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GRAND ORIENT FREEMASONRY UNMASKED
AS THE SECRET POWER BEHIND COMMUNISM
by
MONSIGNOR GEORGE F. DILLON, DD., 1884
with Preface by
REV. Denis Fahey, C.S.Sp., B.A., D.PH., D.D.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
FOREWARD BY FATHER FAHEY ......................00
GOOD VERSUS EVIL ..............................01
THE RISE OF ATHEISM IN EUROPE .................02
VOLTAIRE ......................................03
FREEMASONRY ...................................04
THE UNION AND "ILLUMINISM" OF FREEMASONRY .....05
THE ILLUMINISM OF ADAM WEISHAUPT ..............06
THE CONVENT OF WILHELMSBAD ....................07
CABALISTIC MASONRY OR MASONIC SPIRITISM .......08
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION .........................09
NAPOLEON AND FREEMASONRY ......................10
FREEMASONRY AFTER THE FALL OF NAPOLEON ........11
KINDRED SECRET SOCIETIES IN EUROPE ............12
THE CARBONARI .................................13
PERMANENT INSTRUCTION OF THE ALTA VENDITA .....14
LETTER OF PICCOLO TIGRE .......................15
THE INTELLECTUAL AND THE WAR PARTY OF MASONRY .16
LORD PALMERSTON ...............................17
WAR OF THE INTELLECTUAL PARTY .................18
A WAR PARTY UNDER PALMERSTON ..................19
THE INTERNATIONAL,THE NIHILISTS, THE BLACK HAND20
FREEMASONRY WITH OURSELVES ....................21
FENIANISM .....................................22
CONCLUSION ....................................23
FOOTNOTES .....................................24
FOREWARD OF THE PUBLISHER .....................A0
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
FOREWARD OF THE PUBLISHER
The original title of this book, which was
compiled from a series of lectures delivered in
Edinburgh in October, 1884, by Mgr. Dillon, was
The War of Antichrist with the Church and
Christian Civilization.
the author wrote it "in order to do his part in
carrying out the instruction given in the
Sovereign Pontiff in the Encyclical Humanum
Genus when he called upon the pastors of
souls, to whom it was addressed, to 'instruct the
people as to the artifices used by societies of
this kind in enticing them into their ranks, and
as to the depravity of their opinions and the
wickedness of their acts'. Mgr. Dillon's work has
already been honoured by the Holy Father himself
with so marked and so unusual an approbation that
there is no need for us to accord it any further
praise than merely to take note of the fact. The
book was presented to His Holiness, accompanied
by an Italian versio of its table of contents,
and of long extracts from its principal sections,
and Leo XIII was pleased to order that the
Italian version should be completed, and the book
printed and published at Rome at his own
expense." (The Month, Sept. 18985)
Despite the fact that the lectures were delivered
by a Catholic prelate to an audience composed
mainly of members of his own faith, we feel that
the subject of internanational political
skullduggery is one which cannot fail to interest
Catholic and non-Catholic alike, the more so
indeed since events in the course of the decades
following the original publication of this book
have confirmed the lecturer's thesis.
The last four editions have appeared under the
title of Grand Orient Freemasonry
Unmasked.
FOREWORD
The Britons Publishing Company is to be
congratulated on reprinting this lecture on
Freemasonry by Right Rev. Mgr. George Dillon,
D.D. The lecture was delivered at Edinburgh in
October, 1884, that is, about six months after
the appearance of Pope Leo XIII’s famous
Encyclical Letter, Humanum Genus, on Freemasonry.
At the request of many who had heard the lecture
and of others who had read the reports that
appeared in the papers, Mgr. Dillon decided to
publish it, along with another lecture delivered
to the same audience on the Spoliation of the
Congregation of Propaganda. The book was brought
out by the excellent firm of M. H. Gill and Son,
Ltd., O’Connell Street, Dublin, in 1885, but it
has been long out of print. In the original
preface, the author pointed out that the lecture
had not been intended to be a formal and
exhaustive treatment of the subject, and that he
had embodied in the book several documents which
were only briefly referred to or partially quoted
in the lecture.1 His object was to give a clear
outline of the “whole question of secret,
atheistic organisation, its origin, its nature,
its history in the last century and in this, and
its unity of Satanic purpose in a wonderful
diversity of forms.” He found that it was
necessary to do this because “very few, if any,
attempts have been made in our language to treat
the subject as a whole. Several writers appear to
assume as known that which was really unknown to
very many: and few touched at all upon the fact
of the supreme direction given to the
universality of secret societies from a guiding,
governing and – even to the rank and file of the
members of the secret societies themselves –
unknown and invisible junta.”
Mgr. Dillon does not speak explicitly of the two
currents of thought and action proceeding from
the Masonic French Revolution, namely, the
current of Rousseauist-Lockian-Masonic Liberalism
and the current of Socialism and Communism.1
Implicitly, however, he does so when, on the one
hand, he foreshadows the United States of Europe
and World Federalism and, on the other, quotes
the infamous Declaration of the International in
1868. This Declaration, formulated at the
International Congress held at Geneva in 1868 and
quoted by Mgr. Dillon in his preface, is well
worth reproducing, at least in part. It runs as
follows: “The object of the International
Association of Workmen, as of every other
Socialist Association, is to do away with the
parasite and the pariah. Now what parasite can be
compared to the priest...?
“God and Christ, these citizen-Providences, have
been at all times the armour of Capital and the
most sanguinary enemies of the working classes.
It is owing to God and to Christ that we remain
to this day in slavery. It is by deluding us with
lying hopes that the priests have caused us to
accept all the sufferings of this earth. It is
only after sweeping away all religion, and after
tearing up even to the last roots every religious
idea that we can arrive at our political and
social ideal… “Down, then, with God and with
Christ! Down with the despots of heaven and
earth! Death to the priests! Such is the motto of
our grand crusade.”
In a note on page 20 of the original edition,
Mgr. Dillon returned to the question of the
direction of Freemasonry, which he had mentioned
in his preface. He there says: “The Jewish
connection with modern Freemasonry is an
established fact everywhere manifested in its
history. The Jewish formulas employed by
Freemasonry, the Jewish traditions which run
through its ceremonial, point to a Jewish origin,
or to the work of Jewish contrivers... Who knows
but behind the Atheism and desire of gain which
impels them to urge on Christians to persecute
the Church and destroy it, there lies a hidden
hope to reconstruct their Temple, and in the
darkest depths of secret society plotting there
lurks a deeper society still which looks to a
return to the land of Judah and to the rebuilding
of the Temple of Jerusalem?” These remarks can
furnish the starting point for a deeper
examination of the whole question of secret
societies and their action, studied in the light
of the Encyclicals of the Sovereign Pontiffs, and
of history.
The rejection of order by Satan and the other
fallen angels was irrevocable. It was a
declaration, by the whole body of them together,
of perpetual war on and implacable hatred towards
the Blessed Trinity and the Supernatural Life of
Grace. The fall of the human race could be
undone, because human beings can change their
minds and the human race comes into existence
successively by propagation from the first Adam.
In the undoing of the Fall, however, God
permitted a second rejection of order. In spite
of the fact that they had been repeatedly warned,
in types and figures, and orally by the prophets,
about the way they would treat the true Messiah
when He came, the Jews turned against Him and the
whole Divine Plan He proposed. When they refused
to enter into His designs, God permitted the
crime of Deicide, and by the supreme act of
humble submission on Calvary, the Supernatural
Life of Grace was restored to the world.
Fulfilling the prophecies to the letter, Our Lord
allowed Himself to be put to death, but He died
proclaiming the Divine Plan for order.
God wished the Jews as a people to accept His
Only-Begotten Son and to be the Heralds of the
Supernatural, super-national Life of His Mystical
Body. They were thus offered the glorious
privilege of proclaiming and working for the only
mode of realising the union and brotherhood of
nations which is possible since the Fall. On
account of their racial pride they refused to
accept that there could be any higher life than
their national life and they would not hear of
the non-Jewish nations entering into the Kingdom
of the Mystical Body on the same level as
themselves. The Crucifixion of Our Lord on
Calvary was, however, not only the public
rejection by the Jewish nation of the Divine
Programme for order in the world, but was at the
same time the proclamation by that nation of its
determination to work against God for the triumph
of another Messiah. Since Our Lord Jesus Christ,
the True Messiah, is the Source of the
Supernatural Life through membership of His
Mystical Body, the future Messiah must be
anti-supernatural or naturalistic, and membership
of Christ will have to be eliminated in
preparation for him. Since the True Supernatural
Messiah came to found the supranational kingdom
of His Mystical Body into which he asked the
Jewish nation to lead all nations, the future
Messiah must be a purely Jewish National Messiah
and his mission can have no other object than to
impose the rule of the Jewish nation on the other
nations. The choice presented to the Jewish
nation by the coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ may
be represented diagrammatically as follows:–
+ Supernatural and supranational Kingdom of the
Mystical Body of Christ. The Jewish nation
instructed by the prophets. ¦ ¦ ¦ + Naturalistic
ambition to impose Rule of their nation.
The Jewish nation instructed by the Prophets and
Figures of the Old Testament, and, lastly, by St.
John the Baptist, was meant to turn upwards, at
the bidding of God become Man, and to put all its
splendid natural qualities at the service of the
True Supernatural order of the world. Instead of
doing so, it turned downwards to the slavery of a
self-centred ambition dictated by national pride.
The attitude of Saul prior to his conversion on
the road to Damascus is typical of the corrupt
ideas concerning the mission of the Messiah which
had taken hold of Jewish minds and had led them
to reject Our Lord Jesus Christ. St. Paul saw the
truth about the Mystical Body of Christ after his
conversion and tried to get his fellow-countrymen
to recognise their error, but the nation as such
refused to listen. In his Christmas Allocution,
1948, Pope Pius XII brought out the contrast
between the alternatives that faced the Jewish
nation at the coming of Our Lord as follows:
“Hear, resounding in the night like the bells of
Christmas, the admirable words of the Apostle to
the Gentiles, who had been himself a slave to the
mean, narrow prejudices of nationalist and racial
pride, stricken down along with him on the road
to Damascus: ‘He (Christ Jesus) is our peace who
hath made both (peoples) one... killing the
enmities in Himself. And coming He preached peace
to you that were afar off, and peace to them that
were nigh.’ (Ephesians II, 14, 15, 16, 17.)”2
With that narrow, national outlook dictated by
racial pride, which Pope Pius XII said was
stricken down with St. Paul on the road to
Damascus, the Jewish nation has continued on down
the centuries. That outlook has, in fact, become
more accentuated with time. Accordingly, over and
above the fundamental disorder of original sin,
there is in our fallen and redeemed world an
additional source of disorder in the determined
opposition of His own nation according to the
flesh of the Redeemer and source of order.
Over and above the struggle against the
self-centred tendencies of individual souls, the
Catholic Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, has
to face the persistent opposition of the Jewish
nation. According to the leaders of the Jewish
nation, now as 1,900 years ago, the union of the
nations is not meant by God to take place through
entrance into and acceptance of the supranational
Kingdom of Our Lord’s Mystical Body but through
acceptance of and submission to the Naturalistic
Messianism of the Jewish nation. This is made
very clear in the letter from the Chief Rabbi of
Palestine, which appeared in The Irish
Independent (Dublin) of January 6, 1948.
Referring to the establishment of the new State
of Israel, Rabbi Hertzog said: “Eventually it
will lead to the inauguration of the true union
of the nations through which will be fulfilled
the eternal message to mankind of our immortal
prophets.”3
Jewish Naturalism or Anti-Supernaturalism, by its
striving for a new Messianic age, contains a
twofold source of corruption and decay for other
nations. On the one hand, by its opposition to
the Supernatural Life coming from Our Lord, it
strives directly against the Light and Strength
by which alone human life, individual and
national, can be lived in order. On the other
hand, whether the naturalistic Messiah to come be
an individual Jew or the Jewish Race, it means
that the Jews, as a nation, are seeking to impose
their particular national form on other nations.
The imposition by any nation of its national form
on another nation attacks directly the natural or
normal line of development of that nation and
undermines its natural virtues, which are the
foundation and the bulwark of the Supernatural
virtues. Thus in two ways the Jews, as a nation,
are objectively aiming at giving society a
direction which is in complete opposition to the
order proclaimed by God become Man. In spite of
the unwavering naturalistic opposition of the
Jewish nation and notwithstanding the weakness of
fallen human nature, Western Europe in the 13th
century, had accepted the Programme of Christ the
King and had organised society on that
foundation. The organisation was imperfect as all
the social structures of fallen and redeemed
humanity will inevitably be, but it was some
response to God’s loving condescension. Since
then, there has been steady decay.
The uprise of Protestantism in the 16th century
rent the unity of the Mystical Body of Christ.
Chapter XVI of William Thomas Walsh’s splendid
work, Philip II, is entitled Freemasonry in the
16th Century and shows that there was already at
that time some sort of secret organisation
engaged in working for naturalism against ordered
submission to Christ the King. He adds that “it
is no longer debatable that, if the false leaders
of the Jews did not originate the secret
societies to cover their own anti-Christian
activities and to influence credulous members of
the Christian communities, they had a great deal
to do with the business. The degrees and ritual
of Freemasonry are shot through with Jewish
symbolism: the candidate is going to the East,
towards Jerusalem, he is going to rebuild the
Temple (destroyed in fulfilment of the prophecy
of Christ),... The Grand Orient and Scottish Rite
lodges, sources of so many modern revolutions,
are more militant, more open and apparently more
virulent than some of the others whom they are
leading into a single world-organisation by
gradual steps.”4 From what we know today we can
conclude that “something very much like modern
Freemasonry, surely in spirit and probably to a
great extent in form... existed in the lifetime
of Philip II (1527-1598).”5 What we see, then, in
the years following 1717 is rather the emergence
into fuller light of a secret organised Force
aiming at enrolling and forming groups of adepts
to work for Naturalism, that is, for the denial
of the Supernatural Life and the elimination of
membership of Christ from society. The Jewish
nation is a non-secret organised naturalistic
Force, that is to say its naturalistic opposition
to the Mystical Body of Christ is openly
proclaimed. Freemasonry, the organised
naturalistic Force acting in subordination to and
in conjunction with the Jewish nation is a secret
society or group of societies, for its naturalism
or anti-Supernaturalism is secret or
camouflaged.6 Relatively few of its members are
fully aware of the naturalism of its end, its
ritual and its symbolism. According to Anderson’s
Constitution of the Freemasons, the masonic
society obliges its members to be good men and
true, but insists that in order to be morally
good men, it is a matter of indifference whether
God’s Plan for the restoration of our
Supernatural Life through Our Lord Jesus Christ
is accepted or not. Now, by original sin, we lost
the Supernatural Life of Grace, and we need that
Life of Grace that we may live an ordered life.
Yet this society proclaims that a man can be good
and true, that is, morally in order, while
remaining utterly indifferent to the unique
Source of Grace, Our Lord Jesus Christ and His
Divinity. That is equivalent to a denial of the
Fall and is pure Naturalism.
In his great Encyclical Letter, Humanum Genus, on
Freemasonry, issued in 1884, Pope Leo XIII
insists that “the naturalist and the Masons, not
accepting by faith those truths that have been
made known to us by God’s revelation, deny that
the first Adam fell.” Thus we see the fundamental
error of Masonry, namely, its Naturalism. Again
the great Pontiff points out that “the ultimate
aim of Freemasonry is to uproot completely the
whole religious and political order of the world
which has been brought into existence by
Christianity and to replace it by another in
harmony with their way of thinking. This will
mean that the foundation and laws of the new
structure of society will be drawn from pure
Naturalism.”7 That involves the elimination from
society of every acknowledgment of the
Supernatural Life of members of Christ. In the
Encyclical Letter, moreover, Pope Leo XIII shows
the opposition of Freemasonry to five out of the
six principal points of the Programme for Society
of Christ the King.8 In regard to the fifth
point, namely, the diffusion of ownership, the
Pope insists upon the fact that “Freemasonry is
not only not opposed to the plans of Socialists
and Communists, but looks upon them with the
greatest favour, as its leading principles are
identical with theirs.” That the preparation and
the triumph of the French Revolution were the
work of Freemasonry does not need proof, since
the Masons themselves boast of it.9 Accordingly,
the Declaration of the Rights of Man is a Masonic
production. “When the Bastille fell”, said
Bonnet, the orator at the Grand Orient Assembly
in 1904, “Freemasonry had the supreme honour of
giving to humanity the chart which it had
lovingly elaborated. It was our Brother, de la
Fayette, who first presented the ‘project of a
declaration of the natural rights of the man and
the citizen living in society,’ to be the first
chapter of the Constitution. On August 25, 1789,
the Constituent Assembly, of which more than 300
members were Masons, definitely adopted, almost
word for word, in the form determined upon in the
Lodges, the text of the immortal Declaration of
the Rights of Man.” Given the naturalism of
Freemasonry, the Declaration, then, is simply a
formal renunciation of allegiance to Christ the
King, of Supernatural Life, and of membership of
His Mystical Body. The French State thereby
officially declared that it no longer
acknowledged any duty to God through Our Lord
Jesus Christ and no longer recognised the dignity
of membership of Christ in its citizens. It thus
inaugurated the attack on the organisation of
society under Christ the King which has continued
down to the present day.
That was only the first step. “The subservience
of Freemasonry with regard to the Jews”, writes
l’abbé Joseph Lémann, “soon showed itself.
How?... When the question of Jewish emancipation
came to be examined by the Constituent Assembly
(1789-1791), the deputies who took upon
themselves the task of getting it voted were all
Freemasons. Mirabeau gave it the persevering help
of his eloquence, and Mirabeau was a Freemason of
the higher degrees, intimate with Weishaupt and
his associates, and closely linked up with the
Jews of Berlin. When, after having hesitated for
two years, the Constituent Assembly in its second
last meeting, was still hesitating, it was a
Freemason and Jacobin, A. Duport, who demanded
the vote with threats... Such was the first
secret service rendered to Judaism by
Freemasonry. After that one others will
follow.”10 By the Revolution of 1789 then, the
French State not only decreed the ostracism of
the True Supernatural Messiah and His Programme
but admitted to full citizenship the members of
the Jewish nation, thus allowing them to work
freely for the anti-Supernatural domination of
their nation. Modern history since 1789 is, to a
large extent, the account of the domination of
State after State by the anti-Supernatural
supranationalism of Freemasonry, behind which has
been steadily emerging the still more strongly
organised anti-Supernatural supranationalism of
the Jewish nation. That is why the
post-Revolutionary epoch has witnessed, in
country after country, persistent attacks upon
the Programme of Christ the King.
After every successful Masonic Revolution, since
the first in 1789, down to and including the
Spanish Revolution in 1931, the world soon began
to hear of the country’s entering upon the path
of “progress” by the introduction of
“enlightened” reforms, such as the separation of
Church and State (or the putting of all religions
on the same level), the legalisation of divorce,
the secularisation of the schools, the
suppression and banishment of religious orders
and congregations, the glorification of
Freemasonry, the nationalisation of property and
the unrestrained licence of the Press. The
process of elimination of the union of nations
through the Mystical Body of Christ, and the
substitution therefore of the naturalistic
domination of the Jewish nation seems to be now
on the verge of triumph.
Back in 1922, the Assembly of the Grand Lodge of
France insisted that amongst the tasks lying
ahead was “the creation of a European spirit...
the formation of the United States of Europe, or
rather the Federation of the World.” On this side
of the Iron Curtain and in the U.S.A. nations are
being invited to give up their national
sovereignty to enter a Federation in which those
who control World-Masonry would certainly yield
enormous power and in which the Authentic Teacher
of the Moral Law would not be listened to.11 On
the far side of the Iron Curtain, we see the
continuation of what was stated by Mr. Oudendyke,
the Dutch Minister at St. Petersburg, and
published in the British White Paper of April,
1919. “Unless Bolshevism is nipped in the bud
immediately, it is bound to spread in one form or
another all over Europe and the whole world, as
it is organised and worked by Jews who have no
nationality and whose one object is to destroy
for their own ends the existing order of
things.”12 In G. K.’s Weekly, February 4, 1937,
Mr. Hilaire Belloc wrote: “As for anyone who does
not know that the present revolutionary
Bolshevist movement in Russia is Jewish, I can
only say that he must be a man who is taken in by
the suppressions of our deplorable Press.” Anyone
who carefully studies the rulers of Russia and of
the satellite States Poland and Hungary for
example, at the present day, will have the same
conclusion forced upon him.13
The opposition of all the branches of
Freemasonry, French, Italian, Anglo-Saxon, etc.,
to the Catholic Church is essential and
ineradicable, for it is the opposition of
naturalism to the Supernatural Life of the
Mystical Body of Christ and to the organisation
of society based on the infinite dignity of that
Life. In other words, it is the opposition of
Anti-Christ to Christ. It will be well to stress
this great truth, because of the statements one
sometimes hears that English and American
Freemasonry is quite different from Continental
Freemasonry. In the Encyclical Letter, Humanum
Genus, Pope Leo XIII condemns the Naturalism of
Freemasonry and not only makes no distinction
between the different branches of Freemasonry,
but teaches that no such distinction is to be
made. He alludes to the controversy about God, or
rather about the ancient landmark of the Great
Architect of the Universe, between Anglo-Saxon
Freemasonry and the French Grand Orient, but says
that the fact that there has recently been a
controversy about such a fundamental truth of the
natural order as the existence of God is clear
proof of the inevitably corrupting influence of
Masonic Naturalism or Anti-Supernaturalism. The
Pope does not exempt from condemnation the
sections of Freemasonry that retain the ancient
landmark. No, the condemnation of Freemasonry in
the Encyclical is universal, without any
attenuation in favour of what is called
Anglo-Saxon Freemasonry.14 The text of Pope Leo
XIII with regard to God runs as follows:
“Although as a rule they (the Freemasons) admit
the existence of God, they themselves openly
confess that they do not all firmly assent to
this truth and hold it with unwavering
conviction. For they do not attempt to hide the
fact that this question of God is the chief
source and cause of discord amongst them: nay, it
is well known that recently it has been the
subject of a serious disagreement in their ranks.
As a matter of fact, however, they allow their
members the greatest licence on the point, so
that they are at liberty to hold that God exists
or that God does not exist, and those who
obstinately affirm that there is no God are
admitted just as readily as those who, while
asserting that there is a God, nevertheless have
wrong ideas about Him, like the pantheists. This
is purely and simply the suppression of the truth
about God while holding on to an absurd
caricature of the Divine Nature.”15 It is
regrettable that the Encyclical on Freemasonry is
omitted from the collection of the Letters of
Pope Leo XIII, published by the Bruce Publishing
Company, Milwaukee, and that the Rev. Editor
seems to write, in the note on p. 272, as if
there were an essential difference between
Freemasonry in English-speaking countries and
elsewhere. At least, his words may leave some
readers under that impression. Naturalism is the
fundamental error of Masonry and is common to all
section of the Craft. Corruption of the idea of
God has inevitably followed on the rejection of
the one way instituted for return to God, namely,
membership of the Mystical Body of Christ. The
French Grand Orient has betrayed the presence of
this corruption and degradation with regard to
God more openly than Anglo-Saxon Freemasonry.
That is the whole significance of the controversy
about the deletion by the French Grand Orient of
the expression, The Great Architect of the
Universe.
The retention by the Grand Lodge of England,
then, of the article relating to the Great
Architect of the Universe does not signify that
English Masonry is Christian, for English Masonry
does not accept the supremacy of the Mystical
Body of Christ. On the contrary, English Masonry
is anti-supernatural and anti-Christian like the
other sections of the Masonic Brotherhood, for it
puts Mahomet and Buddha on the same level as
Christ, thus denying Christ’s role as the one
Mediator.16 Neither does this article mean that
English Masonry professes belief in a
transcendent God as we know Him, for it is
compatible with acceptance of pantheism, that is,
with the identification of God with man.17 The
retention of the vague term, “Great Architect of
the Universe”, enables English Freemasonry to
pose as religious, while continuing its work of
sapping the belief of Englishmen in the Divinity
of Our Lord Jesus Christ and in the reality of
that Supernatural Life of Grace coming to us from
Him, by which we are true men as we ought to be.
