shoulders of Christianity to those of Plato or Pythagoras, the obnoxious principles we have been considering, are of no use in this case, as, whatever the characters of these Shakers may be, they were formed by the New Testament, and by nothing else; and I believe, that every scholar in ecclesiastical history, who reads Brown's history of the Shakers, will be immediately and powerfully struck with the resemblance subsisting between them, and the Christians of the two first centuries.
As examples of the effects of those precepts of Christian morality, which command us to hate father, and mother, and sister, and brother, for the Bake of Jesus, take the following extracts from the history referred to.
"According to their faith, natural affection must be eradicated; and they say they must love all equally alike, as brothers, and sisters in the gospel.

It would exceed the limits of this work to give a particular account of the various schemes that have been contrived, to destroy all natural affection and social attachment between man and wife, parent and child, brothers and sisters; especially towards such as have left the society.