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Show Page 33 two years, but left behind innumerable zealots anxious to try again. Rigdon himself had read New Testament significance into such attempts and insisted that communalism was a proper expression of any restoration of the primitive church. A number of Rigdon's followers had therefore formed a "family" relationship, patterned after a nearby Shaker organization, on the Mentor homestead of Isaac Morley. Influenced by the account in the fourth chapter of Acts, Rigdon was wedded to this common property concept andsolicited Joseph's approval. Joseph answered with a revelation which agreed in principle with the Book of Acts, and yet forbade indiscriminate appropriation of common goods for private use. Joseph's vision was an orderly one and revolved around a novel concept - "stewardship," where every man retained his own property within the framework of consecration, with "residuals" going for the support of those 14 with no property to contribute. Joseph's system of accountability most nearly resembled the associationist principles of Fourierism, which was in turn drawn from theories espoused by the ultra-liberal French Jacobins. Fourier's ideas were not then current in the United States, however, and Joseph Smith's communitarian theology was dependent upon a spiritual framework rather than Rousseauvian natural law. The first attempts to incorporate this "law of the Church" proved as unstable as New Harmony had been. With the spring of 1831, the Colesville members bound themselves to the new order as they set up their colony at Thompson, some ten miles east of Kirtland. Orson Pratt had lived in this neighborhood briefly three years before, and now re-joined the branch, laboring for five or six weeks with his hands alongside the people he had befriended in December. This was the entire duration of the order. It collapsed when the former Shaker Leman Copley refused to hand over some 15 lands he had promised the colony. During this time, Orson Pratt also |