Ample proofs of the relations between Anglo-Saxon
Freemasonry and Latin (Grand Orient) Freemasonry
are to be found in La Dictature des Puissances
occultes, by Count de Poncins18. He points out,
for example, that “if we open the English Masonic
Calendar for 1930, we find the Grand Lodge has
official relations with Portugal, Spain, with the
remnant of Italian Freemasonry, and with Latin
America.” In addition to the evidence adduced by
Count de Poncins, we know that the English Grand
Lodge maintains friendly relations with the Swiss
Grand Lodge, “Alpina”, which recognises not only
the Grand Lodge of France but the Grand Orients
of France, Spain and Greece.19 Thus “between
Anglo-Saxon Freemasonry and Latin Freemasonry
there are indirect but effective relations which
are far closer than is admitted.”20
When once the disorder of Masonic Naturalism or
anti-Supernaturalism is grasped, we can easily
understand its varying modes of procedure with
regard to governments. “With tongue and pen”,
declares the Freemason Pike (The Inner Sanctuary,
IV, 547), “with all our open and secret
influences, with the purse and, if need be, with
the sword, we will advance the cause of human
progress and labour to enfranchise human thought,
to give freedom to the human conscience (above
all from Papal usurpations) and equal rights to
the people everywhere.” The formation in
“tolerance” given in the Lodges aims not merely
at that negative mental state which puts
religious truth and error on the same level,
treating them both with indifference; it aims at
the production of a positive hatred of what it
calls the “intolerance” of the Catholic Church,
namely the Catholic Church’s insistence on the
Divine Plan for order. The formation in Masonic
“tolerance”, then, is really a formation in
hatred of the firmness and strength of the
Catholic Church, in standing for the Supernatural
Life and order of the world. This is the ultimate
reason why Anglo-Saxon Masonry, ostensibly so
conservative, has constantly favoured movements
towards the Left, opposed to the true order of
the world.
The effect of the ambiguous naturalistic
formation of Masonry in regard to the State,
accompanied as it is by denunciations of
“tyranny” and “usurpation”, corresponding to the
denunciations of “superstition” and “intolerance”
in regard to religion, will be to favour the same
tendency to the Left. States will be assailed as
“tyrannies” in proportion to the extent in which
they accept Our Lord’s Programme for order. In
Catholic countries violent revolution will be
always aimed at in order to get rid of the
existing social structure in which the Kingship
of Christ is respected. As, owing to their
rejection of Our Lord’s Programme for order, the
advent of Naturalism in Protestant countries is
only a question of time, the terms “tyranny” and
“despotism” may not be applied to them by Masonry
as freely as they were to the realms of the
Bourbons and the Hapsburgs. But the Protestant
countries will not be spared, for behind
Freemasonry is the more cohesive naturalistic
Force of the Jewish nation with its Messianic aim
of domination over all nations. Any vestiges of
the rule of the True Supernatural Messiah must be
swept away. A highly-placed personage, whose name
he does not reveal, said to the distinguished
historian, Cardinal Pitra, at Vienna, in 1889:
“The Catholic nations must be crushed by the
Protestant nations. When this result has been
attained, a breath will be sufficient to bring
about the disappearance of Protestantism.”
Freemasons in England and the U.S.A. will yield
to pressure from leaders of the Jewish nation,
even when the interests of England and the U.S.A.
obviously suffer. The Brooklyn Tablet, May 14,
1949, quoted the frank statements of the American
Senate of Senator Owen Brewster, of Maine, a
non-Catholic. Speaking of the attitude towards
Spain, the Senator said: “Spain is not recognised
because Spain is a Catholic country... The subtle
word is constantly passed that the alternative to
Communism is Catholicism. We know the word is
constantly uttered in the lobbies, although
Senators do not care to bring it out on the
floor.”
There is not space to treat of the Masonic plan
that is being pursued in Ireland. Six Ulster
counties have been detached from the rest of the
country and erected into a State with a
government in which Masonic influence is
predominant (the Orange Society, it must be borne
in mind, is a sub-masonry trained for
anti-Catholic action).21 All the counties of
Ulster were not included in the State lest the
Catholics should have a majority in Parliament.
The Catholic Irish justly resent the partition of
their country. Pressure will be brought to bear
upon them to placate the Freemasons by
compromising still further to the Programme of
Christ the King and abandoning the unity and
indissolubility of marriage.22 Those who are
alert know that Senator H. Lehman’s interest in
undoing the partition of Ireland is ominous. He
is described in Commonsense of November 15, 1949,
as “a banker-Zionist long friendly to Moscow.”23
If Mgr. Dillon were alive today he would tell the
Catholic Irish “to remember all their obligations
to Our Divine Lord Jesus Christ who sustained
their fathers through centuries of trial”,24 and
to placate Him first, not the Zionists,
Communists and the Freemasons. On account of the
confusion of mind prevalent amongst Catholics
concerning the question of Anti-Semitism, a few
words must be said about it before concluding
this Preface.
In the excellent review of my books, The Kingship
of Christ and Organised Naturalism, which
appeared in the Jesuit magazine, La Civilta
Cattolica (Rome), in March, 1947, the reviewer
laid special stress on the distinction which I
have been making in all my books. He wrote as
follows: “The author wants a clear distinction to
be made between hatred of the Jewish nation,
which is Anti-Semitism, and opposition to Jewish
and Masonic Naturalism. This opposition on the
part of Catholics must be mainly positive by
acknowledging, not only individually but
socially, the Rights of the Supernatural Kingship
of Christ and His Church, and by striving
politically to get these Rights acknowledged by
States and in public life. For this indispensable
undertaking... the active and effective union of
Catholics... is absolutely necessary.” Space does
not allow of lengthy quotations from Papal
documents to show that, on the one hand, the
Sovereign Pontiffs insist that Catholics must
stand unflinchingly for the Integral Rights of
Christ the King, as contained in the Papal
Encyclicals, while, on the other hand, keeping
their minds and hearts free from hatred of Our
Lord’s own nation according to the flesh. On the
one hand, they must battle for the Rights of
Christ the King and the Supernatural Organisation
of Society, as laid down in the Encyclical, Quas
Primas, unequivocally proclaiming that the
rejection of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the True
Messiah, by His own nation, and the unyielding
opposition of that nation to Him, are a
fundamental source of disorder and conflict in
the world. On the other hand, as members of Our
Lord Jesus Christ, Catholics should neither hate
the members of the nation in which, through our
Blessed Mother, the Lily of Israel, the Second
Person of the Blessed Trinity assumed human
nature, nor deny them their legitimate rights as
persons. The supernatural elevation of mind and
heart and the unshrinking fortitude that are
required from members of Christ in our day can be
maintained only with the aid of Him who wept over
Jerusalem’s rejection of order. It will
inevitably mean suffering for Christ’s faithful
members as the power of the anti-supernatural
Forces in the world increases. Even in the midst
of their suffering, however, Christ’s members
must bear in mind that there will be a glorious
triumph for Christ the King when, as St. Paul
tells us in his Epistle to the Romans (XI,
11-33), there will be a sincere return on the
part of the Jewish nation to the Mystical Body of
the True Messiah.25
Two reasons can be assigned to the fact that Our
Lord’s faithful members will often be betrayed by
those who should be on the side of Christ the
King. Firstly, many Catholic writers speak of
Papal condemnations of Anti-Semitism without
explaining the meaning of the term, and never
even allude to the documents which insist on the
Rights of Our Divine Lord, Head of the Mystical
Body, Priest and King. Thus, very many are
completely ignorant of the duty incumbent on all
Catholics of standing positively for Our Lord’s
Reign in society in opposition to Jewish
Naturalism. The result is that numbers of
Catholics are so ignorant of Catholic doctrine
that they hurl the accusation of Anti-Semitism
against those who are battling for the Rights of
Christ the King, thus effectively aiding the
enemies of Our Divine Lord. Secondly, many
Catholic writers copy unquestioningly what they
read in the naturalistic or and Supernatural
Press and do not distinguish between
Anti-Semitism in the correct Catholic sense, as
explained above, and “Anti-Semitism”, as the Jews
understand it. For the Jews, “Anti-Semitism” is
anything that is in opposition to the
naturalistic Messianic domination of their nation
over all the others. Quite logically, the leaders
of the Jewish nation hold that to stand for the
Rights of Christ the King is to be
“Anti-Semitic.”26 The term “Anti-Semitism”, with
all its smear connections in the minds of the
unthinking, is being extended to include any form
of opposition to the Jewish nation’s naturalistic
aims and any exposure of the methods they adopt
to achieve these aims. “In our time more than
ever before”, said the saintly Pius X at the
Beatification of Joan of Arc (Dec. 13, 1908),
“the greatest asset of the evil-disposed is the
cowardice and weakness of good men, and all the
vigour of Satan’s reign is due to the easygoing
weakness of Catholics. Oh if I might ask the
Divine Redeemer, as the Prophet Zachary did in
spirit: What are those wounds in the midst of Thy
hands? the answer would not be doubtful. With
these I was wounded in the house of them that
loved me. I was wounded by my friends, who did
nothing to defend me, and who, on every occasion,
made themselves the accomplices of my
adversaries. And this reproach can be levelled at
the weak and timid Catholics of all countries.”
DENIS FAHEY, C.S.Sp. Feast of the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. June 16, 1950.
I
GOOD VERSUS EVIL
SPEAKING of the operative classes, Leo XIII says,
in his celebrated Encyclical Humanum Genus:
“Those who sustain themselves by the labour of
their own hands, besides being by their very
condition most worthy above all others of charity
and consolation, are also especially exposed to
the allurements of men whose ways lie in fraud
and deceit. Therefore, they ought to be helped
with the greatest possible kindness, and invited
to join societies that are good, lest they be
drawn away to others that are evil.” In this, as
in all matters of importance, “to be forewarned
is to be forearmed”, and it is specially
necessary to be forewarned when we have to
contend with an adversary who uses secrecy, fraud
and deceit. We shall see then, that all the
organizations of Atheism appear at first as does
their author, Satan, clothed in the raiment of
angels of light, with their malignity, their
Infidelity, and their ultimate designs always
most carefully hidden. They come amongst all the
faithful but more especially amongst young men,
to seduce and to ruin them, never showing but
when forced to do so, the cloven foot, and
employing a million means to seem to be what they
are not. It is, therefore, first of all,
necessary to unmask them; and this is precisely
what the Supreme Pontiff asks the pastors of the
Universal Fold to do as the best means of
destroying their influence. “But”, he says in the
Encyclical already quoted, “as it befits our
pastoral office that we ourselves should point
out some suitable way of proceeding, we wish it
to be your rule, first of all, to tear away the
mask from Freemasonry, and to let it be seen as
it really is, and by instructions and pastoral
letters to instruct the people as to the
artifices used by societies of this kind in
seducing men and enticing them into their ranks,
and as to the depravity of their opinions and the
wickedness of their acts.”
In this extract the Holy Father makes special
mention of Freemasonry; but, remember, not of
Freemasonry only. He speaks of “other secret
societies.” These other secret societies are
identical with Freemasonry, no matter by what
name they may be called; and they are frequently
the most depraved forms of Freemasonry. And
though what is known in Great Britain as
Freemasonry may not be so malignant as its kind
is on the Continent – though it may have little
or no hold at all upon the mass of Catholics in
English-speaking countries, still we shall see
that like every secret society in existence it is
a danger for the nation and for individuals, and
has hidden within it the same Atheism and
hostility to Christianity which the worst
Continental Freemasonry possesses. These it
develops to the initiated in the higher degrees,
and makes manifest to all the world in time. The
truth is that every secret society is framed and
adapted to make men the enemies of God and of His
Church, and to subvert faith; and there is not
one, no matter on what pretext it may be founded,
which does not fall under the management of a
supreme directory governing all the secret
societies on earth. The one aim of this directory
is to uproot Christianity, and the Christian
social order as well as the Church from the world
– in fact, to eradicate the name of Christ and
the very Christian idea from the minds and the
hearts of men. This it is determined to do by
every means, but especially by fraud and force;
that is by first using wiles and deceit until the
Atheistic conspiracy grows strong enough for
measures as violent and remorseless in all
countries as it exercised in one country during
the first French Revolution. I believe this
secret Atheistic organisation to be nothing less
than the evil which we have been long warned
against by Our Blessed Lord Himself, as the
supreme conflict between the Church and Satan’s
followers. It is the commencement of the contest
which must take place between Christ and
Antichrist; and nothing therefore can be more
necessary than that the elect of God should be
warned of its nature and its aims. First we shall
glance at the rise and the nature of Atheism
itself and its rapid advance amongst those
sections of Christians most liable from position
and surroundings to be led astray by it; and then
at the use it has made of Freemasonry for its
propagandism, and for its contemplated
destruction of Christianity. We shall see its
depravity perfected by what is called Illuminism.
And we shall see that however checked it may have
been by the reaction consequent upon the excesses
of its first Revolution, it has not only outlived
that reaction, but has grown wiser for doing an
evil more extended and more complete. We shall
see how its chiefs have succeeded in mastering
and directing every kind of secret association
whether springing from itself or coming into
existence by the force of its example only; and
have used, and are using them all to its
advantage. We shall see the sleepless vigilance
which this organized Atheism exercises; and thus
come to know that our best, our only resource, is
to fly its emissaries, and draw nearer in
affection and in effect to the teachings of the
Church and her Supreme Visible Head on earth who
can never deceive us, and whom the hosts of Satan
never can deceive. We shall see that the voice of
the Vicar of Christ has been raised against
secret associations from the beginning to this
hour, and that the directions which we receive
from that infallible voice can alone save us from
the wiles and deceits of a conspiracy so
formidable, so active, so malignant, and so
dangerous.
II
THE RISE OF ATHEISM IN EUROPE
IN order, then, to comprehend thoroughly the
nature of the conspiracy, it will be necessary to
go back to the opening of the last century [18th]
and contemplate the rise and advance of the
Atheism and Anti-Christianity which it now
spreads rapidly through the earth. As that
century opened, it disclosed a world suffering
from a multitude of evils. The so-called
Reformation, which arose and continued to
progress during the two preceding centuries had
well nigh run its course.
The principle of private judgment introduced in
apparent zeal for the pure worship and doctrine
of Christ, had ended in leaving no part of the
teaching of Christ unchallenged. It had rendered
His Divinity disbelieved in, and His very
existence doubted, by many who yet called
themselves His followers. Socinus and his nephew
had succeeded in binding the various groups of
Polish and German Protestants in a league where
nothing was required but undying hatred and
opposition to the Catholic Church. Bayle threw
doubt upon everything, and Spinoza destroyed the
little respect left for the Deity in the system
of Socinus, by introducing Pantheism to the
world. In effect, both the Deists and the
Pantheists of that period were Atheists. Whether
they held that everything was God, or that God
was not such a God as Christians hold Him to be,
they did away with belief in the true God, and
raised up an impossible being of their own
imagination in His stead. In life, in conduct,
and in adoration of God, they were practical
Atheists, and soon manifested that hatred for the
truth which the Atheist is sure to possess. Their
theories made headway early in the century
throughout Central Europe and England.
Bolingbroke, Shaftesbury, and the élite amongst
the statesmen and literary aristocracy of the
reign of Queen Anne were Infidels. Tindal,
Collins, Wolston, Toland, and Chubbs were as
advanced as Tom Payne was, later on, in the way
of Atheism. But however much England and Germany
had advanced their Protestantism to what was
called Free-thinking, both were soon destined to
be eclipsed in that sad progress by Catholic and
monarchical France. France owes this evil
pre-eminence to one individual, who, though
largely assisted in his road to ruin by Bayle,
and subsequently by association with English
Infidels, had yet enough of innate wickedness in
himself to outstrip them all. That individual was
Voltaire.
III
VOLTAIRE
THE career of this abandoned, unhappy, but most
extraordinary man is the subject of this chapter.
It was in his day and by his means that Atheism
became perfected, generalized, and organized for
the destruction of Christianity, Christian
civilization, and all religion. He was the first,
and remains still, the greatest of its Apostles.
There is not one of its dark principles which he
did not teach and advocate; and from his
writings, and by their means, the intellectual
and every other form of war against the Catholic
Church and the cause of Christ are carried on to
this day and will be to the end. His real name
was Francis Mary Arouet, but, for some reason
which has never been clearly explained, he chose
to call himself Voltaire. He was the son of good
parents, and by position and education should
have been an excellent Catholic. He was trained
by the very Jesuits whom he afterwards so hated
and persecuted. He was destined for the
profession of the law, and made good progress in
literary studies. But the corruption of the age
in which he lived soon seized upon him,
overmastered him, and bore him along in a current
which in his case did not end in vice only, but
in vice which sought its own justification in
Infidelity. From the beginning, the fool said in
his heart “there is no God”, and in the days of
Voltaire the number of these fools was indeed
infinite. Never before was vice so rampant in
countries calling themselves Christian. If the
Gospel was preached at all in that age, it was
certainly to the poor; for the rich, as a rule –
to which there were, thank God, many exceptions –
seemed so sunk in vice as not to believe in a
particle of it. The Courts of Europe were, in
general, corrupt to the core; and the Court of
the Most Christian King was perhaps the most
abandoned, in a wide sense, of them all. The
Court of Catherine of Russia a scene of
unblushing lewdness. The Court of Frederick of
Prussia was so corrupt, that it cannot be
described without doing violence to decency, and
even to humanity. The Regent Orleans and Louis XV
had carried licence to such an extent as to
render the Court of Versailles a veritable
pandemonium. The vices of royalty infected the
nobles and all others who were so unfortunate as
to be permitted to frequent Courts. Vice, in
fact, was the fashion, and numbers of all
classes, not excepting the poorest, wallowed in
it. As a consequence, the libertines of the
period hated the Church, which alone, amidst the
universal depravity, raised her voice for purity.
They took up warmly, therefore, the movements
which, within or without her pale, were likely to
do her damage. With a sure instinct they sided in
France with Gallicanism and Jansenism; and they
welcomed the new Infidelity which came over from
England and Germany, with unconcealed gladness.
Voltaire appeared in French society at this most
opportune moment for the advancement of their
views. Witty, sarcastic, gay, vivacious, he soon
made his way amongst the voluptuaries who then
filled Paris. His conduct and habit of ridiculing
religion and royalty brought him, however, into
disfavour with the Government, and at the age of
twenty-seven we find him in the Bastille.
Liberated from this prison in 1727, but only on
condition of exile, he crossed over to England,
where he finally adopted those Infidel and
anti-Christian principles which made him, for the
half century through which he afterwards lived,
what Crétineau-Joly1 very justly calls “the most
perfect incarnation of Satan that the world ever
saw.” The Society of Freemasons was just then
perfected in London, and Voltaire at the instance
of his Infidel associates joined one of its
lodges; and he left England, where he had been
during the years 1726-27 and ’28, an adept in
both Infidelity and Freemasonry. He returned to
the Continent with bitterness rankling in his
breast against Monarchical Government which had
imprisoned and exiled him, against the Bastille
where he was immured, and, above all, against the
Catholic Church and her Divine Founder. Christ
and His Church condemned his excesses, and to the
overthrow of both he devoted himself with an
ardour and a malignity more characteristic,
certainly, of a demon than of a man.
A master of French prose hardly ever equalled and
never perhaps excelled, and a graceful and
correct versifier, his writings against morality
and religion grew into immense favour with the
corrupt reading public of his day. He was a
perfect adept in the use of ridicule, and he
employed it with remorseless and blasphemous
force against everything pure and sacred. He had
as little respect for the honour or welfare of
his country as he had for the sanctity of
religion. His ruffian pen attacked the fair fame
of the Maid of Orleans with as little scruple as
it cast shame upon the consecrated servants of
Christ. For Christ he had but one feeling –
eternal, contemptuous hatred. His watchword, the
concluding lines of all his letters to his
infidel confederates, was for fifty years
écrasons nous l’infâme, “let us crush the
wretch”, meaning Christ and His cause. This he
boasted was his delenda est Carthago. And he
believed he could succeed. “I am tired”, said he,
“of hearing it said that twelve men sufficed to
establish Christianity, and I desire to show that
it requires but one man to pull it down.” A
lieutenant of police once said to him that,
notwithstanding all he wrote, he should never be
able to destroy Christianity. “That is exactly
what we shall see”, he replied. Voltaire was
never weary of using his horrible watchword.
Upon the news of the suppression of the Jesuits
reaching him, he exclaimed: “See, one head of the
hydra has fallen. I lift my eyes to heaven and
cry ‘crush the wretch’.” We have from himself his
reason for using these blasphemous words. He
says, “I finish all my letters by saying
‘Ecrasons l’infâme, écrasez l’infâme.’ ‘Let us
crush the wretch, crush the wretch’, as Cato used
one time to say, Delenda est Carthago, Carthage
must be destroyed.” Even at a time when the
miscreant protested the greatest respect for
religion to the Court of Rome, he wrote to
Damilaville: “We embrace the philosophers, and we
beseech them to inspire for the wretch all the
horror which they can. Let us fall upon the
wretch ably. That which most concerns me is the
propagation of the faith of truth, and the making
of the wretch vile, Delenda est Carthago.”
Certainly his determination was strong to do so;
and he left no stone unturned for that end. He
was a man of amazing industry; and though his
vanity caused him to quarrel with many of his
confreres, he had in his lifetime a large school
of disciples, which became still more numerous
after his death. He sketched out for them the
whole mode of procedure against the Church. His
policy as revealed by the correspondence of
Frederick II, and others2 with him, was not to
commence an immediate persecution, but first to
suppress the Jesuits and all Religious orders,
and to secularize their goods; then to deprive
the Pope of temporal authority, and the Church of
property and state recognition. Primary and
higher-class education of a lay and Infidel
character was to be established, the principle of
divorce affirmed, and respect for ecclesiastics
lessened and destroyed. Lastly, when the whole
body of the Church should be sufficiently
weakened and Infidelity strong enough, the final
blow was to be dealt by the sword of open,
relentless persecution. A reign of terror was to
spread over the whole earth, and to continue
while a Christian should be found obstinate
enough to adhere to Christianity. This, of
course, was to be followed by a Universal
Brotherhood without marriage, family, property,
God, or law, in which all men would reach that
level of social degradation aimed at by the
disciples of Saint Simon, and carried into
practice whenever possible, as attempted by the
French Commune.
In the carrying out of his infernal designs
against religion and society, Voltaire had as
little scruple in using lying and hypocrisy as
Satan himself is accredited with. In his attacks
upon religion he falsified history and fact. He
made a principle of lying, and taught the same
vice to his followers. Writing to his disciple
Theriot, he says (Oeuvres, vol. 52, p. 326):
“Lying is a vice when it does evil. It is a great
virtue when it does good. Be therefore more
virtuous than ever. It is necessary to lie like a
devil, not timidly and for a time, but boldly and
always.”
He was also, as the school he left behind has
been ever since, a hypocrite. Infidel to the
heart’s core, he could, whenever it suited his
purpose, both practise, and even feign a zeal for
religion. On the expectation of a pension from
the King, he wrote to M. Argental, a disciple of
his, who reproached him with his hypocrisy and
contradictions in conduct. “If I had a hundred
thousand men, I know well what I would do; but as
I have not got them, I will go to communion at
Easter and you may call me a hypocrite as long as
you like.” And Voltaire, on getting his pension,
went to communion the year following3. It is
needless to say that he was in life, as well as
in his writings, immoral as it was possible for a
man to be. He lived without shame and even
ostentatiously in open adultery. He laughed at
every moral restraint. He preached libertinage
and practised it. He was the guest and the inmate
of the Court of Frederick of Prussia, where crime
reached proportions impossible to speak of. And
lastly, coward, liar, hypocrite, and panderer to
the basest passions of humanity, he was finally,
like Satan, a murderer if he had the power to be
so. Writing to Damilaville, he says, “The
Christian religion is an infamous religion, an
abominable hydra which must be destroyed by a
hundred invisible hands. It is necessary that the
philosophers should course through the streets to
destroy it as missionaries course over earth and
sea to propagate it. They ought to dare all
things, risk all things, even to be burned, in
order to destroy it. Let us crush the wretch!
Crush the wretch!” His doctrine thus expressed
found fatal effect in the French Revolution, and
it will obtain effect whenever his disciples are
strong enough in men and means to act. I have no
doubt his teachings have led to all the
revolutions of this century [19th], and will lead
to the final attack of Atheism on the Church. Nor
was his hatred confined to Catholicism only.
Christians of every denomination were marked out
for destruction by him; and our separated
Christian brethren, who feel glad at seeing his
followers triumph over the Church, might well
ponder on these words of his: “Christians”, he
says, “of every form of profession, are beings
exceedingly injurious, fanatics, thieves, dupes,
impostors, who lie together with their gospels,
enemies of the human race.” And of the system
itself he writes: “The Christian religion is
evidently false, the Christian religion is a sect
which every good man ought to hold in horror. It
cannot be approved of even by those to whom it
gives power and honour.” In fact, since his day,
it has been a cardinal point of policy with his
followers to take advantage of the unfortunate
differences between the various sects of
Christians in the world and the Church, in order
to ruin both; for the destruction of every form
of Christianity, as well as Catholicism, was the
aim of Voltaire, and remains as certainly the aim
of his disciples. They place, of course, the
Church and the Vicar of Christ in the first line
of attack, well knowing that if the great
Catholic unity could be destroyed, the work of
eradicating every kind of separated Christianity
would be easy. In dealing, therefore, with such a
foe as modern Atheism, so powerfully organized,
as we shall see it to be, Protestants as well as
Catholics should guard against its wiles and
deceits. They should, at least, regarding
questions such as the religious education of
rising generations, the attempted secularisation
of the Sabbath and state-established Christian
Institutions, and the recognition of religion by
the State, all of which the Atheism of the world
now attempts to destroy, present an unbroken
front of determined union. Nothing less,
certainly, can save even the Protestantism, the
national, Christian character of Great Britain
and her colonies from impending ruin.
Although Voltaire was as confirmed and malignant
a hater of Christ and of Christianity as ever
lived, still he showed from time to time that his
own professed principles of Infidelity were never
really believed in by himself. In health and
strength he cried out his blasphemous “crush the
wretch!” but when the moment came for his soul to
appear before the judgment seat of “the wretch”,
his faith was shown and his vaunted courage
failed him.
The miscreant always acted against his better
knowledge. His life gives us many examples of
this fact. I will relate one for you. When he
broke a blood vessel on one occasion, he begged
his assistants to hurry for the priest. He
confessed, signed with his hand a profession of
faith, asked pardon of God and the Church for his
offences, and ordered that his retraction should
be printed in the public newspapers; but,
recovering, he commenced his war upon God anew,
and died refusing all spiritual aid, and crying
out in the fury of despair and agony, “I am
abandoned by God and man.” Dr. Fruchen, who
witnessed the awful spectacle of his death, said
to his friends, “Would that all who had been
seduced by the writings of Voltaire had been
witness of his death, it would be impossible to
hold out, in the face of such an awful
spectacle.”4 But that spectacle was forgotten,
and consequently, before ten years passed, the
world saw the effects of his works.
Speaking of the French Revolution, Condorcet, in
his “Life of Voltaire”, says of him, “He did not
see all that which he accomplished, but he did
all that which we see. Enlightened observations
prove to those who know how to reflect that the “
first author of that Great Revolution was without
doubt Voltaire.”
It never was the intention of this man to let his
teachings die, or beat the air, so to speak, with
mere words. He determined that his fatal gospel
should be perpetuated, and should bring forth as
speedily as possible its fruits of death. Even in
his lifetime, we have evidence that he constantly
conspired with his associates for this end, and
that with them he concocted in secret both the
means by which his doctrines should reach all
classes in Europe, and the methods by which civil
order and Christianity might be best destroyed.
St. Beuve writes of him and of his, in the
Journal des Débats, 8 November, 1852:– “All the
correspondence of Voltaire and D’Alembert is
ugly. It smells of the sect, of the conspiracy of
the Brotherhood, of the secret society. From
whatever point it is viewed, it does no honour to
men who make a principle of lying, and who
consider contempt of their kind the first
condition necessary to enlighten them. ‘Enlighten
and despise the human race.’ A sure watchword
this, and it is theirs. ‘March on always
sneering, my brethren, in the way of truth.’ That
is their perpetual refrain’.” But not only did he
and his thus conspire in a manner which might
seem to arise naturally from identical sentiments
and aims, but what was of infinitely greater
consequence, the demon, just as their sad gospel
was ripe for propagation, called into existence
the most efficacious means possible for its
extension amongst men, and for the wished-for
destruction of the Church, of Christian
civilization, and of every form of existing
Christianity. This was the spread amongst those
already demoralized by Voltaireanism, of
Freemasonry and its cognate systems of secret
Atheistic organisation.
IV
FREEMASONRY
FREEMASONRY, we must remember always, appeared
generally and spread generally, too, in the
interests of all that Voltaire aimed at, when it
best suited his purpose. The first lodge
established in France under the English obedience
was in 1727. Its founder and first master was the
celebrated Jacobite, Lord Derwentwater. It had
almost immediate acceptance from the degenerate
nobility of France, who, partly because of the
influence of English and Scotch Jacobite nobles,
and partly because of its novelty, hard swearing,
and mystery, joined the strange institution. Its
lodges were soon in every considerable city of
the realm. The philosophers and various schools
of Atheists, however, were the first to enter
into and to extend it. For them it had special
attractions and special uses, which they were not
slow to appreciate and to employ. Now, though it
very little concerns us to know much of the
origin of this society, which became then and
since so notorious throughout the world, still,
as that origin throws some light on its
subsequent history, it will not be lost time to
glance at what is known, or supposed to be known,
about it. Mgr. Segur,1 Bishop of Grenoble, who
devoted much time to a study of Freemasonry, is
persuaded that it was first elaborated by Faustus
Socinus, the nephew of the too celebrated Laelius
Socinus, the heresiarch and founder of the sect
of Unitarians or, as they are generally called
after him, Socinians. Both were of the ancient
family of the Sozini of Sienna. Faustus, like
many of his relatives, imbibed the errors of his
uncle, and in order to escape the vigilance of
the Inquisition, to which both Italy and Spain
owed much of the tranquillity they enjoyed in
these troublesome times, he fled to France. While
in that country at Lyons, and when only twenty
years of age, he heard of the death of his uncle
at Zurich, and went at once to that city to
obtain the papers and effects of the deceased.
From the papers he found that Laelius had
assisted at a conference of heretics at Vicenza
in 1547, in which the destruction of Christianity
was resolved upon, and where resolutions were
adopted for the renewal of Arianism – a system of
false doctrine calculated to sap the very
foundations of existing Faith by attacking the
Trinity and the Incarnation. Feller, an authority
of considerable weight, in his reference to this
conference, says: “In the assembly of Vicenza
they agreed upon the means of destroying the
religion of Jesus Christ, by forming a society
which by its progressive successes brought on,
towards the end of the eighteenth century, an
almost general apostasy. When the Republic of
Venice became informed of this conspiracy, it
seized upon Julian Trevisano and Francis de Rugo,
and strangled them. Ochinus and the others saved
themselves. The society thus dispersed became
only the more dangerous, and it is that which is
known today under the name of Freemasons.” For
this information Feller refers us to a work
entitled Le Voile Levé, by the Abbé Le Franc, a
victim of the reign of terror in 1792. The latter
tells us that the conspirators whom the severity
of the Venetian Republic had scattered, and who
were Ochinus, Laelius Socinus, Peruta, Gentilis,
Jacques Chiari, Francis Lenoir, Darius Socinus,
Alicas, and the Abbé Leonard, carried their
poison with them, and caused it to bear fruits of
death in all parts of Europe. The success of
Faustus Socinus in spreading his uncle’s theories
was enormous. His aim was not only to destroy the
Church, but to raise up another temple into which
any enemy of orthodoxy might freely enter. In
this temple every heterodox belief might be held.
It was called Christian but was without Christian
faith, or hope, or love. It was simply an
astutely planned system for propagating the ideas
of its founders; for a fundamental part of the
policy of Socinus, and one in which he well
instructed his disciples, was to associate either
to Unitarianism or to the confederation formed at
Vicenza, the rich, the learned, the powerful, and
the influential of the world. He feigned an equal
esteem for Trinitarians and anti-Trinitarians,
for Lutherans and Calvinists. He praised the
undertakings of all against the Church of Rome,
and working upon their intense hatred for
Catholicism, caused them to forget their many
“isms” in order to unite them for the destruction
of the common enemy. When that should be
effected, it would be time to consider a system
agreeable to all. Until then, unity of action
inspired by hatred of the Church should reign
amongst them.
He therefore wished that all his adherents
should, whether Lutheran or Calvinist, treat one
another as brothers; and hence his disciples have
been called at various times “United Brethren”,
“Polish Brothers”, “Moravian Brothers”, “Brother
Masons”, and finally “Freemasons”. Mgr. Segur
informs us, on the authorities before quoted, as
well as upon that of Bergier, and the learned
author of a work entitled, Les Franc-Maçons
Ecrasés – the Abbé Lerudan – printed at
Amsterdam, as early as the year 1747, that the
real secret of Freemasonry consisted, even then,
in disbelief in the Divinity of Christ, and a
determination to replace that doctrine, which is
the very foundation of Christianity, by
Naturalism or Rationalism. Socinus having
established his Sect in Poland, sent emissaries
to preach his doctrines stealthily in Germany,
Holland, and England. In Germany, Protestants and
Catholics united to unmask them. In Holland they
blended with the Anabaptists, and in England they
found partisans amongst the Independents and
various other sects into which the people were
divided.
The Abbé Lefranc believes (Le Voile Levé, Lyons,
1821), that Oliver Cromwell was a Socinian, and
that he introduced Freemasonry into England.
Certainly, Cromwell’s sympathies were not for the
Church favoured by the monarch he supplanted, and
were much with the Independents. If he was a
Socinian, we can easily understand how the secret
society of Vicenza could have attractions for one
of his anti-Catholic and ambitious sentiments. He
gave its members in England, as Mgr. Segur tells
us, the title of Freemasons, and invented the
allegory of the Temple of Solomon, now so much
used by Masonry of every kind, and which meant
the original state of man supposed to be a
commonwealth of equality with a vague Deism as
its religion. This temple, destroyed by Christ
for the Christian order, was to be restored by
Freemasonry after Christ and the Christian order
should be obliterated by conspiracy and
revolution. The state of Nature was the “Hiram”
whose murder Masonry was to avenge; and which,
having previously removed Christ, was to
resuscitate Hiram, by rebuilding the temple of
Nature as it had been before.
Mgr. Segur, moreover, connects modern Freemasonry
with the Jews and Templars, as well as with
Socinus. There are reasons which lead me to think
that he is right in doing so. The Jews for many
centuries previous to the Reformation had formed
secret societies for their own protection and for
the destruction of the Christianity which
persecuted them, and which they so much hated.
The rebuilding of the Temple of Solomon was the
dream of their lives. It is unquestionable that
they wished to make common cause with other
bodies of persecuted religionists. They had
special reason to welcome with joy such heretics
as were cast off by Catholicism. It is,
therefore, not at all improbable that they
admitted into their secret conclaves some at
least of the discontented Templars, burning for
revenge upon those who dispossessed and
suppressed the Order. That fact would account for
the curious combination of Jewish and conventual
allusions to be found in modern Masonry.2 Then,
as to its British History, we have seen that
numbers of the secret brotherhood of Socinus made
their way to England and Scotland, where they
found rich friends, and, perhaps, confederates. I
have, therefore, no doubt but that the Abbé
Lefranc is correct when he says that Cromwell was
connected with them. At least, before he
succeeded in his designs, he had need of some
such secret society, and would, no doubt, be glad
to use it for his purposes. But it is not so
clear that Cromwell was the first, as Lefranc
thinks, to blend that brotherhood with the real
Freemasons. The ancient guild of working masons
had existed in Great Britain and in Europe for
many centuries previous to his time They were
like every other guild of craftsmen – a body
formed for mutual protection and trade offices.
But they differed from other tradespeople in
this, that from their duties they were more
cosmopolitan, and knew more of the ceremonies of
religion at a period when the arts of reading and
writing were not very generally understood. They
travelled over every portion of England and
Scotland, and frequently crossed the Channel, to
work at the innumerable religious houses,
castles, fortifications, great abbeys, churches
and cathedrals which arose over the face of
Christendom in such number and splendour in the
middle and succeeding ages. To keep away
interlopers, to sustain a uniform rate of wages,
to be known amongst strangers, and, above all,
amongst foreigners of their craft, signs were
necessary; and these signs could be of value only
in proportion to the secrecy with which they were
kept within the craft itself. They had signs for
those whom they accepted as novices, for the
companion mason or journeyman, and for the
masters of the craft. In ages when a trade was
transmitted from father to son, and formed a kind
of family inheritance, we can very well imagine
that its secrets were guarded with much jealousy,
and that its adepts were enjoined not to
communicate them to anyone, not even to their
wives, lest they become known to outsiders. The
masons were, if we except the clockmakers and
jewellers, the most skilled artisans of Europe.
By the cunning of their hands they knew how to
make the rough stone speak out the grand
conceptions of the architects of the middle ages;
and often, the delicate foliage and flowers and
statuary of the fanes they built, remind us of
the most perfect eras of Greek and Roman
sculpture. So closely connected with religion and
religious architecture as were these “Brothers
Masons”, “Friars”, “Fra”, or “Free Masons”, they
shared to a large extent in the favour of the
Popes. They obtained many and valuable charters.
But they degenerated. The era of the so-called
Reformation was a sad epoch for them. It was an
era of Church demolition rather than of church
building. Wherever the blight of Protestantism
fell, the beauty and stateliness of Church
architecture became dwarfed, stunted, and
degraded, whenever it was not utterly destroyed.
The need of brothers Masons had passed, and
succeeding Masons began to admit men to their
guilds who won a living otherwise than by the
craft. In Germany their confraternity had become
a cover for the reformers, and Socinus, seeing it
as a means for advancing his Sect – a method for
winning adepts and progressing stealthily without
attracting the notice of Catholic government –
would desire no doubt to use it for his purposes.
We have to this day the statute the genuine
Freemasons of Strasbourg framed in 1462, and the
same revised as late as 1563, but in them there
is absolutely nothing of heresy or hostility to
the Church. But there is a curious document
called the Charter of Cologne dated 1535, which,
if it be genuine, proves to us that there existed
at that early period a body of Freemasons having
principles identical with those professed by the
Masons of our own day. It is to be found in the
archives of the Mother Lodge of Amsterdam which
also preserves the act of its own constitution
under the date of 1519. It reveals the existence
of lodges of kindred intent in London, Edinburgh,
Vienna, Amsterdam, Paris, Lyons, Frankfurt,
Hamburg, Antwerp, Rotterdam, Madrid, Venice,
Goriz, Koenigsberg, Brussels, Dantzig, Magdeburg,
Bremen and Cologne; and it bears the signatures
of well-known enemies of the Church at that
period, namely – Hermanus or Herman de Weir, the
immoral and heretical Archbishop-Elector of
Cologne, placed for his misdeeds under the ban of
the Empire; De Coligny, leader of the Huguenots
of France; Jacob d’Anville, Prior of the
Augustinians of Cologne, who incurred the same
reproaches as Archbishop Herman; Melancthon, the
Reformer; Nicholas Van Noot, Carlton, Bruce,
Upson, Banning, Vireaux, Schroeder, Hoffman,
Nobel, De la Torre, Doria, Uttenbow, Falck,
Huissen, Wormer. These names reveal both the
country and the celebrity of all the men who
signed the document. It was, possibly, a society
like theirs, which the Venetian Government broke
up and scattered in 1547, for we find distinct
mention of a lodge existing at Venice in 1535.
However this may be, Freemason lodges existed in
Scotland from the time of the Reformation. One of
them is referred to in the Charter of Cologne,
and doubtless had many affiliations. In Scotland,
as in other Catholic countries, the Templars were
suppressed; and there, if nowhere else, that
Order had the guilds of working masons under its
special protection. It is therefore possible, as
some say, that the knights coalesced with these
Masons, and protected their own machinations with
the aid of the secrets of the craft. But while
this and all else stated regarding the connection
of the Templars with Masonry may be true, there
is no real evidence that it is so. Much is said
about the building of the Temple of Solomon; and
that the Hiram killed, and whose death the craft
is to avenge, means James Molay, the Grand
Master, executed in the barbarous manner of his
age for supposed complicity in the crimes with
which the Templars were everywhere charged. There
is tall talk about such things in modern Masonry,
and a great deal of the absurd and puerile ritual
in which the sect indulges when conferring the
higher grades, is supposed to have reference to
them. But the Freemasonry with which we have to
deal, however connected in its origin with the
Templars, with Socinus, with the conspirators of
Cologne, or those of Vicenza, or with Cromwell,
received its modern characteristics from Elias
Ashmole, the Antiquary, and the provider, if not
the founder, of the Oxford Museum. Ashmole was an
alchemist and an astrologer, and imbued
consequently with a love for the jargon and
mysticism of that strange body so busied about
the philosopher’s stone and other utopias. The
existing lodges of the Freemasons had an
inexpressible charm for Ashmole, and in 1646 he,
together with Colonel Mainwaring, became members
of the craft. He perfected it, added various
mystic symbols to those already in use and gave
partly a scriptural, partly an Egyptian form to
its jargon and ceremonies. The Rosecroix,
Rosicrucian degree, a society formed after the
idea of Bacon’s New Atlantis, appeared; and the
various grades of companion, master, secret
master, p rfect master, elect, and Irish master,
were either remodelled or newly formed, as we
know them now. Charles I was decapitated in 1649,
and Ashmole being a Royalist to the core, soon
turned English Masonry from the purposes of
Cromwell and his party, and made the craft, which
was always strong in Scotland, a means to upset
the Government of the Protector and to bring back
the Stuarts. Now “Hiram” became the murdered
Charles, who was to be avenged instead of James
Molay, and the reconstruction of the Temple meant
the restoration of the exiled House of Stuart. On
the accession of Charles II the craft was, of
course, not treated with disfavour; and when the
misfortunes of James II drove him from the
throne, the partisans of the House of Stuart had
renewed recourse to it as a means of secret
organization against the enemy.
To bring back the Pretender, the Jacobites formed
a Scotch and an English and an Irish
constitution. The English constitution embraced
the Mother Lodge of York and that of London,
which latter separated from York, and with a new
spring of action started into life as the Grand
Lodge of London in 1717. The Jacobite nobles
brought it to France chiefly to aid their
attempts in favour of the Stuarts. They opened a
lodge called the “Amity and Fraternity”, in
Dunkirk, in 1721, and in 1725 the Lord
Derwentwater opened the famous Mother Lodge of
Paris. Masonry soon spread to Holland (1730), to
Germany in 1736, to Ireland in 1729, and
afterwards to Italy, Spain and Europe generally.
All its lodges were placed under the Grand Lodge
of England, and remained so for many years.
I mention these facts and dates in order to let
you see that precisely at the period when
Freemasonry was thus extending abroad, the
Infidelity, which had been introduced by Bayle
and openly advocated by Voltaire, was being
disseminated largely amongst the corrupt nobility
of France and of Europe generally. It was, as we
have already seen, a period of universal licence
in morals with the great in every country, and
the members of the Grand Lodge in England were
generally men of easy virtue whose example was
agreeable to Continental libertines.
Voltaire found that the Masonry to which he had
been affiliated in London was a capital means of
diffusing his doctrines among the courtiers, the
men of letters and the public of France. It was
like himself, the incarnation of hypocrisy and
lying. It came recommended by an appearance of
philanthropy and of religion. Ashmole gave it the
open Bible, together with the square and compass.
It called the world to witness that it believed
in God, “the great Architect of the Universe.” It
had “an open eye”, which may be taken for God’s
all-seeing providence, or for the impossibility
of a sworn Mason escaping his fate if he revealed
the secrets of the craft or failed to obey the
orders he was selected to carry out. It made
members known to each other, just as did the
ancient craft, in every country, and professed to
take charge of the orphans and widows of deceased
brethren who could not provide for them. But, in
its secret conclaves and in its ascending
degrees, it had means to tell the victim whom it
could count upon, that the “Architect” meant a
circle, a nothing;3 that the open Bible was the
universe; and that the square and compass was
simply the fitness of things – the means to make
all men “fraternal, equal and free” in some
impossible utopia it promised but never gave. In
the recesses of its lodges, the political
conspirator found the men and the means to arrive
at his ends in security. Those who ambitioned
office found there the means of advancement. The
old spirit breathed into the fraternity by
Socinus, and nourished so well by the heretical
libertines of the England and Germany of the
seventeenth century, and perfected by the
Infidels of the eighteenth, was master in all its
lodges. Banquets, ribald songs and jests,
revelling in sin, constituted from the beginning
a leading feature in its life. Lodges became the
secure home for the roué, the spendthrift, the
man of broken fortunes, the Infidel, and the
depraved of the upper classes. Such attractive
centres of sin, therefore, spread over Europe
with great rapidity. They were encouraged not
only by Voltaire, but by his whole host of
Atheistic writers, philosophers, encyclopaedists,
revolutionists, and rakes. The scoundrels of
Europe found congenial employment in them; and
before twenty years elapsed from their first
introduction the lodges were a power in Europe,
formidable by the union which subsisted between
them all, and by the wealth, social position, and
unscrupulousness of those who formed their
brotherhood. The principles fashionable – and
indeed alone tolerated – in them all, before
long, were the principles of Voltaire and of his
school. This led in time to the Union and
“Illuminism” of Freemasonry.
V
THE UNION AND “ILLUMINISM” OF FREEMASONRY
WITH the aid of Voltaire, and of his party,
Freemasonry rapidly spread amongst the higher
classes of France and wherever else in Europe the
influence of the French Infidels extended. It
soon after obtained immense power of union and
propagandism. In France and everywhere else it
had an English, a Scotch, and a local obedience.
These had separate constitutions and officers,
even separate grades, but all were identical in
essence and in aim. A brother in one was a
brother in all. However, it seemed to the leaders
that more unity was needed, and aided by the
adhesion of the Duke of Chartres, subsequently
better known as the Duke of Orleans, the infamous
Philippe-Egalité, who was Grand Master of the
Scotch Masonic Body in France, the French Masons
in the English obedience desiring independence of
the Mother Lodge of England, separated and
elected him the first Grand Master of the since
celebrated Grand Orient of France. Two years
after this, the execrable “Androgyne” lodges for
women, called “Lodges of Adoption” were
established, and had as Grand Mistress over them
all the Duchess of Bourbon, sister of Egalité.
The Infidels, by extending these lodges for
women, obtained an immense amount of influence,
which they otherwise never could attain. They
thus invaded the domestic circle of the Court of
France and of every Court in Europe. Thus, too,
the royal edicts, the decrees of Clement XII and
Benedict XIV against Freemasonry, and the efforts
of conscientious officers, were rendered
completely inoperative. After the death of
Voltaire, the extension of Freemasonry became
alarming; but no State effort could then stop its
progress. It daily grew more powerful and more
corrupt. It began already to extend its influence
into every department of state. Promotion in the
army, in the navy, in the public service, in the
law, and even to the fat benefices “in commendam”
of the Church, became impossible without its
aid1; and at this precise juncture, when the
political fortunes of France were, for many
reasons, growing desperate, two events occurred
to make the already general and corrupt
Freemasonry still more formidable. These were the
advent of the Illuminism of Saint Martin in
France, and that of Adam Weishaupt in Germany,
and the increased corruption introduced
principally by means of women-Freemasons.
A Portuguese Jew, named Martinez Pasqualis, was
the first to introduce Illuminism into the Lodge
of Lyons, and his system was afterwards perfected
in wickedness by Saint Martin, from whom French
Illuminism took its name. Illuminism meant the
extreme extent of immorality, Atheism, anarchy,
levelling, and bloodshed, to which the principles
of Masonry could be carried. It meant a universal
conspiracy against the Church and established
order. It constituted a degree of advancement for
all the lodges, and powerfully aided to make them
the centres of revolutionary intrigue and of
political manipulation which they soon became in
the hands of men at once sunk in Atheism and
moral corruption.
An idea of these lodges may be obtained from a
description given of that of Ermanonville, by M.
Le Marquis de Lefroi, in Dictionnaire des Erreurs
Sociales, quoted by Deschamps, vol. ii, page 93.
“It is known”, he says, “that the Chateau de
Ermanonville belonging to the Sieur Girardin,
about ten leagues from Paris, was a famous haunt
of Illuminism. It is known that there, near the
tomb of Jean-Jacques, under the pretext of
bringing men back to the age of nature, reigned
the most horrible dissoluteness of morals.
Nothing can equal the turpitude of morals which
reigns amongst that horde of Ermanonville. Every
woman admitted to the mysteries became common to
the brothers, and was delivered up to the chance
or to the choice of these true ‘Adamites’.”
Barruel in his Mémoires sur le Jacobinisme, vol.
iv. p. 334, says “that M. Leseure, the father of
the hero of La Vendée, having been affiliated to
a lodge of this kind, and having, in obedience to
the promptings of conscience, abandoned it, was
soon after poisoned.” He himself declared to the
Marquis de Montron that he fell a victim to “that
infamous horde of the Illuminati.”
The Illuminism of Saint Martin was simply an
advance in the intensity of immorality, Atheism,
secrecy, and terror, which already reigned in the
lodges of France. It planned a deeper means of
revolution and destruction. It became in its
hidden depths a lair in which the Atheists of the
period could mature their plans for the overthrow
of the existing order of things to their own best
advantage. It gave itself very captivating names.
Its members were “Knights of Beneficence”, “Good
Templars”, “Knights of St. John”, &c. They
numbered, however, amongst them, the most active,
daring, and unscrupulous members of Masonry. They
set themselves at work to dominate over and to
control the entire body. They had no system, any
more than any other sort of Masons, to give the
world instead of that which they determined to
pull down. The state of nature, goods and the
sexes in common, no God, and instead of God a
hatred for everything sustaining the idea of God,
formed about the sum total of the happiness which
they desired to see reign in a world where people
should be reduced to a level resembling that of
wild cattle in the American prairies. This was
the Illumination they destined for humanity; yet
such was the infatuation inspired by their
immoral and strange doctrines that nobles,
princes, and monarchs of the period, including
Frederick II of Prussia and the silly Joseph II
of Austria, admitted to a part of their secrets,
were the tools and the dupes, and even the
accomplices, of these infamous conspirators.
VI
THE ILLUMINISM OF ADAM WEISHAUPT
BUT the Illuminism of Lyons was destined soon to
have a worldwide and ineradicable hold on the
Masonry of the world by means of an adept far
more able than Saint Martin or any of his
associates. This was Adam Weishaupt, a Professor
of Canon Law in the University of Munich. I shall
detain you a while to consider this remarkable
individual who, more than any of the Atheists
that have arisen in Masonry, has been the cause
of the success of its agencies in controlling the
fate of the world since his day. Had Weishaupt
not lived, Masonry may have ceased to be a power
after the reaction consequent on the first French
Revolution. He gave it a form and character which
caused it to outlive that reaction, to energize
it to the present day, and which will cause it to
advance until its final conflict with
Christianity must determine whether Christ or
Satan shall reign on this earth to the end.
Voltaire’s will to do God and man injury was as
strong as that of Weishaupt. His disciples,
D’Alembert, Diderot, Damilaville, Condorcet, and
the rest, were as fully determined as he was, to
eradicate Christianity. But they desired in its
stead a system with only a mitigated antipathy
for monarchy, and which might have tolerated for
a long time such kings as Frederick of Prussia,
and such Empresses as Catherine of Russia. But
the hatred for God and all form of worship, and
the determination to found a universal republic
on the lines of Communism, was on the part of
Weishaupt a settled sentiment. Possessed of a
rare power of organization, an education in law
which made him a pre-eminent teacher in its
highest faculty, an extended knowledge of men and
things, a command over himself, a repute for
external morality, and finally, a position
calculated to win able disciples, Weishaupt
employed for fifty years after the death of
Voltaire, his whole life and energies in the one
work of perfecting secret associations to
accomplish by deep deceit, and by force when that
should be practical, the ruin of the existing
order of religion, civilization, and government,
in order to plant in its stead his own system of
Atheism and Socialism.
He found contemporary Masonry well adapted for
his ends. His object was to extend it as far as
possible as a means of seducing men away from
Christianity. He well knew that Masonry and the
Church were in mortal conflict, and that the
moment a man became a Mason, he, that instant,
became excommunicated; he lost the grace of God;
he passed into a state of hostility to the
Church; he ceased to approach the Sacraments; he
was constituted in a state of rebellion; he
forfeited his liberty to unknown superiors; he
took a dreadful oath – perhaps many – not to
reveal the secrets then, or at any after time, to
be committed to his keeping; and finally, he
placed himself amongst men, all of whom were in
his own position, and in whose society it was
possible and easy for the astute disciples of
Weishaupt to lead him farther on the road to
ruin.
Weishaupt’s view, then, was first to entice men
into Masonry – into the lowest degree. A great
gain for evil was thus at once obtained. But a
man, though in Masonry, may not be willing to
become an Atheist and a Socialist, for some time
at least. He may have in his heart a profound
conviction that a God existed, and some hope left
of returning to that God at or before his death.
He may have entered Masonry for purposes of
ambition, for motives of vanity, from mere
lightness of character. He may continue his
prayers, and refuse, if a Catholic, to give up
the Mother of God and some practice of piety
loved by him from his youth. But Masonry was a
capital system to wean a man gradually away from
all these things. It did not at once deny the
existence of God, nor at once attack the
Christian Dispensation. It commenced by giving
the Christian idea of God, an easy, and, under
semblance of respect, an almost imperceptible
shake. It swore by the name of God in all its
oaths. It called him, however, not a Creator,
only an architect – the great Architect of the
universe. It carefully avoided all mention of
Christ, of the Adorable Trinity, of the Unity of
the Faith, or of any faith. It protested a
respect for the convictions of every man, for the
idolatrous Parsee, for the Mahommedan, for the
Heretic, the Schismatic, the Catholic. By and by,
it gave, in higher degrees, a ruder shock to the
belief in the Deity and a gradual inducement to
favour Naturalism. This it did gradually,
imperceptibly, but effectually. Now, to a man who
meditated the vast designs of social and
religious destruction contemplated by Weishaupt,
Masonry, especially the Masonry of his period,
was the most effective means that could be
conceived. In its midst, therefore, he planted
his disciples, well versed in his system. These
consisted of three classes, each class having
subdivisions, and all of which were high degrees
of Masonry. The first class of Illuminati, was
that of preparation. It consisted of two degrees,
namely, the degree of Novice and that of
Minerval. The Minervals formed the great body of
the order, and were under the direction of
certain chiefs, who themselves were subjected to
other agencies invisible to those instructed by
themselves. Weishaupt instructed the teachers of
the Minervals to propose each year to their
scholars some interesting questions, to cause
them to write themes calculated to spread impiety
amongst the people, such as burlesques on the
Psalms, pasquinades on the Prophets, and
caricatures of personages of the Old Testament
after the manner of Voltaire and his school. It
is surprising with what exactitude these
Minervals follow out the instructions of
Weishaupt to this day. At this moment, in London,
under the eyes of the Lord Chancellor, pamphlets,
with hideous woodcuts, ridiculing David, “the man
after God’s own heart”, are weekly published. One
of these, which was handed to me in a public
place, had a woodcut representing the “meek
Monarch of Judea”, with a head just severed from
a human body in one hand, and the sword that did
the deed in the other. Another represented Him
amidst a set of ridiculous figures dancing. From
this we can easily judge that illuminated Masonry
is at work somewhere even in London, and that the
Masonry in high quarters is blind to its
excesses, exactly as happened in France a few
years before the French Revolution. Now these
Minervals, if they manifested what the German
Masons called “religionary” inclinations, might
indeed receive the first three Masonic degrees,
but they were not to be further promoted in
Illuminism. They were relegated to the rank and
file of Masonry, who were of use in many ways for
the movement, but they were never to be trusted
with the real secret. The teacher, without
seeming to do so, was ordered to encourage, but
not to applaud publicly, such blasphemies as the
Minervals might make use of in their essays. They
were to be led on, seemingly by themselves, in
the ways of irreligion, immorality, and Atheism,
until ripe for further promotion in evil
progress. Finally, in the advanced grades of
Illuminated Major and Minor, and in those of
Scotch Knight and Epopte or Priest they were told
the whole secret of the Order as follows, in a
discourse by the initiator.
“Remember”, he said, “that from the first
invitations which we have given you, in order to
attract you to us, we have commenced by telling
you that in the projects of our Order there did
not enter any designs against religion. You
remember that such an assurance was again given
to you when you were admitted into the ranks of
our novices, and that it was repeated when you
entered into our Minerval Academy. Remember also
how much from the first grades we have spoken to
you of morality and virtue, but at the same time
how much the studies which we prescribed for you
and the instructions which we gave you rendered
both morality and virtue independent of all
religion; how much we have been at pains to make
you understand, while making to you the eulogy of
religion, that it was not anything else than
those mysteries, and that worship degenerated in
the hands of the priest. You remember with what
art, with what simulated respect, we have spoken
to you of Christ and of his Gospel; but in the
grades of greater Illuminism, of Scotch Knight,
and of Epopte or Priest, how we have known to
form from Christ’s Gospel that of our reason, and
from its morality that of nature, and from its
religion that of nature, and from religion,
reason, morality, and nature, to make the
religion, and the morality of the rights of man,
of equality, and of liberty. Remember that while
insinuating to you the different parts of this
system, we have caused them to bud forth from
yourselves as if your own opinions. We have
placed you on the way; you have replied to our
questions very much more than we did to yours.
When we demanded of you, for example, whether the
religions of peoples responded to the end for
which men adopted them; if the religion of
Christ, pure and simple, was that which the
different Sects professed today, we know well
enough what to hold. But it was necessary to knew
to what point we had succeeded to cause our
sentiments to germinate in you. We have had very
many prejudices to overcome in you, before being
able to persuade you that the pretended religion
of Christ was nothing else than the work of
priests, of imposture, and of tyranny. If it be
so with that religion so much proclaimed and
admired, what are we to think of other religions?
Understand, then, that they have all the same
fictions for their origin, that they are all
equally founded on lying, error, chimera, and
imposture. Behold our secret!
“The turns and counter-turns which it was
necessary to make; the eulogies which it was
necessary to give to the pretended secret
schools; the fable of the Freemasons being in
possession of the veritable doctrine; and our
Illuminism today, the sole inheritor of these
mysteries, will no longer astonish you at this
moment. If, in order to destroy all Christianity,
all religion, we have pretended to have the sole
true religion, remember that the end justifies
the means, and that the wise ought to take all
the means to do good, which the wicked take to do
evil. Those which we have taken to deliver you,
those which we take to deliver one day the human
race from all religion, are nothing else than a
pious fraud which we reserve to unveil some day
in the grade of Magus or Philosopher
Illuminated.” – Segur: Le Secret de la
Franc-Maçonnerie, p. 49.
The above extract will serve to show you what
manner of man Weishaupt was, and the quality of
the teaching he invented. His organization – for
the perfection of which he deeply studied the
constitution of the then suppressed Society of
Jesus – contemplated placing the thread of the
whole conspiracy, destined to be controlled by
the Illuminati, in the hands of one man, advised
by a small council. The Illuminati were to be in
Masonry and of Masonry, so as to move amongst its
members secretly. They were so trained that they
could obtain the mastery in every form of secret
society, and thus render it subservient to their
own Chief. Their fidelity to him was made perfect
by the most severe and complex system of
espionage. The Chief himself was kept safe by his
position, his long training, and by his council.
It thus happened that no matter to what office or
position the Illuminati attained, they had to
become subservient to the general aims of the
Order. Weishaupt, after being deprived of his
professorship in Bavaria, found an asylum with
the Prince of Coburg Gotha, where he remained in
honour, affluence and security, until his death
in 1830. He continued all his life the Chief of
the Illuminati, and this fact may account, in
large measure, for the fidelity with which the
Illuminati of the Revolution, the Directory,
Consulate, the Empire, the Restoration, and the
Revolution of 1830, invariably carried out his
programme of perpetual conspiracy for the ends he
had in view. It may also account for the strange
vitality of the spirit of the Illuminati in
Italy, Switzerland, and Spain, and of its
continuance through the “Illuminated” reigns of
Nubius and Palmerston, the successors of
Weishaupt to our own day [1885]. This we shall
see further on; but, meanwhile, we shall glance
at the first step of Weishaupt to rule over
Masonry through his disciples. This was by
calling together the famous “General Council” of
Freemasonry, known as the Convent of Wilhelmsbad.
VII
THE CONVENT OF WILHELMSBAD
FROM its rise Freemasonry appears as a kind of
dark parody of the Church of Christ. The names
taken by its dignitaries, the form of its
hierarchy, the designations affected by its
lodges and “obediences”, the language of its
rituals, all seem to be a kind of aping after the
usages of Christianity. When Saint Martin wished
to spread his Illuminism in France, he managed to
have a meeting of deputy Masons from all the
lodges in that country. This was designated the
“Convent of the Gauls”; and Lyons, the place of
its meeting, was called “The Holy City”.
Weishaupt had more extended views. He meant to
reach all humanity by means of Masonry, and
looked for a “Convent” far more general than that
of Lyons. When, therefore, he had matured his
plans for impregnating the Masonry of the world
with his infernal system, he began to cast about
for means to call that Convent. The Illuminism of
Saint Martin was in full sympathy with him, but
it could not effect his purpose. He wanted a kind
of General Council of the Masonry extended at the
time throughout the earth to be called together;
and he hoped that, by adroitly manipulating the
representatives whom he knew would be sent to it
by the lodges of every nationality of Masons, his
own Illuminism might be adopted as a kind of
high, arch, or hidden, Masonry, throughout its
entire extent. He succeeded in his design, and in
1781, under the official convocation of the Duke
of Brunswick, acting as Supreme Grand Master,
deputies from every country where Freemasonry
existed were summoned to meet at Wilhelmsbad in
council. They came from every portion of the
British Empire; from the newly formed United
States of America; from all the Nations of
Continental Europe, every one of which, at that
period, had lodges; from the territories of the
Grand Turk, and from the Indian and Colonial
possessions of France, Spain, Portugal, and
Holland. The principal and most numerous
representatives were, however, from Germany and
France. Through the skilful agency of the
notorious Baron Knigge, and another still more
astute adept of his, named Dittfort, Weishaupt
completely controlled this Council. He further
caused measures to be there concerted which in a
few years led to the French Revolution, and
afterwards handed Germany over to the French
revolutionary Generals acting under the
Girondins, the Jacobins, and the Directory. I
would wish, if time permitted, to enter at length
into the proofs of this fact. It will suffice,
however, for my present purpose, to state that
more than sufficient evidence of it was found by
the Bavarian Government, which had, some five
years later, to suppress the Illuminati, and that
one of the members of the convent, the Count de
Virene, was struck with such horror at the
depravity of the body that he abandoned
Illuminism and became a fervent Catholic. He said
to a friend:– “I will not tell you the secrets
which I bring, but I can say that a conspiracy is
laid so secret and so deep that it will be very
difficult for monarchy and religion not to
succumb to it.” It may be also of use to remark
that many of the leaders of the French
Revolution, and notably most of those who lived
through it, and profited by it, were deputy
Masons sent from various lodges in France to the
Convent of Wilhelmsbad.
VIII
CABALISTIC MASONRY OR MASONIC SPIRITISM
BEFORE proceeding further with the history of
Freemasonry, I shall stay a moment to consider a
very remarkable feature in its strange
composition, without which it scarcely ever
appears. The world was never without wizards,
witches, necromancers, jugglers, and those who
really had, or through imposture, pretended to
have, intercourse with demons. Masonry in its
various ramifications is the great continuator of
this feature of a past which we had thought
departed for ever. Spirit-rapping, table-turning,
medium imposture, etc, distinguish its adepts in
Protestant countries and in Catholic ones. We
have almost incredible stories of the intercourse
with the devil and his angels, which men like the
Carbonari of Italy maintain. However, from the
very beginning Freemasonry has had a kind of
peculiar dark mysticism connected with it. It
loves to revel in such mysteries as the secret
conclaves that the Jews used to practise in the
countries in which they were persecuted, and
which were common among those unclean heretics,
the Bulgarians, the Gnostics, the Albigenses, and
the Waldenses. The excesses alleged against the
Templars were also accompanied by secret signs
and symbols which Masonry adopted. But whatever
may have been the extent of this mysticism in
Masonry before, a spurious kind of spiritism
became part of its very essence since the advent
of the celebrated Cagliostro, who travelled all
over Europe under the instructions of Weishaupt,
and founded more lodges than did any individual
Freemason then or since.
The real name of this arch-impostor was Balsamo.
He was an inveterate sorcerer, and in his
peregrinations in the East, picked up from every
source the secrets of alchemy, astrology,
jugglery, legerdemain, and occult science of
every kind about which he could get any
information. Like the Masonry to which he became
affiliated at an early period, he was an adept at
acting and speaking a lie. He suited Weishaupt,
who, though knowing him to be an impostor,
nevertheless employed for him the diffusion of
Illuminism. Accompanied by his no less celebrated
wife, Lorenza, he appeared in Venice as the
Marquis Pelligrini, and subsequently traversed
Italy, Germany, Spain, England, the Netherlands,
and Russia. In the latter country he amassed, at
the Court of Catherine II, an immense fortune. In
France, assisted by the efforts of the
Illuminati, he was received as a kind of demigod,
and called the divine Cagliostro. He established
new lodges in all parts of the country. At
Bordeaux he remained eleven months for this
purpose. In Paris he established lodges for women
of a peculiarly cabalistic and impure kind, with
inner departments horribly mysterious. At the
reception of members he used rites and ceremonies
exactly resembling the absurd practices of spirit
mediums, who see and speak to spirits, etc, and
introduced all that nonsense with which we are
made now familiar by his modern followers. He
claimed the power of conferring immortal youth,
health, and beauty, and what he called moral and
physical regeneration, by the aid of drugs and
Illuminated Masonry. He was the father and the
founder of the existing rite of Misraim – the
Egyptian rite in Masonry. The scoundrel became
involved in the celebrated case of the “Diamond
Necklace”, and was sent to the Bastille, from
which he managed to pass to England, where, in
1787, he undertook to foretell the destruction of
the Bastille, and of the Monarchy of France, the
Revolution, and – but here he miscalculated – the
advent of a Prince who would abolish Lettres de
Cachet, convoke the States General, and establish
the worship of Reason. All these measures were
resolved on at Wilhelmsbad, and Cagliostro of
course knew that well. His only miscalculation
was regarding the Prince Grand Master. The
Revolution went on a little too far for the
wretched Egalité, who ended his treason to his
house by losing his head at the guillotine. As to
Cagliostro, he made his way to Rome, where the
Inquisition put an end to his exploits on
detecting his attempts at Illuminism. His secret
powers could not deliver him from prison. He died
there miserably, in 1795, after attempting to
strangle a poor Capuchin whom he asked for as a
confessor, and in whose habit he had hoped to
escape. This impostor is of course made a martyr
to the Inquisition accordingly. Masonry does much
to disown Cagliostro; but with a strange
inconsistency it keeps the Egyptian rite founded
by him, and clings to mysticism of the debased
kind he introduced. It is wonderful how extremes
thus meet, – how men who make it a sign of
intellectual strength to deny the existence of
the God that made them bow down stupidly and
superstitiously before devils, real or imaginary.
Necromancy is a characteristic of Antichrist, of
whom we read, “that he will show great signs and
wonders so as to deceive, if that were possible,
even the elect.” He will be when he comes both a
Cromwell and a Cagliostro.
IX
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
I MAY here remark that the conspiracy of the
Illuminati, and of Freemasonry generally, was far
from being a secret to many of the Courts of
Europe. But, then, just as at the present moment,
it had friends, female as well as male, in every
court. These baulked the wholesome attempts of
some rulers to stay its deadly intrigues against
princes, governments, and all order, as well as
against its one grand enemy, the Church of Jesus
Christ. The Court of Bavaria found out, as I have
said, but only by an accident, a part of the
plans of the Illuminati, and gave the alarm; but,
strange to say, that alarm was unheeded by the
other Courts of Europe, Catholic as well as
Protestant. A Revolution was expected, but, as
now, each Court hoped to stave off the worst
consequences from itself, and to profit by the
ruin of its neighbours. The voice of the Holy
Father was raised against Freemasonry again and
again. Clement VIII, Benedict XIV, and other
Pontiffs, condemned it. The Agents and Ministers
of the Holy See gave private advices and made
urgent appeals to have the evil stopped while yet
the powers of Europe could do so. These were all
baffled, and the Court of the Grand Monarch and
every Court of Continental Europe slept in the
torpor of a living death, until wakened to a true
sense of danger at a period far too late to
remedy the disasters which irreligion, vice,
stupidity, and recklessness hastened. The lodges
of the Illuminati in France meanwhile carried on
the conspiracy. They had amassed and expended
immense sums in deluging the country with immoral
and Atheistic literature.
Mirabeau, in his Monarchie Prussienne (vol. 6,
page 67), published ‘before the Revolution, thus
speaks of these sums:–
“Masonry in general, and especially the branch of
the Templars, produced annually immense sums by
means of the cost of receptions and contributions
of every kind. A part of the total was employed
in the expenses of the order, but another part,
much more considerable, went into a general fund,
of which no one, except the first amongst the
brethren, knew the destination.” Cagliostro, when
questioned before the Holy Roman Inquisition,
“confessed that he led his sumptuous existence
thanks to the funds furnished him by the
Illuminati. He also stated that he had a
commission from Weishaupt to prepare the French
Lodges to receive his direction.” – See
Deschamps, v., p. 129.
Discontent was thus sown broadcast amongst every
class of the population. Masonic Lodges
multiplied, inspired by the instructed emissaries
of the remorseless Weishaupt; and the direct work
of Freemasonry in subsequent events is manifest
not only in the detailed prophecy of Cagliostro,
founded on what he knew was decided upon; but is
still more clearly evidenced by a second convent,
held by the French Illuminati, where everything
was arranged for the Revolution. The men
prominent in this conclave were the men
subsequently most active in every scene that
followed. Mirabeau, Lafayette, Fouché,
Talleyrand, Danton, Murat, Robespierre,
Cambacérès, and in fact every foremost name in
the subsequent convulsions of the country were
not only Illuminati, but foremost amongst the
Illuminati.1 Some disappeared under their own
guillotine; others outlived the doom of their
fellows. Constantly, the men of the whole
conspiracy had understandings and relations with
each other. Weishaupt, at the safe distance of
Coburg-Gotha, gave them his willing aid and that
of the German Freemasons. This concert enabled
them to float on every billow which the troubled
sea of the Revolution caused to swell; and if
they did not succeed in making France and all
Europe a social ruin, such as that contemplated
at Wilhelmsbad, it was from want of power, not
from want of will. Position and wealth made many
of them desire to conserve what the Revolution
threw into their hands. But they remained under
all changes of fortune Freemasons, as they and
their successors are to this day. Perhaps, under
the influence of oaths, of secret terror, and of
the Sect, they dare not remain long otherwise.
One or two individuals may drop aside; but some
fatality or necessity keeps the leaders
Illuminati always. They as a whole body remain
ever the same, and recoil before political
adversity, only to gather more strength for a
future attack upon religion and order still wider
and more fatal than the one which preceded it.
They are not at any time one whit less determined
to plunge the world into the anarchy and
bloodshed they created at the French Revolution,
than they were in 1789. On this point let one of
themselves speak:–(Extracts from “Proofs of a
Conspiracy”, by John Robison, A.M., Professor of
Natural Philosophy and Secretary to the Royal
Society of Edinburgh – The Third Edition,
corrected, 1789.)
“I have been able to trace these attempts, made,
through a course of fifty years, under the
specious pretext of enlightening the world by the
torch of philosophy, and of dispelling the clouds
of civil and religious superstition which keep
the nations of Europe in darkness and slavery. I
have observed these doctrines gradually diffusing
and mixing with all the different systems of Free
Masonry; till, at last, AN ASSOCIATION HAS BEEN
FORMED for the express purpose of ROOTING OUT ALL
THE RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENTS, AND OVERTURNING ALL
THE EXISTING GOVERNMENTS OF EUROPE. I have seen
this Association exerting itself zealously and
systematically, till it has become almost
irresistible; and I have seen that the most
active leaders in the French Revolution were
members of this Association, and conducted their
first movements according to its principles, and
by means of its instructions and assistance,
formally requested and obtained; lastly, I have
seen that this Association still exists, still
works in secret, and that not only several
appearances among ourselves show that its
emissaries are endeavouring to propagate their
detestable doctrines among us, but that the
Association has Lodges in Britain corresponding
with the mother Lodge at Munich ever since 1784.
“If all this were a matter of mere curiosity, and
susceptible of no good use, it would have been
better to have kept it to myself than to disturb
my neighbours with the knowledge of a state of
things which they cannot amend. But if it shall
appear that the minds of my countrymen are misled
in the very same manner as were those of our
continental neighbours – if I can show that the
reasonings which make a very strong impression on
some persons in this country are the same which
actually produced the dangerous association in
Germany; and that they had this unhappy influence
solely because they were thought to be sincere,
and the expressions of the sentiments of the
speakers. If I can show that this was all a
cheat, and that the Leaders of this Association
disbelieved every word that they uttered, and
every doctrine that they taught; and that their
real intention was to abolish all religion,
overturn every government, and make the world a
general plunder and a wreck... I cannot but think
that such information will make my countrymen
hesitate a little, and receive with caution, and
even distrust, addresses and instructions which
flatter our self-conceit.” – (pp. 11-13.)
These words of Robison show, that as early as
1797, the connection between Freemasonry and the
French Revolution was well understood. Since then
Louis Blanc, and other Masonic writers, have
gloried in the fact. “Our end”, said the
celebrated Alta Vendita, to which I shall have to
refer presently, “is that of Voltaire and the
French Revolution.” In fact, what Freemasonry did
in France, it now labours, with greater caution,
to effect on some future day throughout the
entire world. It then submitted, with perfect
docility, to a great military leader, who arose
out of its own work and principles. Such another
leader will finally direct its last efforts
against God and man. That leader will be
Antichrist.
X
NAPOLEON AND FREEMASONRY
THE leader who arose out of the first French
Revolution, and whose military and diplomatic
fame is still fresh in the recollection of many
of the present generation – that leader was
Napoleon Bonaparte. In the days of his greatest
prosperity, nothing was so distasteful to him as
to be reminded of his Jacobin past. He then
wished to pose as another Charlemagne, or Rudolph
of Hapsburg. He wished to be considered the
friend of religion, and of the Catholic religion
in particular. He did something for the
restoration of the Church in France, but it was
as little as he could help. It, perhaps,
prevented a more wholesome and complete reaction
in favour of the true religious aspirations of
the population. It was done grudgingly,
parsimoniously, and meanly. And when it had been
done, Napoleon did all he could to undo its
benefits. He soon became the persecutor – the
heartless, cruel, ungrateful persecutor of the
Pontiff, and an opponent to the best interests of
religion in France, and in every country which
had the misfortune to fall under his sway. The
reason for all this was that Napoleon had
commenced his career as a Freemason, and a
Freemason he remained in spirit and in effect to
the end of his life. It is known that he owed his
first elevation to the Jacobins, and that his
earliest patron was Robespierre. His first
campaign in Italy was characterized by the utmost
brutality which could gratify Masonic hatred for
the Church. He suppressed the abodes of the
consecrated servants of God, sacked churches,
cathedrals, and sanctuaries, and reduced the Pope
to the direst extremities. His language was the
reflex of his acts and of his heart. His letters
breathe everywhere the spirit of advanced
Freemasonry, gloating over the wounds it had been
able to inflict upon the Spouse of Christ. Yet
this adventurer has, with great adroitness, been
able to pass with many, and especially in
Ireland, as a good Catholic. Because he was the
enemy of England, or rather that England, led by
the counsels of Pitt and Burke, constituted
herself the implacable enemy of the Revolution of
which he was the incarnation and continuation,
many opposed to England for political reasons,
regard Bonaparte as a kind of hero. No one can
doubt the military genius of the man, nor indeed
his great general ability; but he was in all his
acts what Freemasonry made him. He was mean,
selfish, tyrannical, cruel. He was reckless of
blood. He could tolerate or use the Church while
that suited his policy. But he had from the
beginning to the very end of his career that
thorough indifference to her welfare, and want of
belief in her doctrines, which an early and
lifelong connection with the Illuminati inspired.
Father Deschamps writes of him: “Napoleon
Bonaparte was in effect an advanced Freemason,
and his reign has been the most flourishing epoch
of Freemasonry. During the reign of terror the
Grand Orient ceased its activity. The moment
Napoleon seized power the lodges were opened in
every place.”
I have said that the revolutionary rulers in
France were all Illuminati – that is Freemasons
of the most pronounced type – whose ultimate aim
was the destruction of every existing religion
and form of secular government, in order to found
an atheistic, social republic, which would extend
throughout the world and embrace all mankind.
Freemasonry welcomes, as we have seen, the
Mahommedan, the Indian, the Chinese, and the
Buddhist, as well as the Christian and the Jew.
It designs to conquer all, as a means of bringing
all into the one level of Atheism and Communism.
When, therefore, its Directory, in their desire
to get rid of Napoleon, planned the expedition to
Egypt and Asia, they meant the realization of a
part of this programme, as well as the removal of
a troublesome rival. A universal monarchy is, in
their idea, the most efficacious means for
arriving at a universal republic. Once obtained,
the dagger with which they removed Gustavus III
of Sweden, or the guillotine by which they rid
France of Louis XVI, can at any moment remove
Caesar and call in Brutus. They are not the men
to recoil before deeds of blood for the
accomplishment of their purposes.
Now Napoleon, who was, as Father Deschamps
informs us, a member of the lodge of the
Templars, the extreme Illuminated lodge of Lyons,
and had given proof of his fidelity to Masonry in
Italy, was the very man to extend the rule of
Republicanism throughout Asia. He appeared in
Egypt with the same professions of hypocritical
respect for the Koran, the Prophet, and
Mahommedanism, as he afterwards made when it
suited his policy for Catholicism. His address to
the people of Egypt will prove this. It ran as
follows, with true Masonic hypocrisy:–
“Cadis, Chieks, Imans, tell the people that we
are the friends of true Mussulmen; that we
respect more than the Mamelukes do, God, His
Prophet, and the Alkoran. Is it not we who have
destroyed the Pope, who wished that war should be
made against the Mussulman? Is it not we who have
destroyed the Knights of Malta, because these
madmen thought that God willed them to make war
upon the Mussulman? Is it not we who have been in
all ages the friends of the Grand Seigneur – may
God fulfil his desires – and the enemy of his
enemies. God is God, and Mahomet is his Prophet!
Fear nothing above all for the religion of the
Prophet, which I love.”
The cool hypocrisy of this address is manifested
by a proclamation he made on that occasion to his
own soldiers. The same proclamation also shows
the value we may place on his protestations of
attachment to, and respect for, the usages of
Christianity. The following is a translation of
it:–
“Soldiers the peoples with whom we are about to
live are Mahommedan. The first article of their
faith is this: ‘There is no God but God, and
Mahomet is his Prophet.’ Do not contradict them.
Act with them as you have acted with the Jews and
with the Italians. Have the same respect for
their Muftis and their Imans, as you have had for
Rabbis and Bishops. Have for the ceremonies
prescribed by the Alkoran, for the Mosques, the
same tolerance you had for Convents, for
Synagogues, and for the religion of Moses and of
Jesus Christ.”
We read in the correspondence of Napoleon I,
published by order of napoleon III (vol. v., pp.
185, 191, 241), what he thought of this
proclamation at the very end of his career:–
“After all, it was not impossible that
circumstances might have brought me to embrace
Islam”, he said at St. Helena. “Could it be
thought that the Empire of the East, and perhaps
the subjection of the whole of Asia, was not
worth a turban and pantaloons, for it was reduced
to so much solely. We would lose only our
breeches and our hats. I say that the army,
disposed as it was, would have lent itself to
that project undoubtedly, and it saw in it
nothing but a subject for laughter and
pleasantry. Meanwhile, you see the consequences.
I took Europe by a back stroke. The old
civilization was beaten down, and who then
thought to disturb the destinies of our France
and the regeneration of the world? Who had dared
to undertake it? Who could have accomplished it?”
Neither prosperity nor adversity changed
Napoleon. He was a sceptic to the end. He said at
St. Helena to Las Cases:
“Everything proclaims the existence of a God –
that is not to be doubted – but all our religions
are evidently the children of men.
“Why do these religions cry down one another,
combat one another? Why has that been in all
ages, and all places? It is because men are
always men. It is because the Priests have always
insinuated, slipped in lies and fraud everywhere.
“Nevertheless”, he continued, “from the moment
that I had the power, I had been eager to
re-establish religion. I used it as the base and
the root. It was in my eyes the support of good
morality, of true principles, of good manners.
“I am assuredly far from being an Atheist; but I
cannot believe all that they teach me in spite of
my reason, under penalty of being deceitful and
hypocritical.
“To say whence I come, what I am, where I go, is
above my ideas. And nevertheless all that is, I
am the watch which exists and does not know
itself.
“No doubt”, he commented, “but my spirit of mere
doubt was, in my quality of Emperor, a benefit
for the people. Otherwise how could I equally
favour sects so contrary, if I had been dominated
over by one alone? How could I preserve the
independence of my thoughts and of my movements
under the suggestions of a confessor who could
govern me by means of the fear of hell.
“What an empire could not a wicked man, the most
stupid of men, under that title of confessor,
exercise over those who govern nations ?
“I was so penetrated with these truths that I
preserved myself well to act in such a manner,
that, in as far as it lay in me, I would educate
my son in the same religious lines in which I
found myself.”
Two months later the ex-Emperor said that from
the age of thirteen he had lost all religious
faith.
Thiers (Histoire du Consulat et de l’Empire, iv.
p. 14), says that when Napoleon intended to
proclaim himself Emperor, he wished to give the
Masons a pledge of his principles, and that he
did this by killing the Duke d’Enghien. He said,
“They wish to destroy the Revolution in attacking
it in my person. I will defend it, for I am the
Revolution. I, myself – I, myself. They will so
consider it from this day forward, for they will
know of what we are capable.”
A less brave but still more accomplished relative
of his, Napoleon III, in his Idées
Napoléoniennes, says:–
“The Revolution dying, but not vanquished, left
to Napoleon the accomplishments of its last
designs. Enlighten the nations it would have said
to him. Place upon solid bases the principal
result of our efforts. Execute in extent that
which I have done in depth. Be for Europe what I
have been for France. That grand mission Napoleon
accomplished even to the end.”
When Napoleon obtained power, it was we know
principally by means of the Illuminated Freemason
Talleyrand.1 By him and his confederates of the
Illuminati, he was recalled from Egypt and placed
in the way of its attainment. His brothers were –
every one of them – deep in the secrets of the
Sect. Its supreme hidden directory saw that a
reaction had set in, which if not averted, would
speedily lead to the return of the exiled
Bourbons, and to the disgorgement of ill-gotten
goods on the part of the revolutionists. As a
lesser evil, therefore, and as a means of
forwarding the unification of Europe which they
had planned, by his conquests, they placed
supreme power in the hands of Bonaparte, and
urged him on in his career, watching, at the same
time, closely, their own opportunities for the
development of the deadly designs of the Sect.
Then, they obtained the first places in his
Empire for themselves. They put as much mischief
into the measures of relief given to conscience
as they could. They established a fatal supremacy
for secularism in the matter of education. They
brought dissension between the Pope and the
Emperor. They caused the second confiscation of
the States of the Church. They caused and
continued to the end, the imprisonment of Pius
VII. They were at the bottom of every attack made
by Napoleon while Emperor upon the rights of the
Church, the freedom and independence of the
Supreme Pontiff, and the well-being of religion.
But the chief mistake of Napoleon was the
encouragement he gave to Freemasonry. It served
his purpose admirably for a while, that is so
long as he served the present and ultimate views
of the conspiracy; for a conspiracy Masonry ever
was and ever will be. Even if Cambacérès,
Talleyrand, Fouché, and the old leaders of the
Illuminati, whom he had taken into his confidence
and richly rewarded, should be satisfied, there
was a mass of others whom no reward could
conciliate, and who, filled with the spirit of
the Sect, were sure to be ever on the look out
for the means to advance the designs of Weishaupt
and his inner circle. That inner circle never
ceased its action. It held the members of the
Sect, whom it not only permitted but assisted to
attain high worldly honours, completely in its
power, and hence in absolute subjection. For them
as well as for the humblest member of the secret
conclave, the poisoned aqua tophona and the
dagger were ready to do the work of certain death
should they lack obedience to those depraved
fanatics of one diabolical idea, who were found
worthy to be selected by their fellow
conspirators to occupy the highest place of
infamy and secret power. These latter scattered
secretly amidst the rank and file of the lodges,
hundreds of Argus-eyed, skilled plotters, who
kept the real power of inner or high Masonry in
the hands of its hidden masters. Masonry from
this secret vantage ground ceaselessly conspired
during the Empire. It assisted the conquest of
the victor of Austerlitz and Jena; and if
Deschamps, who quotes from the most reliable
sources, is to be trusted, it actually did more
for these victories than the great military
leader himself. Through its instrumentality the
resources of the enemies of Napoleon were never
at hand, the designs of the Austrian and other
generals opposed to him were thwarted, treason
was rife in their camps, and information fatal to
their designs was conveyed to the French
commander. Masonry was then on his side, and as
now the secret resources of the Order, its power
of hidden influence and espionage were placed at
the disposal of the cause it served. But when
Masonry had reason to fear that Napoleon’s power
might be perpetuated; when his alliance with the
Imperial Family of Austria, and above all, when
the consequence of that alliance, an heir to his
throne, caused danger to the universal republic
it could otherwise assure itself of at his death;
when, too, he began to show a coldness for the
sect, and sought means to prevent it from the
propagandism of its diabolical aims, then it
became his enemy, and his end was not far off.2
Distracting councils prevailed in his cabinet.
His opponents began to get information regarding
his movements, which he had obtained previously
of theirs. Members of the sect urged on his mad
expedition to Moscow. His resources were
paralyzed; and he was, in one word, sold by
secret, invisible foes into the hands of his
enemies. In Germany, Weishaupt and his party,
still living on in dark intrigue, prepared
secretly for his downfall. His generals were
beaten in detail. He was betrayed, hoodwinked,
and finally led to his deposition and ruin. He
then received with a measure, pressed down and
overflowing, and shaken together, the gratitude
of the father of lies, incarnate in Freemasonry,
in the Illuminati, and kindred Atheist secret
societies. Banished to Elba he was permitted to
return to France only in order to meet the fate
of an outcast and a prisoner upon the rock of St.
Helena, where he died abandoned and persecuted by
the dark Sect which had used, abused, and
betrayed him. So it has continued, as we shall
see, to use, to abuse, and to betray every
usurper or despot whom it lures into its toils.
XI
FREEMASONRY AFTER THE FALL OF NAPOLEON
THE many intrigues of that very same body of
Illuminati who had planned and executed the
Revolution, then created successively the
Directory, the Consulate, and the Empire in
France, as they now posed in a new capacity as
friends to the return of Monarchy in Europe
generally. This they did for the purposes of the
Freemasons, and in order to keep the power they
wielded so long in their own hands, and in the
hands of their party. Now, I wish you to note,
that Weishaupt, the father of the Illuminati, and
the fanatical and deep director of all its
operations, was even then living in power and
security at Coburg-Gotha, and that his wily
confederates were ministers in every court of
Europe. Then, as now, the invincible
determination with which they secreted their
quality from the eyes of monarchs as well as of
the general public, enabled them to pose in any
character or capacity without fear of being
detected as Freemasons, or at least as
Illuminati. Since the reign of Frederick the
Great, they filled the Court of Berlin. Many
minor German Princes continued to be Freemasons.
The Duke of Brunswick was the central figure in
the first Masonic conspiracy, and though, with
the hypocrisy common to the Sect, he issued a
declaration highly condemnatory of his fellows,
it is generally believed that he remained to the
end attached to the “regeneration of humanity” in
the interests of Atheism. The Court of Vienna was
more or less Masonic since the reign of the
wretched Joseph II. Alexander of Russia was
educated by La Harpe, a Freemason, and at the
very period when called upon to play a principal
part in the celebrated “Holy Alliance”, he was
under the hidden guidance of others of the
Illuminati. Fessler, an apostate Austrian
religious, the Councillor of Joseph II, after
having abjured Christianity, remained, while
professing a respect for religion, its most
determined enemy. He founded what is known as the
Tugendbund, a society by which German Freemasonry
put on a certain Christian covering, in order
more securely to outlive the reaction against
Atheism, and to de-Christianize the world again
at a better opportunity. The Tugendbund refused
to receive Jews, and devised many other means to
deceive Christians to become substantially
Freemasons without incurring Church censures or
going against ideas then adverse to the old
Freemasonry, which, nevertheless, continued to
exist as satanic as ever under Christian devices.
In France, the Illuminati of the schools of
Wilhelmsbad and Lyons continued their
machinations without much change of front, though
they covered themselves with that impenetrable
secrecy which the sect has found so convenient
for disarming public suspicion while pursuing its
aims. Possessing means of deceiving the outside
world, and capable of using every kind of
hypocrisy and ruse, the Freemasons of both France
and Germany plotted at this period with more
secure secrecy and success than ever. There is
nothing which Freemasonry dreads more than light.
It is the one thing it cannot stand. Therefore,
it has always taken care to provide itself with
adepts and allies able to disarm public suspicion
in its regard. Should outsiders endeavour to find
out its real character and aims, it takes refuge
at once under the semblance of puerility, of
harmless amusement, of beneficence, or even of
half-witted simplicity. It is content to be
laughed at, in order not to be found out. But it
is for all its puerility the same dangerous foe
to Christianity, law, legitimacy, and order,
which it proved itself to be before and during
the first French Revolution, and which it will
continue to be until the world has universal
reason to know the depth, the malignity, and the
extent of its remorseless designs.1
At the period of the reaction against Bonaparte
it seems to have taken long and wise counsel.
When Talleyrand found that Weishaupt and the
inner Masonry no longer approved of Napoleon’s
autocracy, he managed very adroitly that the
Emperor should grow cold with him. He was thus
free to take adverse measures against his master,
and to prepare himself for the coming change. The
whole following of Bonaparte recruited from the
Illuminati were ready to betray him. They could
compass the fall of the tyrant, but the
difficulty for them was to find one suitable to
put in his place. It was decreed in their highest
council that whosoever should come upon the
throne of France, should be as far removed as
possible from being a friend to Catholicism or to
any principle sustaining true religion. They
therefore determined that, if at all possible, no
member of the ancient House should reign; and as
soon as the allied sovereigns who were for the
most part non-Catholic, had crushed Napoleon,
these French Masons demanded the Protestant and
Masonic King of Holland for King in France. This
failing, they contrived by Masonic arts to obtain
the first places in the Provisional Government
which succeeded Napoleon. They endeavoured to
make the most of the inevitable, and to rule the
incoming Louis XVIII in the interests of their
sect and to the detriment of the Church and of
Christianity.
Notwithstanding the fact that they had shown open
hostility to himself and to his house, Louis
XVIII, strange to say, favoured the Illuminati.
Talleyrand was made minister, and the other
advanced Freemasons of the Empire – Siéyès,
Cambacérès, Fouché, and the rest – obtained place
and power. These men at once applied themselves
to subvert the sentiment of reaction in favour of
the monarchy and of religion. Soon, Louis XVIII
gave the world the sad spectacle of a man
prepared at their bidding to cut his own throat.
He dissolved a Parliament of ultra loyalists
because they were too loyal to him. The
Freemasons took care that his next Parliament
should be full of its own creatures. They also
wrung from the King, under the plea of freedom of
the press, permission to deluge the country anew
with the infidel and immoral publications of
Voltaire and his confederates, and with
newspapers and periodicals, which proved
disastrous to his house, to royalty, and to
Christianity, in France. These led before long to
the attempt upon the life of the Duke of Berry,
to the revolution against Charles X, to the
elevation of the son of the Grand Master,
Egalité, as Constitutional King, and to all the
revolutionary results that have since distracted
and disgraced unfortunate France. But much as
Freemasonry effected in that country, it was not
there but in peaceful Italy that its illuminated
machinations produced the worst and most
widespread fruits of death.
XII
KINDRED SECRET SOCIETIES IN EUROPE
WE HAVE seen that the use made of Freemasonry by
the Atheists of the last century was a very
elastic one. As it came from England it had all
the qualities required by the remorseless
revolutionists, who so eagerly and so ably
employed it for their purposes. Its hypocritical
professions of Theism, of acceptation of the
Bible, and of beneficence; its terrible oaths of
secrecy; its grotesque and absurd ceremonial, to
which any meaning from the most silly to the
deepest and darkest could be given; its ascending
degrees, each one demanding additional secrets,
to be kept not only from outsiders, but from the
lower degrees; the death penalty for indiscretion
or disobedience; the system of mystery capable of
any extension; the hidden hierarchy; in a word,
all its qualities could be improved and
elaborated at will by the Infidels of the
Continent who had made British Masonry their own.
Soon the strict subjection of all subordinate
lodges to whatever Grand Orient or Mother Lodge
they spring from, and on which they depend, and,
above all, the complete understanding between the
directors of the Masonic “powers”, that is of the
different rites into which the Masonry is
divided, placed its entire government in a select
ruling body, directed in turn by a small
committee of the ablest conspirators, elected by
and known to that body alone. The whole rank and
file of Masonry receive their orders at present
from this inner body, who are unknown to the mere
masons of the lodges. The members of the
committee deputed by the lodges are able to
testify to the fact of the authenticity of the
orders. Those who rule from the hidden recesses
take care that these deputies shall be men worthy
of confidence. A lodge, therefore, has its
masters, it officers, and management; but its
orders come through a channel that appears to be
nothing, whereas it is everything in the movement
of the whole mass. Thus it happens that the
master of a lodge or the grand master of a
province, or of a nation, whose high-sounding
titles may make him seem to outsiders to be
everything, is in reality often nothing at all in
the actual government of Masonry. The real power
rests with the hidden committee of direction, and
confidential agents, who move almost invisibly
amongst the officers and members of the lodges.
These hidden agents of iniquity are vigilant
spies, secret “wire pullers”, who are seldom
promoted to any office, but content themselves
with the real power which they are selected to
use with dexterity and care.
It was through this system that Weishaupt
obtained the adoption of illuminated Masonry at
the convent of Wilhelmsbad. Through the
machinations of Knigge he obtained from the
delegates there assembled the approval of his
plan that the ultimate end of Freemasonry and all
secret plotting should be: 1°, Pantheism, a form
of Atheism which flatters Masonic pride. 2°,
Communism of goods, women, and general concerns.
3°, That the means to arrive at these ends should
be the destruction of the Church, and of all
forms of Christianity; the obliteration of every
kind of supernatural belief; and, finally, the
removal of all existing human governments to make
way for a universal republic in which the utopian
ideas of complete liberty from existing social,
moral, and religious restraint, absolute
equality, and social fraternity, should reign.
When these ends should be attained, but not till
then, the secret work of the Atheistic Freemasons
should cease.
At the convent of Wilhelmsbad, Weishaupt had the
means taken to carry out this determination.
There Masonry became one organized Atheistic
mass, while being still permitted to assume many
fantastic shapes. The Knights Rosicrucian, the
Templars, the Knights of Beneficence, the
Brothers of Amity were strictly united to
Illuminated Masonry. All could be reached through
Masonry itself. All were placed under the same
government. Masonry was made more elastic than
ever. When, as in the cases of Ireland and
Poland, an enslaved nationality should be found,
which the supreme Invisible Directory wished to
revolutionize, and when, at the same time, the
existing respect for the words of the Vicar of
Christ made Masonry hateful, a secret political
society was ordered to be formed on the plan of
Freemasonry, but with some other name. It too put
on, after the example of Masonry itself, the
semblance of zeal and respect for religion, but
it was bound to have horrible oaths, ascending
degrees, centres, the terrible death penalty for
indiscretion or treason, to be, in essence, and
in every sense, if not in name, a society
identical with Freemasonry. The supreme direction
of the Revolution was to contrive by sure means
to have adepts high and powerful in its
management; and the society was, even if founded
to defend the Catholic religion, thus sure,
sooner or later, to diverge from the Church and
to become hostile to religion and to its
ministers. The Atheistic revolutionists of the
Continent in the last century [18th] learned to
perfection the art to effect this; and hence the
ready assistance which men who were murdering
priests in Paris and throughout France and Italy,
gave to the Catholics of Ireland in 1798. Was it
to relieve the Catholics of Ireland from
persecution, while they themselves were to a far
more frightful extent oppressing the Catholic
Church, the Catholic priesthood, Catholic
religious, and Catholic people, for no other
reason than the profession of the Catholic faith
in France and Italy? By no means. They, at the
very time, had already corrupted Irishmen. Some
of these were open Infidels and others were
Jacobite Freemasons of no particular attachment
to any form of Christianity. They shared in
Napoleon’s indifference to religion, and were as
ready to profess zeal for their Catholic fellow
countrymen, as he and his soldiers were ready to
profess “love” for the Alkoran and the Prophet in
Egypt, or for St. Januarius in Naples. But they
and their leaders in Black Masonry knew that once
they could unite even the very best and truest
Catholic men in Ireland into a secret society on
such lines as I have described, they would soon
find an entrance for Atheism into the country.
They would not be wanting in means to win
recruits by degrees from the best intentioned
Catholics so bound by oaths, and so subjected to
hidden influences. They were adepts at
proselytism, especially amongst those who gave up
liberty and will to unknown masters. But the
agency of the Atheists of France was carried to
work the mischief it intended for Ireland upon
other Catholic lands. It forced its tyranny very
soon upon Italy, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland,
and the Rhenish provinces of Germany. That was
bad enough, but it was not all. When the French
revolutionary armies had departed from these
countries, after the fall of Bonaparte, they left
a deadly scourge that could not be removed behind
them. That was the system of Atheistic
organization of which we have been speaking, and
which was not slow in producing its malignant
fruits.
In Catholic Italy, where the scourge of the
Revolution fell most heavily, the misfortune
happened thus: The discontent consequent upon the
multitude of political parties in that country
gave the secret machinators of the Weishaupt
school a splendid opportunity of again renewing
their intrigues; while the miserable Government
of the Bourbons in France, in permitting
Freemasonry to flourish, afforded its supreme
direction an opportunity to assist them in many
ways. Public opinion in Germany was unripe for
any Atheism unless veiled under the hypocritical
pretences of the Tugendbund. In Italy, however,
though religion was strong amongst all classes,
the division of the country into small
principalities caused the hopes of the
revolutionists to be more sanguine than anywhere
else, and the opportunity of dealing a blow at
the temporal power of the Pope under the national
pretext of a united Italy, was too great a
temptation for the Supreme Masonic Directory to
resist. Besides, it could not be forgotten by
them, that in making past efforts the power of
the Pope was the principal cause of their many
failures. They rightly judged that the complete
destruction of his temporal authority was
essential to Atheism, and the first and most
necessary step to their ultimate views upon all
Christianity, and for the subjugation of the
world to their sway. The temporal power was the
stronghold, the rallying point of every
legitimate authority in Europe. With a sure
instinct of self-preservation, the Schismatical
Lord of Russia, the Evangelical King of Prussia,
the Protestant Governments of England, Denmark,
and Sweden, as well as the ancient legitimate
Catholic dynasties of Portugal, Austria, Bavaria,
and Spain had determined at the Congress of
Vienna on the restoration of the temporal
dominions of the Pope. The Conservatives of
Europe, whether Catholic, Protestant, or
Schismatic, felt that while the States of the
Church were preserved intact to the Head of the
Catholic religion, their own rights would remain
unquestioned – that to reach themselves his
rights should be first assailed. The Atheistic
conspiracy, guided now by old, experienced
revolutionists, saw also that the conservatism of
the world which they had to destroy in order to
dominate in its stead, could not be undermined
without first taking away the foundation of
Christian civilization upon which it rested and
which unquestionably, even for Christian
schismatics and heretics, was the temporal and
the spiritual authority of the Pope. Having no
idea of a divine preservation of the Christian
religion, they judged that the destruction of the
temporal power would lead inevitably to the
destruction of the spiritual; and as experience
proved that it would be useless to attempt to
destroy both altogether, they then set all their
agencies at work to destroy the temporal power
first. They therefore determined to create and
ferment to the utmost extent a political
discontent amongst the populations of the
different states into which the Italian Peninsula
was divided. Now this was a difficult task in the
face of the experience which the Italian people
had gained of the revolutions and constant
political changes brought by the French from the
first attempt of the Republic to the last of the
Empire. The Congress of Vienna restored most of
the ancient Italian States as well as the States
of the Church to the legitimate rulers. Peace and
prosperity beyond what had been known for years
began to reign in the Peninsula. The mass of the
people were profoundly contented. They were more
Catholic than ever, notwithstanding all that the
revolutionary agents of France did to pervert
them. But there remained a dangerous fraction
amidst the population not at all satisfied with
the change which had so much improved the nation
generally. This fraction consisted of those
individuals and their children who benefited by
the revolutionary regime. They were the men who
made themselves deputies in Rome, Naples, and
elsewhere, and by the aid of French revolutionary
bayonets seized upon Church property and became
enriched by public spoliation. These still
remained revolutionary to the core. Then, there
was the interest effected by their party. And
finally, there was that uneasy class, educated by
the many cheap universities of the country in too
great number, the sons of advocates and other
professional men, who, tinged with liberalism,
easily became the prey of the designing men who
still remained addicted to the principles and
were leagued in the secret organizations of
Weishaupt and his fellow Atheists. Even one of
these youths corrupted and excited to ambition by
the adroit manipulation of these emissaries of
Satan, still active, though more imperceptible
than ever, would be sufficient to kindle a flame
amongst his fellows capable of creating a wide
discontent. Aided then by such elements, already
at hand for their purposes, Weishaupt and his
hidden Directory determined to kindle such a
flame of Revolution in Italy as, in its effects,
should, before long, do more harm to religion and
order than even the French Revolution had caused
in its sanguinary but brief career. They effected
this by the formation, on the darkest lines of
“illuminated” Masonry, of the terrible Sect of
the Carbonari.
XIII
THE CARBONARI
IN this sect, the whole of the hitherto
recognized principles of organized Atheism were
perfected and intensified. In it, from the
commencement, a cunning hypocrisy was the means
most used as the best calculated to lead away a
people Catholic to the very core. The first of
the Carbonari of which we have any distinct
notice appeared at a season when Atheism,
directed by Weishaupt, was busy in forming
everywhere secret associations for apparently no
purpose other than political amelioration. He
determined to try upon the peasantry of Italy the
same arts which the French had intended for the
Catholic peasantry of Ireland. The United
Irishmen were banded together to demand amongst
other things, Catholic Emancipation. Never had a
people greater reason to rise against oppression
than the Catholics of Ireland of that period.
They were urged on to do so, however, by leaders
who, in many instances, were not Catholic, and
who had no political grievance, and whose aim was
the formation in Ireland of an independent
republic ruled, of course, by themselves, on the
model of the one which was established then in
France. That seemed to the Catholic the only way
to get out of the heretical domination which had
for such a lengthened period oppressed his
country. Now, the Carbonari of Italy were at
first formed for a purpose identical with that of
the United Irishmen. They conspired to bring back
their national independence ruined by the French,
the freedom of their religion, and their rightful
Bourbon sovereign. With them it was made an.
indispensable obligation that each member should
be not only a Catholic, but a Catholic going
regularly to the Sacraments. They took for their
Grand Master, Jesus Christ our Lord. But, as I
have said before, it is impossible for a secret
society having a death penalty for breach of
secret, having ascending degrees, and bound to
blind obedience to hidden masters, to remain any
appreciable length of time without falling under
the domination of the Supreme Directory of
organized Atheism. It was so with Carbonarism,
which, having started on the purest Catholic and
loyal lines, soon ended in being the very worst
kind of secret society which Infidelity had then
formed on the lines of Masonry. Very soon,
Italian adepts in black Masonry invaded its
ranks, the loudest in the protestation of
religion and loyalty. Equally soon, these
skilled, experienced, and unscrupulous veterans
in dark intrigue obtained the mastery in its
supreme direction, won over proselytes from fit
conspirators, and had the whole association in
their power. It was then easy to find abundant
pretexts to excite the passions of the rank and
file, to kindle hopes from revolution, to create
political dissatisfaction, and to make the whole
body of the Sect what it has actually become.
Italian genius soon outstripped the Germans in
astuteness; and as soon, perhaps sooner, than
Weishaupt passed away, the supreme government of
all the secret societies of the world was
exercised by the Alta Vendita or highest lodge of
the Italian Carbonari. The Alta Vendita ruled the
blackest Freemasonry of France, Germany, and
England; and until Mazzini wrenched the sceptre
of the dark Empire from that body, it continued
with consummate ability to direct the revolutions
of Europe. It considered, with that wisdom
peculiar to the children of darkness, that the
conspiracy against the Holy See was the
conspiracy in permanence. It employed its
principal intrigues against the State, the
surroundings, and the very person of the Pontiff.
It had hopes, by its manipulations, to gain
eventually even the Pope himself, to betray the
Christian cause, and then it well knew the
universe would be placed at its feet. It left
unmeasured freedom to the lodges of Masonry to
carry on those revolutions of a political kind,
which worked out the problems of the sect upon
France, Spain, Italy, and other countries. It
kept still greater movements to itself. The
permanent instruction of this body to its adepts
will give you an idea of its power, its policy,
and its principles.
XIV
PERMANENT INSTRUCTION OF THE ALTA VENDITA
“EVER since we have established ourselves as a
body of action, and that order has commenced to
reign in the bosom of the most distant lodge, as
in that one nearest the centre of action, there
is one thought which has profoundly occupied the
men who aspire to universal regeneration. That is
the thought of the enfranchisement of Italy, from
which must one day come the enfranchisement of
the entire world, the fraternal republic, and the
harmony of humanity. That thought has not yet
been seized upon by our brethren beyond the Alps.
They believe that revolutionary Italy can only
conspire in the shade, deal some strokes of the
poniard to sbirri and traitors, and tranquilly
undergo the yoke of events which take place
beyond the Alps for Italy, but without Italy.
This error has been fatal to us on many
occasions. It is not necessary to combat it with
phrases which would be only to propagate it. It
is necessary to kill it by facts. Thus, amidst
the cares which have the privilege of agitating
the minds of the most vigorous of our lodges,
there is one which we ought never to forget.
“The Papacy has at all times exercised a decisive
action upon the affairs of Italy. By the hands,
by the voices, by the pens, by the hearts of its
innumerable bishops, priests, monks, nuns and
people in all latitudes, the Papacy finds
devotedness without end ready for martyrdom, and
that to enthusiasm. Everywhere, whenever it
pleases to call upon them, it has friends ready
to die or lose all for its cause. This is an
immense leverage which the Popes alone have been
able to appreciate to its full power, and as yet
they have used it only to a certain extent. Today
there is no question of reconstituting for
ourselves that power, the prestige of which is
for the moment weakened. Our final end is that of
Voltaire and of the French Revolution, the
destruction for ever of Catholicism and even of
the Christian idea which, if left standing on the
ruins of Rome, would be the resuscitation of
Christianity later on. But to attain more
certainly that result, and not prepare ourselves
with gaiety of heart for reverses which adjourn
indefinitely, or compromise for ages, the success
of a good cause, we must not pay attention to
those braggarts of Frenchmen, those cloudy
Germans, those melancholy Englishmen, all of whom
imagine they can kill Catholicism, now with an
impure song, then with an illogical deduction; at
another time, with a sarcasm smuggled in like the
cottons of Great Britain. Catholicism has a life
much more tenacious than that. It has seen the
most implacable, the most terrible adversaries,
and it has often had the malignant pleasure of
throwing holy water on the tombs of the most
enraged. Let us permit, then, our brethren of
these countries to give themselves up to the
sterile intemperance of their anti-Catholic zeal.
Let them even mock at our Madonnas and our
apparent devotion. With this passport we can
conspire at our ease, and arrive little by little
at the end we have in view.
“Now the Papacy has been for seventeen centuries
inherent to the history of Italy. Italy cannot
breathe or move without the permission of the
Supreme Pastor. With him she has the hundred arms
of Briareus, without him she is condemned to a
pitiable impotence. She has nothing but divisions
to foment, hatreds to break out, and hostilities
to manifest themselves from the highest chain of
the Alps to the lowest of the Appenines. We
cannot desire such a state of things. It is
necessary, then, to seek a remedy for that
situation. The remedy is found. The Pope, whoever
he may be, will never come to the secret
societies. It is for the secret societies to come
first to the Church, in the resolve to conquer
the two.
“The work which we have undertaken is not the
work of a day, nor of a month, nor of a year. It
may last many years, a century perhaps, but in
our ranks the soldier dies and the fight
continues.
“We do not mean to win the Popes to our cause, to
make them neophytes of our principles, and
propagators of our ideas. That would be a
ridiculous dream, no matter in what manner events
may turn. Should cardinals or prelates, for
example, enter, willingly or by surprise, in some
manner, into a part of our secrets, it would be
by no means a motive to desire their elevation to
the See of Peter. That elevation would destroy
us. Ambition alone would bring them to apostasy
from us. The needs of power would force them to
immolate us. That which we ought to demand, that
which we should seek and expect, as the Jews
expected the Messiah, is a Pope according to our
wants. Alexander VI, with all his private crimes,
would not suit us, for he never erred in
religious matters. Clement XIV, on the contrary,
would suit us from head to foot. Borgia was a
libertine, a true sensualist of the eighteenth
century strayed into the fifteenth. He has been
anathematized, notwithstanding his vices, by all
the voices of philosophy and incredulity, and he
owes that anathema to the vigour with which he
defended the Church. Ganganelli gave himself
over, bound hand and foot, to the ministers of
the Bourbons, who made him afraid, and to the
incredulous who celebrated his tolerance, and
Ganganelli is become a very great Pope. He is
almost in the same condition that it is necessary
for us to find another, if that be yet possible.
With that we should march more surely to the
attack upon the Church than with the pamphlets of
our brethren in France, or even with the gold of
England. Do you wish to know the reason? It is
because by that we should have no more need of
the vinegar of Hannibal, no more need of the
powder of cannon, no more need even of our arms.
We have the little finger of the successor of St.
Peter engaged in the plot, and that little finger
is of more value for our crusade than all the
Innocents, the Urbans, and the St. Bernards of
Christianity.
“We do not doubt that we shall arrive at that
supreme term of all our efforts; but when? but
how? The unknown does not yet manifest itself.
Nevertheless, as nothing should separate us from
the plan traced out; as, on the contrary, all
things should tend to it – as if success were to
crown the work scarcely sketched out tomorrow –
we wish in this instruction which must rest a
secret for the simple initiated, to give to those
of the Supreme Lodge, councils with which they
should enlighten the universality of the
brethren, under the form of an instruction or
memorandum. It is of special importance, and
because of a discretion, the motives of which are
transparent, never to permit it to be felt that
these counsels are orders emanating from the Alta
Vendita. The clergy is put too much in peril by
it, that one can at the present hour permit
oneself to play with it, as with one of these
small affairs or of these little princes upon
which one need but blow to cause them to
disappear.
“Little can be done with those old cardinals or
with those prelates, whose character is very
decided. It is necessary to leave them as we find
them, incorrigible, in the school of Consalvi,
and draw from our magazines of popularity or
unpopularity the arms which will render useful or
ridiculous the power in their hands. A word which
one can ably invent and which one has the art to
spread amongst certain honourable chosen families
by whose means it descends into the cafés and
from the cafés into the streets; a word can
sometimes kill a man. If a prelate comes to Rome
to exercise some public function from the depths
of the provinces, know presently his character,
his antecedents, his qualities, his defects above
all things. If he is in advance a declared enemy,
an Albani, a Pallotta, a Bernetti, a Della Genga,
a Riverola, envelope him in all the snares which
you can place beneath his feet; create for him
one of those reputations which will frighten
little children and old women; paint him cruel
and sanguinary; recount, regarding him, some
traits of cruelty which can be easily engraved in
the minds of people. When foreign journals shall
gather for us these recitals, which they will
embellish in their turn (inevitably because of
their respect for truth), show, or rather cause
to be shown, by some respectable fool those
papers where the names and the excesses of the
personages implicated are related. As France and
England, so Italy will never be wanting in facile
pens which know how to employ themselves in these
lies so useful to the good cause. With a
newspaper, the language of which they do not
understand, but in which they will see the name
of their delegate or judge, the people have no
need of other proofs. They are in the infancy of
liberalism; they believe in liberals, as, later
on, they will believe in us, not knowing very
well why.
“Crush the enemy whoever he may be; crush the
powerful by means of lies and calumnies; but
especially crush him in the egg. It is to the
youth we must go. It is that which we must
seduce; it is that which we must bring under the
banner of the secret societies. In order to
advance by steps, calculated but sure, in that
perilous way, two things are of the first
necessity. You ought to have the air of being
simple as doves, but you must be prudent as the
serpent. Your fathers, your children, your wives
themselves, ought always to be ignorant of the
secret which you carry in your bosoms. If it
pleases you, in order the better to deceive the
inquisitorial eye, to go often to confession, you
are as by right authorised to preserve the most
absolute silence regarding these things. You know
that the least revelation, that the slightest
indication escaped from you in the tribunal of
penance, or elsewhere, can bring on great
calamities and that the sentence of death is
already pronounced upon the revealer, whether
voluntary or involuntary.
“Now then, in order to secure to us a Pope in the
manner required, it is necessary to fashion for
that Pope a generation worthy of the reign of
which we dream. Leave on one side old age and
middle life, go to the youth, and, if possible,
even to infancy. Never speak in their presence a
word of impiety or impurity. Maxima debetur puero
reverentia. Never forget these words of the poet
for they will preserve you from licences which it
is absolutely essential to guard against for the
good of the cause. In order to reap profit at the
home of each family, in order to give yourself
the right of asylum at the domestic hearth, you
ought to present yourself with all the appearance
of a man grave and moral. Once your reputation is
established in the colleges, in the gymnasiums,
in the universities, and in the seminaries – once
that you shall have captivated the confidence of
professors and students, so act that those who
are principally engaged in the ecclesiastical
state should love to seek your conversation.
Nourish their souls with the splendours of
ancient Papal Rome. There is always at the bottom
of the Italian heart a regret for Republican
Rome. Excite, enkindle those natures so full of
warmth and of patriotic fire. Offer them at
first, but always in secret, inoffensive books,
poetry resplendent with national emphasis; then
little by little you will bring your disciples to
the degree of cooking desired. When upon all the
points of the ecclesiastical state at once, this
daily work shall have spread our ideas as the
light, then you will be able to appreciate the
wisdom of the counsel in which we take the
initiative.
“Events, which in our opinion, precipitate
themselves too rapidly, go necessarily in a few
months’ time to bring on an intervention of
Austria. There are fools who in the lightness of
their hearts please themselves in casting others
into the midst of perils, and, meanwhile, there
are fools who at a given hour drag on even wise
men. The revolution which they meditate in Italy
will only end in misfortunes and persecutions.
Nothing is ripe, neither the men nor the things,
and nothing shall be for a long time yet; but
from these evils you can easily draw one new
chord, and cause it to vibrate in the hearts of
the young clergy. That is the hatred of the
stranger. Cause the German to become ridiculous
and odious even before his foreseen entry. With
the idea of the Pontifical supremacy, mix always
the old memories of the wars of the priesthood
and the Empire. Awaken the smouldering passions
of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, and thus you
will obtain for yourselves the reputation of good
Catholics and pure patriots.
“That reputation will open the way for our
doctrines to pass to the bosoms of the young
clergy, and go even to the depths of convents. In
a few years the young clergy will have, by the
force of events, invaded all the functions. They
will govern, administer, and judge. They will
form the council of the Sovereign. They will be
called upon to choose the Pontiff who will reign;
and that Pontiff, like the greater part of his
contemporaries, will be necessarily imbued with
the Italian and humanitarian principles which we
are about to put in circulation. It is a little
grain of mustard which we place in the earth, but
the sun of Justice will develop it even to be a
great power, and you will see one day what a rich
harvest that little seed will produce.
“In the way which we trace for our brethren there
are found great obstacles to conquer,
difficulties of more than one kind to surmount.
They will be overcome by experience and by
perspicacity; but the end is beautiful. What does
it matter to put all the sails to the wind in
order to attain it. You wish to revolutionize
Italy? Seek out the Pope of whom we give the
portrait. You wish to establish the reign of the
elect upon the throne of the prostitute of
Babylon ? Let the clergy march under your banner
in the belief always that they march under the
banner of the Apostolic Keys. You wish to cause
the last vestige of tyranny and of oppression to
disappear? Lay your nets like Simon Barjona. Lay
them in the depths of sacristies, seminaries, and
convents, rather than in the depths of the sea,
and if you will precipitate nothing you will give
yourself a draught of fishes more miraculous than
his. The fisher of fishes will become a fisher of
men. You will bring yourselves as friends around
the Apostolic Chair. You will have fished up a
Revolution in Tiara and Cope, marching with Cross
and banner – a Revolution which needs only to be
spurred on a little to put the four quarters of
the world on fire.
“Let each act of your life tend then to discover
the Philosopher’s Stone. The alchemists of the
middle ages lost their time and the gold of their
dupes in the quest of this dream. That of the
secret societies will be accomplished for the
most simple of reasons, because it is based on
the passions of man. Let us not be discouraged
then by a check, a reverse, or a defeat. Let us
prepare our arms in the silence of the lodges,
dress our batteries, flatter all passions the
most evil and the most generous, and all lead us
to think that our plans will succeed one day
above even our most improbable calculations.”
This document reveals the whole line of action
followed since by the Italian Revolutionists. It
gives also a fair insight into tactics with which
other European countries have been made familiar
by Freemasonry generally. But we are in
possession of what appears to me a still more
striking document, written for the benefit of the
Piedmontese lodges of the Carbonari, by one of
the Alta Vendita, whose pseudonym was Piccolo
Tigre – Little Tiger. I may here mention that the
custom of taking these fanciful appellations has
been common to the secret societies from the very
beginning. Arouet became Voltaire, the notorious
Baron Knigge was called Philo, Baron Dittfort was
called Minos, a custom adopted by the principal
chiefs of the dark Atheistic conspiracy then and
since. The first leader or grand chief of the
Alta Vendita was a corrupt Italian nobleman who
took the name of Nubius. From such documents as
he, before his death, managed, in revenge for
being sacrificed by the party of Mazzini, as we
shall see, to have communicated to the
authorities of Rome; or which were found by the
vigilance of the Roman detective police; we find
that his funds, and the funds for carrying on the
deep and dark conspiracy in which he and his
confederates were engaged, came chiefly from rich
German Jews. Jews, in fact, from the
commencement, played always a prominent part in
the conspiracies of Atheism. They do so still.
Piccolo Tigre, who seems to have been the most
active agent of Nubius, was a Jew. He travelled
under the appearance of an itinerant banker and
jeweller. This character of moneylender or usurer
disarmed suspicion regarding himself and such of
his confederates as he had occasion to call upon
in his peregrinations. Of course he had the
protection of the Masonic body everywhere. The
most desperate revolutionists were generally the
most desperate scoundrels otherwise. They were
gamblers, spendthrifts, and the very class with
which an usurious Jew would be expected to have
money dealings. Piccolo Tigre thus travelled
safely; and brought safely to the superior lodges
of the Carbonari, such instructions as the Alta
Vendita thought proper to give. In the document
referred to, which I shall now read for you, it
will be seen how anxious the Secret Directory
were to make use of the common form of Masonry
notwithstanding the contempt they had for the
bons vivants who only learned from the craft how
to become drunkards and liberals. Beyond the
Masons, and unknown to them, though formed
generally from them, lay the deadly secret
conclave which, nevertheless, used and directed
them for the ruin of the world and of their own
selves. The next chapter contains a translation
of the document, or “instructions”, as it was
called, addressed by Piccolo Tigre to the
Piedmontese lodges of the Carbonari.
XV
LETTER OF PICCOLO TIGRE
“IN the impossibility in which our brothers and
friends find themselves, to say, as yet, their
last word, it has been judged good and useful to
propagate the light everywhere, and to set in
motion all that which aspires to move. For this
reason we do not cease to recommend to you, to
affiliate persons of every class to every manner
of association, no matter of what kind, only
provided that mystery and secrecy should be the
dominant characteristics. All Italy is covered
with religious confraternities, and with
penitents of divers colours. Do not fear to slip
in some of your people into the very midst of
these flocks, led as they are by a stupid
devotion. Let our agents study with care the
personnel of these confraternity men, and they
will see that little by little, they will not be
wanting in a harvest. Under a pretext the most
futile, but never political or religious, create
by yourselves, or, better yet, cause to be
created by others, associations, having commerce,
industry, music, the fine arts, etc, for object.1
Reunite in one place or another – in the
sacristies or chapels even – these tribes of
yours as yet ignorant; put them under the
pastoral staff of some virtuous priest, well
known, but credulous and easy to be deceived.
Then infiltrate the poison into those chosen
hearts; infiltrate it in little doses, and as if
by chance. Afterwards, upon reflection, you will
yourselves be astonished at your success. “The
essential thing is to isolate a man from his
family, to cause him to lose his morals. He is
sufficiently disposed by the bent of his
character to flee from household cares, and to
run after easy pleasures and forbidden joys. He
loves the long conversations of the café and the
idleness of shows. Lead him along, sustain him,
give him an importance of some kind or other;
discreetly teach him to grow weary of his daily
labours, and by this management, after having
separated him from his wife and from his
children, and after having shown him how painful
are all his duties, you will then excite in him
the desire of another existence. Man is a born
rebel. Stir up the desire of rebellion until it
becomes a conflagration, but in such a manner
that the conflagration may not break out. This is
a preparation for the grand work that you should
commence. When you shall have insinuated into a
few souls disgust for family and for religion
(the one nearly always follows in the wake of the
other), let fall some words which will provoke
the desire of being affiliated to the nearest
lodge. That vanity of the citizen or the burgess,
to belong to Freemasonry, is something so common
and so universal that it always makes me wonder
at human stupidity. I begin to be astonished at
not seeing the entire world knock at the gates of
all the Venerables, and demand from these
gentlemen the honour to be one of the workmen
chosen for the reconstruction of the temple of
Solomon. The prestige of the unknown exercises
upon men a certain kind of power, that they
prepare themselves with trembling for the
phantasmagoric trials of the initiation and of
the fraternal banquet.
“To find oneself a member of a lodge, to feel
oneself called upon to guard, from wife and
children, a secret which is never confided to
you, is for certain natures a pleasure and an
ambition. The lodges, today, can well create
gourmands, they will never bring forth citizens.
There is too much dining amongst right worshipful
and right reverend brethren of all the Ancients.
But they form a place of depot, a kind of stud
(breeding ground), a centre through which it is
necessary to pass before coming to us. The lodges
form but a relative evil, an evil tempered by a
false philanthropy, and by songs yet more false
as in France. All that is too pastoral and too
gastronomic; but it is an object which it is
necessary to encourage without ceasing. In
teaching a man to raise his glass to his lips you
become possessed of his intelligence and of his
liberty, you dispose of him, turn him round
about, and study him. You divine his
inclinations, his affections, and his tendencies;
then, when he is ripe for us, we direct him to
the secret society of which Freemasonry can be no
more than the antechamber.
“The Alta Vendita desires that under one pretence
or another, as many princes and wealthy persons
as possible should be introduced into the Masonic
lodges. Princes of a sovereign house, and those
who have not the legitimate hope of being kings
by the grace of God, all wish to be kings by the
grace of a Revolution. The Duke of Orleans is a
Freemason, the Prince of Carignan was one also.
There are not wanting in Italy and elsewhere,
those amongst them, who aspire to the modest
enough honours of the symbolic apron and trowel.
Others of them are disinherited and proscribed.
Flatter all of their number who are ambitious of
popularity; monopolize them for Freemasonry. The
Alta Vendita will afterwards see what it can do
to utilize them in the cause of progress. A
prince who has not a kingdom to expect, is a good
fortune for us. There are many of them in that
plight. Make Freemasons of them. The lodge will
conduct them to Carbonarism. A day will come,
perhaps, when the Alta Vendita will deign to
affiliate them. While awaiting they will serve as
birdlime for the imbeciles, the intriguing, the
bourgeoisie, and the needy. These poor princes
will serve our ends, while thinking to labour
only for their own. They form a magnificent sign
board, and there are always fools enough to be
found who are ready to compromise themselves in
the service of a conspiracy, of which some prince
or other seems to be the ringleader.
“Once that a man, that a prince, that a prince
especially, shall have commenced to grow corrupt,
be persuaded that he will hardly rest upon the
declivity. There is little morality even amongst
the most moral of the world, and one goes fast in
the way of that progress. Do not then be dismayed
to see the lodges flourish, while Carbonarism
recruits itself with difficulty. It is upon the
lodges that we count to double our ranks. They
form, without knowing it, our preparatory
novitiate. They discourse without end upon the
dangers of fanaticism, upon the happiness of
social equality, and upon the grand principles of
religious liberty. They launch amidst their
feastings thundering anathemas against
intolerance and persecution. This is positively
more than we require to make adepts. A man imbued
with these fine things is not very far from us.
There is nothing more required than to enlist
him. The law of social progress is there, and all
there. You need not take the trouble to seek it
elsewhere. In the present circumstances never
lift the mask. Content yourselves to prowl about
the Catholic sheepfold, but as good wolves seize
in the passage the first lamb who offers himself
in the desired conditions. The burgess has much
of that which is good for us, the prince still
more. For all that, these lambs must not be
permitted to turn themselves into foxes like the
infamous Carignan. The betrayal of the oath is a
sentence of death; and all those princes, whether
they are weak or cowardly, ambitious or
repentant, betray us or denounce us. As good
fortune would have it, they know little, in fact
not anything, and they cannot come upon the trace
of our true mysteries.
“Upon the occasion of my last journey to France,
I saw with profound satisfaction that our young
initiated exhibited an extreme ardour for the
diffusion of Carbonarism; but I also found that
they rather precipitated the movement a little.
As I think, they converted their religious hatred
too much into a political hatred. The conspiracy
against the Roman See should not confound itself
with other projects. We are exposed to see
germinate in the bosom of secret societies,
ardent ambitions; and the ambitious, once masters
of power, may abandon us. The route which we
follow is not as yet sufficiently well traced so
as to deliver us up to intriguers and tribunes.
It is of absolute necessity to de-Catholicise the
world. And an ambitious man, having arrived at
his end, will guard himself well from seconding
us. The Revolution in the Church is the
Revolution en permanence. It is the necessary
overthrowing of thrones and dynasties. Now an
ambitious man cannot really wish these things. We
see higher and farther. Endeavour, therefore, to
act for us, and to strengthen us. Let us not
conspire except against Rome. For that, let us
serve ourselves with all kinds of incidents; let
us put to profit every kind of eventuality. Let
us be principally on our guard against the
exaggerations of zeal. A good hatred, thoroughly
cold, thoroughly calculated, thoroughly profound,
is of more worth than all these artificial fires
and all these declamations of the platform. At
Paris they cannot comprehend this, but in London
I have seen men who seized better upon our plan,
and who associated themselves to us with more
fruit. Considerable offers have been made to me.
Presently we shall have a printing establishment
at Malta placed at our disposal. We shall then be
able with impunity, with a sure stroke, and under
the British flag, to scatter from one end of
Italy to the other, books, pamphlets, etc., which
the Alta Vendita shall judge proper to put in
circulation.”
This document was issued in 1822. Since then, the
instructions it gives have been constantly acted
upon in the lodges of Carbonarism, not only in
Italy but everywhere else. “Prowl about the
Catholic sheepfold and seize the first lamb that
presents himself in the required conditions.”
This, and the order to get into Catholic
confraternities, were as well executed by the
infamous Carey under the influence of “No. 1”, as
they were by any Italian conspirator and
assassin, under the personal inspiration of
Piccolo Tigre. Carey, the loud-spoken Catholic –
the Catholic who had Freemason or Orange friends
able to assist him in the truly Masonic way of
getting members of the craft as Town-Councillors,
or Aldermen, or Members of Parliament – was, we
now know, a true secret-society hypocrite of the
genuine Italian type. He prowled with effect
round the Catholic sheepfold. He joined “with
fruit” the confraternities of the Church.
Another curious instruction given by the Alta
Vendita to the Carbonari of the lower lodges, is
the way to catch a priest and make the good,
simple man, unconsciously aid the designs of the
revolutionary sectaries. In the permanent
instruction of the Alta Vendita, given to all the
lodges, you will recollect the passage I read for
you relative to the giving of bad names to
faithful Prelates who may be too knowing or too
good to do the work of the Carbonari against
conscience, God, and the souls of men. “Ably find
out the words and the ways to make them
unpopular” is the sum of that advice. Has it not
been attempted amongst ourselves? But the main
advice of the permanent instruction is to seduce
the clergy. The ecclesiastic to be deceived is to
be led on by patriotic ardour. He is to be
blinded by a constant, though, of course, false,
and fatal popularity. He is to be made believe
that his course, so very pleasant to flesh and
blood, is not only the most patriotic but the
best for religion. “A free Church in a free
State”, was the cry with which the sectaries
pulled down the altars, banished the religious,
seized upon Church property, robbed the Pope, and
despoiled the Propaganda. There were
ecclesiastics so far deceived, at one time, as to
be led away by these cries in Italy, and
ecclesiastics have been deceived, if not by
these, at least by cries as false and fatal
elsewhere to our knowledge. The seduction of
foremost ecclesiastics, prelates, and bishops,
was the general policy of the sect at all times,
and it remains so everywhere to this day.
The rank and file of the Carbonari had to do with
local priests and local men of influence. These
were, if possible, to be corrupted, unnerved, and
seduced. Each Carbonaro was ordered to try and
corrupt a fellow Christian, a man of family, by
means that the devil himself incarnate could not
devise better for the purpose.
At the end of his letter, Piccolo Tigre glances
at means of corruption which he hoped then – and
his hopes were soon realized to the full – to
have in operation for the scattering of Masonic
“light” throughout Italy. We have another
document which will enable us to judge of the
nature of this “light”. It is contained in a
letter from Vindex to Nubius, and was meant to
cause the ideas of the Alta Vendita to pass
through the lodges. It is found in that
convenient form of questioning which the Sultan
propounds to the Sheik-ul-Islam when he wants to
make war. He puts his reasons in a set of
questions, and the Sheik replies in as many
answers. Then the war is right in the sight of
Allah, and so all Islam go to fight in a war so
sanctified. The new Islam does the same. A
skilfully devised set of questions are posed for
the consideration of one member of the Alta
Vendita by another, and the answer which has been
well concocted in secret conclave, is of course
either given or implied to be given by the nature
of the case. The horrible quality of the
diabolical measures proposed by Vindex to Nubius
in this form for the desired destruction of the
Church, cannot be surpassed. If he
discountenances assassination, it is not from
fear or loathing of that frightful crime, but
simply because it is not the best policy. He
certainly did fall in upon the only blow that
could – if that were possible, which, thank God,
it is not – destroy the Church of God, and place,
as he well says, Catholicism in the tomb. This is
a translation of the document:–
CASTELLAMARE, 9th August, 1838.
“The murders of which our people render
themselves culpable now in France, now in
Switzerland, and always in Italy, are for us a
shame and a remorse. It is the cradle of the
world, illustrated by the epilogue of Cain and
Abel, and we are too far in progress to content
ourselves with such means. To what purpose does
it serve to kill a man? To strike fear into the
timid and to keep audacious hearts far from us?
Our predecessors in Carbonarism did not
understand their power. It is not in the blood of
an isolated man, or even of a traitor, that it is
necessary to exercise it; it is upon the masses.
Let us not individualize crime. In order to grow
great, even to the proportions of patriotism and
of hatred for the Church, it is necessary to
generalize it. A stroke of the dagger signifies
nothing, produces nothing. What does the world
care for a few unknown corpses cast upon the
highway by the vengeance of secret societies?
What matters it to the world, if the blood of a
workman, of an artist, of a gentleman, or even of
a prince, has flown in virtue of a sentence of
Mazzini, or certain of his cut-throats playing
seriously at the Holy Vehme? The world has not
time to lend an ear to the last cries of the
victim. It passes on and forgets: it is we, my
Nubius, we alone, that can suspend its march.
Catholicism has no more fear of a well-sharpened
stiletto than monarchies have, but these two
bases of social order can fall by corruption. Let
us then never cease to corrupt. Tertullian was
right in saying, that the blood of martyrs was
the seed of Christians. Let us, then, not make
martyrs, but let us popularise vice amongst the
multitudes. Let us cause them to draw it in by
their five senses; to drink it in; to be
saturated with it; and that land which Aretinus
has sown is always disposed to receive lewd
teachings. Make vicious hearts, and you will have
no more Catholics. Keep the priest away from
labour, from the altar, from virtue. Seek
adroitly to otherwise occupy his thoughts and his
hours. Make him lazy, a gourmand, and a patriot.
He will become ambitious, intriguing, and
perverse. You will thus have a thousand times
better accomplished your task, than if you had
blunted the point of your stiletto upon the bones
of some poor wretches. I do not wish, nor do you
any more, my friend Nubius, to devote my life to
conspiracies, in order to be dragged along in the
old ruts.
“It is corruption en masse that we have
undertaken: the corruption of the people by the
clergy, and the corruption of the clergy by
ourselves; the corruption which ought, one day to
enable us to put the Church in her tomb. I have
recently heard one of our friends, laughing in a
philosophic manner at our projects, say to us:
‘in order to destroy Catholicism it is necessary
to commence by suppressing woman.’ The words are
true in a sense; but since we cannot suppress
woman, let us corrupt her with the Church,
corruptio optimi pessima. The object we have in
view is sufficiently good to tempt men such as we
are; let us not separate ourselves from it for
some miserable personal satisfaction of
vengeance. The best poniard with which to strike
the Church is corruption. To work, then, even to
the very end.”
The horrible programme of impurity here proposed
was at once adopted. It was after all but an
attempt more determined than ever, to spread the
immorality of which Voltaire and his school were
the apostles. At the time the Alta Vendita
propounded this infernal plan they were resisting
an inroad upon their authority on the part of
Joseph Mazzini, just then coming into notoriety,
who, however, overcame them.
Mazzini developed and taught, in his
grandiloquent style, as well as practised the
doctrine of assassination2 which formed, we know,
a part of the system of all secret societies, and
which the Alta Vendita deprecated because they
feared that it was about to be employed, just
then, against the members of their own body.
Mazzini speaks of having arisen from his bed one
morning fully satisfied as to the lawfulness of
removing whomsoever he might be pleased to
consider an enemy by the dagger, and fully
determined to put that horrible principle into
execution. He cherished it as the simplest means
given to an oppressed people to free themselves
from tyrants. But however much he laboured to
make his terrible creed plausible, as being only
permissible against tyrants and traitors, it was
readily foreseen how easily it could be extended,
until it became a capital danger for the
sectaries themselves. Human nature could never
become so base and so blinded as not to revolt
against a principle so pernicious. It may last
for a season amidst the first pioneers of the
Alta Vendita, amongst the Black-Hand in Spain,
amongst the Nihilists in Russia, amongst the
Invincibles in Ireland, amongst the
Trade-Unionists of the Bradlaugh stamp in
England, or amongst the Communists of Paris. It
may serve as a means to hold in terror the
unfortunate prince or leader who may be seduced
in youth or manhood to join secret societies from
motives of ambition; and when that ambition was
gratified, might refuse to go the lengths for
Socialism which the Alta Vendita required. But
otherwise assassination did not by experience
prove such a sovereign power in the hands of the
Carbonari as Mazzini expected. His more astute
associates soon found out this; and not from any
qualms of conscience, but from a strong sense of
its inexpediency for their ends, they determined
to reject it. They found out a more effective,
though a far more infamous, way for attaining the
dark mastery of the world. It was by the
assassination not of bodies but of souls – by
deliberate, systematic and persevering diffusion
of immorality.3
The Alta Vendita, then, sat down calmly to
consider the best means to accomplish this
design. Satan and his fallen angels could devise
no more efficacious methods than they found out.
They resolved to spread impurity by every method
used in the past by demons to tempt men to sin,
to make the practice of sin habitual, and to keep
the unhappy victim in the state of sin to the
end. They had, being living men, means to
accomplish this purpose, which devils could not
use without the aid of men. Christian
civilization established upon the ruins of the
licentiousness of Paganism had kept European
society pure. Vice, when it did appear, had to
hide its head for shame. Public decency,
supported by public opinion, kept it down. So
long as morality existed as a recognized virtue,
the Revolution had no chance of permanent
success; and so the men of the Alta Vendita
resolved to bring back the world to a state of
brutal licentiousness not only as bad as that of
Paganism, but to a state at which even the
morality of the Pagans would shudder. To do this
they proceeded with caution. Their first attempt
was to cause vice to lose its conventional
horror, and to make it free from civil
punishment. The unfortunate class of human beings
who make a sad trade in sin, were to be taken
under the protection of the law, and to be kept
free from disease at the expense of the State.
Houses were to be licensed, inspected, protected,
and given over to their purposes. The dishonour
attached to their infamous condition was, so far
as the law could effect it, to be taken away.
That wholesome sense of danger and fear of
disease which averted the criminally disposed
from sin was to disappear. The agents of the Alta
Vendita had instructions to increase the number
and the seductiveness of those unfortunate
beings, while the State, when revolutionized, was
to close its eyes to their excesses, and to
connive at their attempts upon the youth of the
country. They were to be planted close to great
schools and universities, and wherever else they
could ruin the rising generation in every country
in which the sect should obtain power.
Then literature was systematically rendered as
immoral as possible, and diffused with a
perseverance and labour worthy of a better cause.
Railway stations, newspaper stands, book shops,
and restaurants, were made to teem with infamous
productions, while the same were scattered
broadcast to the people over every land.
The teaching of the Universities and of all the
middle schools of the State, was not only to be
rendered Atheistic and hostile to religion, but
was actually framed to demoralize the unfortunate
alumni at a season of life always but too prone
to vice.
Finally, besides the freest licence for blasphemy
and immorality, and the exhibition and diffusion
of immoral pictures, paintings, and statuary, a
last attempt was to be made upon the virtue of
young females under the guise of educating them
up to the standard of human progress.
Therefore, middle and high-class schools were,
regardless of expense, to be provided for female
children, who should be, at any cost, taken far
away from the protecting care of nuns. They were
to be taught in schools directed by lay masters,
and always exposed to such influences as would
sap, if not destroy, their purity, and, as a sure
consequence, their faith. These schools have
since been the order of the day with Masonry all
over the world. “If we cannot suppress woman let
us corrupt her with the Church”, said Vindex, and
they have faithfully acted upon this advice.
The terrible society which planned these infernal
means for destroying religion, social order, and
the souls of men, continued its operations for
many years. Its “permanent instruction” became
the Gospel of all the secret societies of Europe.
Its agents, like Piccolo Tigre, travelled
unceasingly in every country. Its orders were
received, according to the system of Masonry, by
the heads and the rank and file of the lodges as
so many inevitable decrees. But unfortunately for
the world, it permitted too much political action
to the second lines of the great conspiracy. In
the latter, ambitious spirits arose, who, while
embracing to the full the doctrines of Voltaire
and the principles of Weishaupt, began to think
that the Alta Vendita halted actual revolution
too much. This state of feeling became general
when that high lodge refused admittance to
Mazzini, who wished to become one of the
invisible forty – the number beyond which the
supreme governing body never permitted itself to
pass.
The jealousy of Nubius – for jealousy is a
quality of demons not wanting from the highest
intelligence in Atheistic organization to the
lowest – prevented his being admitted. But he was
already far too powerful with the rank and file
of the Carbonari to be refused a voice in the
supreme management. He raised a cry against the
old chiefs as being impotent and needing change.
Nubius consequently passed mysteriously away. M.
Crétineau-Joly4 is clearly of opinion that it was
by poison; and as it was a custom with the
unfortunate chief to betray for his own
protection, or for punishment, some lodges of
Carbonari to the Pontifical Government, it is
more than probable that it was by his provision
or information that the same Government came into
the possession of the whole archives of the Alta
Vendita, and that the Church and society have the
documents which I have quoted and others still
more valuable to guide them in discovering and
defeating the attempts of organized Atheism.
The Alta Vendita subsequently passed to Paris,
and since it is believed, to Berlin. It was the
immediate successor of the Inner Circle of
Weishaupt. It may change in the number of its
adepts and in the places of its meetings, but it
always subsists. There is over it a recognized
Chief like Nubius or Weishaupt. But in his
lifetime this Chief is usually unknown, at least
to the world outside “Illuminated” Masonry. He is
unknown to the rank and file of the common
lodges. But he wields a power which, however, is
not, as in the case of Nubius and Mazzini, always
undisputed. Since that time, if not before it,
there have been two parties under its Directory,
each having its own duties, well defined.
XVI
THE INTELLECTUAL AND THE WAR PARTY IN MASONRY
ECKERT1 shows that at present all secret
societies are divided into two parties – the
party of direction and the party of action or war
party. The duty of the intellectual party is to
plot and to contrive; that of the party of action
is to combine, recruit, excite to insurrection,
and fight. The members of the war party are
always members of the intellectual party, but not
vice versa. The war party thus know what is being
plotted. But the other party, concealed as common
Freemasons amongst the simpletons of the lodges,
cover both sections from danger. If the war party
succeed, the peace party go forward and seize
upon the offices of state and the reins of power.
Their men go to the hustings, make speeches that
suit, are written up in the press, which, all the
world over, is under Masonic influence. They are
cried up by the adroit managers of mobs. They
become the deputies, the ministers, the
Talleyrands, the Fouchés, the Gambettas, the
Ferrys; and of course they make the war party
generals, admirals, and officers of the army, the
navy, and the police. If the war party fails, the
intellectual party, who close their lodges during
the combat, appear afterwards as partisans, if
possible, of the conquering party, or if they
cannot be that, they silently conspire. They
manage to get some friends into power. They
agitate. They, in either case, come to the
assistance of the defeated war party. They
extenuate the faults, while condemning the
heedless rashness of ill-advised, good-natured,
though too ardent, young men. They cry for mercy.
They move the popular compassion. In time, they
free the culprits, and thus prepare for new
commotions.
All Freemasonry has been long thus adapted, to
enable the intellectual party to assist the war
party in distress. It must be remembered that
every Carbonaro is in reality a Freemason. He is
taught the passes and can manipulate the members
of the craft. Now, at the very threshold of the
admission of a member to Freemasonry, the Master
of the Lodge, the “Venerable”, thus solemnly
addresses him:–
“Masons”, says he, “are obliged to assist each
other by every means, when occasion offers.
Freemasons ought not to mix themselves up in
conspiracies; but if you come to know that a
Freemason is engaged in any enterprise of the
kind, and has fallen a victim to his imprudence,
you ought to have compassion upon his misfortune,
and the Masonic bond makes it a duty for you to
use all your influence and the influence of your
friends, in order to diminish the rigour of
punishment in his favour.”
From this it will be seen, with what astute care
Masonry prepares its dupes from the very
beginning, to subserve the purposes of the
universal Revolution. Under plea of compassion
for a brother in distress, albeit through his
supposed imprudence, the Mason’s duty is to make
use not only of all his own influence, but also
“of the influence of his friends”, to either
deliver him altogether from the consequences of
what is called “his misfortune”, or “to diminish
the rigour of his punishment”.
Masonry, even in its most innocent form, is a
criminal association. It is criminal in its
oaths, which are at best rash; and it is criminal
in promising obedience to unknown commands coming
from hidden superiors. It always, therefore,
sympathises with crime. It hates punishment of
any repressive kind, and does what it can to
destroy the death penalty even for murder. In
revolution, its common practice is to open gaols,
and let felons free upon society. When it cannot
do this, it raises on their behalf a mock
sympathy. Hence we have Victor Hugo pleading with
every Government in Europe in favour of
revolutionists; we have the French Republic
liberating the Communists; and there is a motion
before the French Parliament to repeal the laws
against the party of dynamite – the
Internationalists, whose aim is the destruction
of every species of religion, law, order and
property, and the establishment of absolute
Socialism. With ourselves, there is not a
revolutionary movement created, that we do not
find at the same time an intellectual party
apparently disconnected with it, often found
condemning it but in reality supporting it
indirectly but zealously. The Odgers and others
of the Trades Union, for instance, will murder
and burn; but it is the Bradlaughs and men
theorising in Parliament if they can, or on the
platform if they cannot, who sustain that very
party of action. They secretly sustain what in
public they strongly reprobate, and if necessary
disown and denounce. This is a point worthy of
deep consideration, and shows more than anything
else, the ability and astuteness with which the
whole organization has been planned.
Again, we must remember, that while the heads of
the party of action are well aware of the course
being taken by the intellectual party, it does
not follow that the intellectual party know the
movements of the party of action, or even the
individuals, at least so far as the rank and file
are concerned. It therefore can happen in this
country, that Freemasons or others who are in
communication only with the Supreme Council on
the Continent, get instructions to pursue one
line of conduct, and that the war party for deep
reasons get instructions to oppose them. This
serves, while preventing the possibility of
exposure, to enable the work of the Infidel
Propaganda to be better done. It is the deeply
hidden Chief and his Council that concoct and
direct all. They wield a power with which, as is
well known, the diplomacy of every nation in the
world must count. There are men either of this
Council, or in the first line of its service,
whom it will never permit to be molested.
Weishaupt, Nubius, Mazzini, Piccolo Tigre, De
Witt, Misley, Garibaldi, Number One, Hartmann,
may have been arrested, banished, etc., but they
never found the prison that could contain them
long, nor the country that would dare deliver
them up for crime against law or even life. It is
determined by the Supreme Directory that at any
cost, the men of their first lines shall not
suffer; and from the beginning they have found
means to enforce that determination against all
the crowned heads of Europe. Now the man who
succeeded to the Chieftaincy of this formidable
conspiracy when Nubius passed away was none other
than Lord Palmerston.
XVII
LORD PALMERSTON
IT is with difficulty that one can believe that
Lord Palmerston knew the veritable secret of
Freemasonry, and that for the greater part of his
career he was the real master, the successor of
Nubius, the Grand Patriarch of the Illuminati,
and as such, the Ruler of all the secret
societies in the world. As a Statesman, the
distinguished nobleman had dealings of a very
close character with Mazzini, Cavour, Napoleon
III, Garibaldi, Kossuth, and the other leading
revolutionary spirits of Europe in his day, but
it was never for a moment suspected that he went
so far as to accept the supreme direction of the
whole dark and complex machinery of organized
Atheism, or sacrificed the welfare of the great
country he was supposed to serve so ably and so
well, to the designs of the terrible secret
conclave whose acts and tendencies were so well
known to him. But the mass of evidence collected
by Father Deschamps and others1 to prove Lord
Palmerston’s complicity with the worst designs of
Atheism against Christianity and monarchy – not
even excepting the monarchy of England – is so
weighty, clear, and conclusive, that it is
impossible to refuse it credence. Father
Deschamps brings forward in proof the testimony
of Henry Misley, one of the foremost
Revolutionists of the period, when Palmerston
reigned over the secret Islam of the Sects, and
other no less important testimonies. These I
would wish, if time permitted, to give at length.
But the whole history, unhappily, of Lord
Palmerston proves them. In 1809, when but 23
years of age, we find him War Minister in the
Cabinet of the Duke of Portland. He remained in
this office until 1828, during the successive
administrations of Mr. Percival, the Earl of
Liverpool, Mr. Canning, Lord Goderick, and the
Duke of Wellington. He left his party – the
Conservatives – when the last-named Premier
insisted upon accepting the resignation of Mr.
Huskisson. In 1830, he accepted the position of
Foreign Secretary to the Whig Ministry of Earl
Grey. Up to this period he must have been well
informed in the policy of England. He saw
Napoleon in the fullness of youth, and he saw his
fall. He knew and approved of the measures taken
after that event by the advisers of George IV,
for the conservation of legitimate interests in
Europe, and for the preservation for the Pope of
the Papal States. The balance of power, as formed
by the Congress of Vienna, was considered by the
wisest and most patriotic English statesmen, the
best safeguard for British interests and
influence on the Continent. While it existed the
multitude of small States in Italy and Germany
could be always so manipulated by British
diplomacy, as effectually to prevent that
complete isolation which England feels today so
keenly, and which may prove so disastrous within
a short period to her best interests. If this
sound policy has been since changed, it is
entirely owing to Palmerston, who appears, after
leaving the ranks of the Tories, to have thrown
himself absolutely into the hands of that
Liberalistic Freemasonry, which, at the period,
began to show its power in France and in Europe
generally. On his accession to the Foreign Office
in 1830, he found the Cabinet freed from the
influence of George IV, and from Conservative
traditions; and he at once threw the whole weight
of his energy, position and influence to cause
his government to side with the Masonic programme
for revolutionizing Europe. With his aid, the
sectaries were able to disturb Spain, Portugal,
Naples, the States of the Church, and the minor
States of Italy. The cry for a constitutional
Government received his support in every State of
Europe, great and small. The Pope’s temporal
authority and every Catholic interest were
assailed. England, indeed, remained quiet. Her
people were fascinated by that fact. Trade
interest being served by the distractions of
other States, and religious bigotry gratified at
seeing the Pope, and every Catholic country
harassed, they all gave a willing, even a hearty
support to the policy of Palmerston. They little
knew that it was dictated, not by devotion to
their interests, but in obedience to a hidden
power of which Palmerston had become the dupe and
the tool, and which permitted them to glory in
their own quiet, only to gain their assistance
and, on a future day, to compass with greater
certainty their ruin. Freemasonry, as we have
already seen, creates many “figurehead” Grand
Masters from the princes of reigning houses and
the foremost statesmen of nations, to whom,
however, it only shows a small part of its real
secrets. Palmerston was an exception to this
rule. He was admitted into the very recesses of
the Sect. He was made its Monarch, and as such
ruled with a real sway over its realms of
darkness. By this confidence he was flattered,
cajoled, and finally entangled beyond the hope of
extrication in the meshes of the sectaries. He
was a noble, without a hope of issue, or of a
near heir to his title and estates. He therefore
preferred the designs of the Atheistic conspiracy
he governed, to the interests of the country
which employed him, and he sacrificed England to
the projects of Masonry. As he advanced in years
he appears to have grown more infatuated with his
work. In 1837, in or about the time when Nubius
was carried off by poison, Mazzini, who most
probably caused that Chief to disappear, and who
became the leader of the party of action, fixed
his permanent abode in London. With him came also
several counsellors of the “Grand Patriarch”, and
from that day forward the liberty of Palmerston
to move England in any direction, except in the
interest of the secret conspiracy, passed away
for ever. Immediately, plans were elaborated
destined to move the programme of Weishaupt
another step towards its ultimate completion.2
These were, by the aid of well-planned
Revolutions, to create one immense Empire from
the small German States, in the centre of Europe,
under the house of Brandenburg; next to weaken
Austrian dominion; then to annihilate the
temporal sovereignty of the Pope, by the
formation of a United Kingdom of Italy under the
provisional government of the house of Savoy; and
lastly, to form of the discontented Polish,
Hungarian, and Slavonian populations, an
independent kingdom between Austria and Russia.
After an interval during which these plans were
hatched, Palmerston returned to office in 1846,
and then the influence of England was seen at
work, in the many revolutions which broke out in
Europe within eighteen months afterwards. If
these partly failed, they eventuated at least in
giving a Masonic Ruler to France in the person of
the Carbonaro, Louis Napoleon. With him
Palmerston instantly joined the fortunes of
England, and with him he plotted for the
realization of his Masonic ideas to the very end
of his career. Now here comes a most important
event, proving beyond question the determination
of Palmerston to sacrifice his country to the
designs of the Sect he ruled. The Conservative
feeling in England shrank from acknowledging
Louis Napoleon or approving of his coup d’état.
The country began to grow afraid of
revolutionists, crowned or uncrowned. This
feeling was shared by the Sovereign, by the
Cabinet, and by the Parliament, so far that Lord
Derby was able to move a vote of censure on the
Government, because of the foreign policy of Lord
Palmerston. For Palmerston, confiding in the
secret strength he wielded, and which was not
without its influence in England herself, threw
every consideration of loyalty, duty, and honour
overboard, and without consulting his Queen or
his colleagues, he sent, as Foreign Secretary,
the recognition of England to Louis Napoleon. He
committed England to the Empire, and the other
nations of Europe had to follow suit.
On this point Chambers’ Encyclopaedia, Art.
“Palmerston”, has the following notice:– “In
December, 1852, the public was startled at the
news that Palmerston was no longer a member of
the Russell Cabinet. He had expressed his
approbation of the coup d’état of Louis Napoleon
(gave England’s official acknowledgment of the
perpetration) without consulting either the
Premier or the Queen; and as explanations were
refused, Her Majesty exercised her constitutional
right of dismissing her minister.” Palmerston had
also audaciously interpolated despatches signed
by the Queen. He acted, in fact, as he pleased.
He had the agents of his dark realm in almost
every Masonic lodge in England. The Press at home
and abroad, under Masonic influences, applauded
his policy. The Sect so acted that his measures
were productive of immediate success. His manner,
his bonhomie, his very vices fascinated the
multitude. He won the confidence of the trading
classes, and held the Conservatives at bay.
Dismissed by the Sovereign, he soon returned into
power her master, and from that day to the day of
his death ruled England and the world in the
interests of the Atheistic Revolution, of which
he thought himself the master spirit.3
We shall see the truth of this when
considering the political action of the Sect he
led, but first it will be necessary to glance
at what the Church and Christianity generally had
to suffer in his day.
XVIII
WAR OF THE INTELLECTUAL PARTY
DURING what may be called the reign of
Palmerston, the war of the intellectual party
against Christianity, intensified in the dark
counsels of the Alta Vendita, became accentuated
and general throughout Europe. It chiefly lay in
the propagandism of immorality, luxury, and
naturalism amongst all classes of society, and
then in the spread of Atheistic and revolutionary
ideas. During the time of Palmerston’s influence
not one iota of the advices of the Alta Vendita
was permitted to be wasted. Wherever, therefore,
it was possible to advance the programme mapped
out in the “Permanent Instruction”, in the letter
of Piccolo Tigre, and in the advices of Vindex,
that was done with effect. We see, therefore,
France, Italy, Germany, Spain, America, and the
rest of the world, deluged with immoral novels,
immodest prints, pictures, and statues, and every
legislature invited to legalise a system of
prostitution, under pretence of expediency, which
gave security to sinners, and a kind of
recognized status to degraded women. We find,
wherever Masonry could effect it, these bad
influences brought to bear upon the universities,
the army, the navy, the training schools, the
civil service, and upon the whole population.
“Make corrupt hearts and you will have no more
Catholics”, said Vindex, and faithfully, and with
effect, the secret societies of Europe have
followed that advice. Hence, in France under the
Empire, Paris, bad enough before, became a very
pandemonium of vice; and Italy just in proportion
to the conquests of the Revolution, became
systematically corrupted on the very lines laid
down by the Alta Vendita.
Next, laws subversive of Christian morality were
caused to be passed in every State, on, of
course, the most plausible pretexts. These laws
were first that of divorce, then, the abolition
of impediments to marriage, such as
consanguinity, order, and relationship, union
with a deceased wife’s sister, etc. Well the
Infidels knew that in proportion as nations fell
away from the holy restraints of the Church, and
as the sanctity and inviolability of the marriage
bond became weakened, the more Atheism would
enter into the human family.
Moreover, the few institutions of a public,
Christian nature yet remaining in Christian
States were to be removed one after another on
some skilfully devised, plausible plea. The
Sabbath which in the Old as well as in the New
Dispensation proved so great an advantage to
religion and to man – to nations as well as to
individuals – was marked out for desecration. The
leniency of the Church which permitted certain
necessary works on Sunday, was taken advantage
of, and the day adroitly turned into one of
common trading in all the great towns of Catholic
Continental Europe. The Infidels, owing to a
previous determination arrived at in the lodges,
clamoured for permission to open museums and
places of public amusement on the days sacred to
the services of religion, in order to distract
the population from hearing Mass and worshipping
God. Not that they cared for the unfortunate
working man. If the Sabbath ceased tomorrow, he
would be the slave on Sunday that they leave him
to be during the rest of the week. The one day of
rest would be torn from the labouring population,
and their lot drawn nearer than before to that
absolute slavery which always did exist, and
would exist again, under every form of Idolatry
and Infidelity. Pending the reduction of men to
Socialism, the secret conclave directing the
whole mass of organized Atheism has therefore
taken care that in order to withdraw the working
man from attending divine worship and hearing the
Word of God, theatres, cafés, pleasure gardens,
drinking saloons, and other still worse means of
popular enjoyment shall be made to exert the
utmost influence on him upon that day. This sad
influence is beginning to be felt amongst
ourselves. Then, besides the suppression of State
recognition to religion, chaplains to the army,
the navy, the hospitals, the prisons, etc., were
to be withdrawn on the plea of expense or of
being unnecessary. Courts of Justice and public
assemblies were to be deprived of every Christian
symbol. This was to be done on the plea of
religion being too sacred to be permitted to
enter into such places. In courts, in society, at
dinners, etc., Christian habits, like that of
grace before meals, etc., or any social
recognition of God’s presence, were to be scouted
as not in good taste. The company of
ecclesiastics was to be shunned, and a hundred
other able means were devised to efface the
Christian aspect of the nations until they
presented an appearance more devoid of religion
than that of the very pagans.
But of all the attacks made by Infidels during
the reign of Palmerston, that upon primary,
middle-class, and superior education was the most
marked, the most determined, and decidedly, when
successful, the most disastrous.
We must remember that from the commencement of
the war of Atheism on Christianity, under
Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists, this means of
doing mischief was the one most advocated by the
chief leaders. They then accumulated immense sums
to diffuse their own bad literature amongst every
class. Under the Empire, the most disastrous blow
struck by the Arch-Mason Talleyrand was the
formation of a monopoly of education for
Infidelity in the foundation of the Paris
University. But it was left for the Atheistic
plotters of this century to perfect the plan of
wresting the education of every class and sex of
the coming generations of men from out of the
hands of the Church and the influence of
Christianity.
This plan was apparently elaborated as early as
1826 by intellectual Masonry. About that time
appeared a dialogue between Quintex and Eugene
Sue, in which after the manner of the letter of
Vindex to Nubius the whole programme of the now
progressing education war was sketched out. In
this the hopes which Masonry had from
Protestantism in countries where the population
was mixed, were clearly expressed. The jealousy
of rival Sects was to be excited, and when they
could not agree, then the State was to be induced
to do away with all kinds of religion “just for
peace sake”, and establish schools on a purely
secular basis, entirely removed from “clerical
control”, and handed over to lay teachers, whom
in time Atheism could find means to “control”
most surely. But in purely Catholic countries,
where such an argument as the differences of
Sects could not be adduced, then the cry was to
be against clerical versus lay teaching.
Religious teachers were to be banished by the
strong hand, as at present in France, and
afterwards it could be said that lay teachers
were not competent or willing to give religious
instruction, and so that, too, in time, could be
made to disappear.1
One may here call to mind the fact that it was
while Lord Palmerston directed Masonry as
Monarch, and English policy as Minister, that an
insidious attempt was made to introduce
secularism into higher education in Ireland by
Queen’s Colleges, and into primary education by
certain acts of the Board of National Education.
The fidelity of the Irish Episcopacy and the ever
vigilant watchfulness of the Holy See,
disconcerted both plans, or neutralized them to a
great extent. Attempts of a like kind are being
made in England. There, by degrees, board schools
with almost unlimited assistance from taxes have
been first made legal, and then encouraged most
adroitly. The Church schools have been
systematically discouraged, and have now reached
the point of danger. This has been effected,
first, by the Masonry of Palmerston in high
places, and secondly, by the Masonry of England
generally, not in actual league and knowingly
with the dark direction I speak of, but
unknowingly influenced by its well-devised cries
for the spread of light, for the diffusion of
education amongst the masses, for the banishment
of religious discord, etc. It was, of course,
never mentioned, that all the advantages cried up
could be obtained, together with the still
greater advantage of a Christian education,
producing a future Christian population. It was
sedulously kept out of sight that the people who
would be certain to use board schools, were those
who never went themselves to any church, and who
would never think of giving religious instruction
of any kind to their children. Nothing can show
the power of Freemasonry in a stronger light than
the stupor it was able to cast over the men who
make laws in both Houses of the English
Parliament, and who were thus hoodwinked into
training up men fitted to take position, wealth,
and bread itself from themselves and their
children; to subject, in another generation, the
moneyed classes of England to the lot that befell
other blinded “moneyed people” in France during
the last century. In England, the Freemasons had,
unfortunately, the Dissenters as allies. Hatred
for church schools caused the latter to make
common cause with Atheists against God, but the
destruction of the Church of England – they do
not hope for the destruction of the vigorous
Catholic Church of the country – will never
compensate even Socinians for a spirit of
instructed irreligion in England – a spirit
which, in a generation, will be able and only too
willing to attempt Atheistic levelling for its
own advantage, and certainly not for the benefit
of wealthy Dissenters, or Dissenters having
anything at all to lose. The same influences of
Atheism were potent, and for the same reasons, in
all Australian legislatures. There the influence
of continental Freemasonry is stronger than at
home, and conservative influences which
neutralize Atheistic movements of too democratic
a nature in England and Scotland, are weaker.
Hence, in all Australian Parliaments, Acts are
passed with but a feeble resistance from the
Church Party, abolishing religious education of
every kind, and making all the education of the
country “secular, compulsory and free.” That is,
without religion, enforced upon every class, and
at the general expense of the State. Hence, after
paying the taxation in full, the Catholic and the
conscientious Christian of the Church of England,
have to sustain in all those colonies their own
system of education, and this, while paying for
the other system, and while bearing the
additional burden of the competition of State
schools, richly and completely endowed with every
possible requisite and luxury out of the general
taxes.
A final feature in the education-war of Atheism
against the Church especially, and against
Christianity of every kind, is the attempted
higher education without religion of young girls.
The expense which they have induced every
legislature to undertake for this purpose is
amazing; and how the nations tolerate that
expense is equally amazing. It is but carrying
out to the letter the advice of Vindex:– “If we
cannot suppress woman, let us corrupt her
together with the Church.” For this purpose those
infamous hot-beds of foul vice, “lodges of
adoption”, lodges for women, and “androgynes”, –
lodges for libertine Masons and women – were
established by the Illuminati of France in the
last century [18th]. For the same purpose schools
for the higher education of young girls are now
devised. This we know by the open avowal of
leading Masons. They were introduced into France,
Belgium, Italy, and Germany for the purpose of
withdrawing young girls of the middle and upper
classes from the blessed, safe control of nuns in
convents, and of leading them to positive Atheism
by Infidel masters and Infidel associates. This
design of the lodges is succeeding in its mission
of terrible mischief; but, thank God, not amongst
the daughters of respectable Christians of any
kind, who value the chastity, the honour, or the
future happiness here and hereafter of that sex
of their children, who need most care and
delicacy in educating.
In the extract from the permanent instruction of
the Alta Vendita, you have already seen how
astutely the Atheists compassed the corruption of
youth in Universities. It is since notorious that
in all high schools over which they have been
able to obtain influence, the students have been
deprived of religion, taught to mock and hate it,
allured to vicious courses, and have been placed
under professors without religion or morality.
How can we be surprised if the Universities of
the Continent have become the hot-beds of vice,
revolution, and Atheism? Moreover, when Masonry
governs, as in France, Italy, and Germany, the
only way for youth to obtain a livelihood on
entering upon life is by being affiliated to
Masonry; and the only way to secure advancement
is to be devoted to the principles, the
intrigues, and the interests of the Sect.
The continuous efforts of Masonry, aided by an
immoral and Atheistic literature, by a corrupt
public opinion, by a zealous Propagandism of
contempt for the Church, for her ministers and
her ministrations, and by a sleepless, able
Directory devoted to the furtherance of every
evil end, are enough in all reason to ruin
Christianity if that were not Divine. But, in
addition to its intellectual efforts, Masonry has
had from the beginning another powerful means of
destroying the existing social and Christian
order of the world in the interests of Atheism.
XIX
A WAR PARTY UNDER PALMERSTON
FATHER Deschamps, on the authority of Eckert and
Misley, gives an interesting description of all
that Freemasonry, under the direction of Lord
Palmerston, attempted and effected after the
failure of the revolutionary movements, conducted
by the party of action, under Mazzini, in 1848.
These were fomented to a large extent by British
diplomacy and secret service money manipulated by
Lord Palmerston. Under his guidance and
assistance, Mazzini had organized all his
revolutionary Sects. Young Italy, Young Poland,
Young Europe, and the rest sprang as much from
the one as from the other. But after years of
close union, Mazzini, who was probably hated by
Palmerston, and dreaded as the murderer of
Nubius, began to wane in influence. He and his
party felt, of course, the inevitable effects of
failure; and the leader subsided without,
however, losing any of his utility for the Sect.
Napoleon III appears to have supplanted him in
the esteem of Palmerston, and would, had he
dared, have ceased to follow the Carbonari.
Mazzini accordingly hated Napoleon III with a
deadly hatred, which he lived to be able to
gratify signally when Palmerston was no more. As
he was the principal means of raising Palmerston
to power in the Alta Vendita, so, after
Palmerston had passed away, he introduced another
great statesman to the high conductors, if not
into the high conduct itself, of the whole
conspiracy; and caused a fatal blow to be given
to France and to the dynasty of Napoleon.
Meanwhile, from 1849 to the end of the life of
Palmerston, the designs formed by the high
council of secret Atheism, were carried out with
a perfection, a vigour, and a success never
previously known in their history. Nothing was
precipitated; yet everything marched rapidly to
realization. The plan of Palmerston – or the plan
of the deadly council which plotted under him –
was to separate the two great conservative
empires of Russia and Austria, while, at the same
time, dealing a deadly blow at both. It was easy
for Palmerston to make England see the utility of
weakening Russia, which threatened her Indian
possessions. France could be made to join in the
fray, by her ruler, and the powerful Masonic
influence at his command: hence the Russian
campaign of 1852. But it was necessary for this
war to keep Prussia and Austria quiet. Prussia
was bribed by a promise to get, in time, the
Empire of United Germany. Austria was frightened
by the resolution of England and France to bring
war to the Danube, and so form a projected
Kingdom in Poland and Hungary. The joint power of
England, France, and Turkey could easily, then,
with the aid of the populations interested, form
the new kingdom, and so effectually curb Russia
and Austria. But it was of more importance for
the designs of the sect upon the temporal power
of the Pope, and upon Austria herself, to
separate the Empires. Palmerston succeeded with
Austria, who withdrew from her alliance with
Russia. The forces therefore of England and
France, were ordered from the Danube to the
barren Crimea, as payment for her neutrality.
This bribe proved the ruin of Austrian influence.
As soon as Russia was separated from her, and
weakened beyond the power of assisting her, if
she would, France, countenanced by England, dealt
a deadly blow at Austrian rule in Italy, united
Italy, and placed the temporal power of the Pope
in the last stage of decay. On the other hand,
Prussia was permitted to deal a blow soon after
at Austria. This finished the prestige of the
latter as the leading power in Germany, and
confined her to her original territory, with the
loss of Venice, her remaining Italian province.
After this war, Palmerston passed away, and
Mazzini came, once more, into authority in the
Sect. He remembered his grudge against Napoleon,
and at once used his influence with the high
direction of Masonry to abandon France and assist
Germany; and, on the promise of Bismarck – a
promise fulfilled by the May laws – that Germany
should persecute the Church as it was persecuted
in Italy, Masonry went over to Germany, and
Masons urged on Napoleon to that insane
expedition which ended in placing Germany as the
arbiter of Europe, and France and the dynasty of
Napoleon in ruins. In the authorities quoted,
there is abundant proof that Masonry, just as it
had assisted the French Revolution and Napoleon
I, now assisted the Germans. It placed treason on
the side of the French, and sold in fact the
unfortunate country and her unscrupulous ruler.
Mazzini forced Italy not to assist Napoleon, and
was gratified to find before his death that the
liar and traitor, who, in the hope of getting
assistance he did not get from Masonry, had dealt
his last blow at the Vicar of Christ, and placed
Rome and the remnant of the States of the Church
in the hands of the King of Italy, had lost the
throne and gained the unenviable character of a
coward and a fool.
This is necessarily but a brief glance at the
programme which Atheism has both planned and
carried out since the rule of Palmerston
commenced. Wherever it prevailed, the worst from
of persecution of the Church at once began to
rage. In Sardinia, as soon as it obtained hold of
the King and Government, the designs of the
French Revolution were at once carried out
against religion. The State itself employed the
horrible and impure contrivances of the Alta
Vendita for the corruption and demoralisation of
every class of the people. The flood gates of
hell were opened. Education was at once made
completely secular. Religious teachers were
banished. The goods of the religious orders were
confiscated. Their convents, their land, their
very churches were sold, and they themselves were
forced to starve on a miserable pension, while a
succession was rigorously prohibited. All
recognition of the spiritual power of Bishops was
put to an end. The priesthood was systematically
despised and degraded. The whole ministry of the
Church was harassed in a hundred vexatious ways.
Taxes of a crushing character were levied on the
administration of the sacraments, on masses, and
on the slender incomes of the parish clergy.
Matrimony was made secular, divorce legalised,
the privileges of the clerical state abrogated.
Worse than all, the leva or conscription was
rigorously enforced. Candidates for the
priesthood, at the most trying season of their
career, were compelled to join the army for a
number of years, and exposed to all the snares
which the Alta Vendita had astutely prepared to
destroy their purity, and with it, of course,
their vocations; “make vicious hearts, and you
will have no more Catholics.” Besides these
measures made and provided by public authority,
every favour of the State, its power of giving
honours, patronage and place, was constantly
denied to Catholics. To get any situation of
value in the army, navy, civil service, police,
revenue, on the railways, in the telegraph
offices, to be a physician to the smallest
municipality, to be employed almost anywhere, it
was necessary to be a Freemason, or to have
powerful Masonic influence. The press, the larger
mercantile firms, important manufactories,
depending as such institutions mostly do on State
patronage and interest, were also in the hands of
the Sectaries. To Catholics was left the lot of
slaves. If permitted to exist at all, it was as
the hewers of wood and the drawers of water. The
lands which those amongst them held, who did not
forsake religion, were taxed to an unbearable
extent. The condition of the faithful Catholic
peasants became wretched from the load of fiscal
burdens placed upon them. The triumph of Atheism
could not be more complete, so far as having all
that the world could give on its side, and
leaving to the Church scarcely more than covered
her Divine Founder upon the Cross.
Bismarck, though assisted in his wars against
France by the brave Catholic soldiers of the
Rhine, and of the Fatherland generally, no sooner
had his rival crushed, and his victory secured,
than he hastened to pay to Freemasonry his
promised persecution of the Church. The
Freemasons in the German Parliament, and the
Ministers of the Sect, aided him to prepare
measures against the Catholic religion as drastic
as those in operation in Italy, even worse in
many respects. The religious orders of men and
women were rigorously suppressed or banished, as
a first instalment. Then fell Catholic education
to make way for an Infidel propagandism. Next
came harassing decrees against the clergy by
which Bishops were banished or imprisoned and
parishes were deprived in hundreds of their
priests. All the bad, immoral influences,
invented and propagated by the Sectaries, were
permitted to run riot in the land. A schism was
attempted in the Church. Ecclesiastical education
was corrupted in the very bud, and all but the
existence of Catholics was proscribed.
Wherever we find the dark sect triumphant we find
the same results. In the Republics of South
America, where Freemasonry holds the highest
places, the condition of the Church is that of
normal persecution and vexation of every kind. It
has been so for many years in Spain and Portugal,
in Switzerland, and to whatever extent Freemasons
can accomplish it, in Belgium and in Austria. The
dark Directory succeeding Weishaupt, the Alta
Vendita, and Palmerston, sits in Paris and in
Berlin almost openly, and prepares at leisure its
measures, which are nothing short of, first, the
speedy weakening of the Church, and then a bloody
attempt at her extermination. If it goes on
slower than it did during the French Revolution,
it is in order to go on surer. Past experience,
too, and the determinations of the sect already
arrived at, show but too clearly that a single
final consummation is kept steadily in view. The
impure assassins who conduct the conspiracy have
had no scruple to imbue their hands in the blood
of Christians in the past, and they never will
have a scruple to do so, whenever there is hope
of success. In fact, from what I have seen and
studied on the Continent, an attempt at this
ultimate means of getting rid at least of the
clergy and principal lay leaders amongst
Catholics, might take place in France and even in
Italy at any moment. In France, some new measure
of persecution is introduced every day. The
Concordat is broken openly. The honour of the
country is despised. Subventions belonging by
contract to the clergy are withdrawn. The
insolence of the Atheistical Government, relying
on the strength of the army and on the
unaccountable apathy or cowardice of the French
Catholic laity, progresses so fast, that no act
of the Revolution of 1789 or of the Commune, can
be thought improbable within the present decade;
and Italy would be sure to follow any example set
by France in this or in any other method of
exterminating the Church.
There are sure signs in all the countries where
the Atheistic Revolution has made decided
progress, that this final catastrophe is planned
already, and that its instruments are in course
of preparation. These instruments are something
the same as were devised by the illuminated
lodges, when the power of the French Revolution
began to pass from the National Assembly to the
clubs. The clubs were the open and ultimate
expression of the destructive, anti-Christianity
of Atheism; and when the lodges reached so far,
there was no further need for secrecy. That which
in the jargon of the Sect is called “the object
of the labour of ages”, was attained. Man was
without God or Faith, King or Law. He had reached
the level aimed at by the Commune, which is
itself the ultimate end of all Masonry, and all
that secret Atheistic plotting which, since the
rise of Atheism, has filled the world.
In our day, if Masonry does not found Jacobite or
other clubs, it originates and cherishes
movements fully as satanic and as dangerous.
Communism, just like Carbonarism, is but a form
of the illuminated Masonry of Weishaupt. “Our
end”, said the Alta Vendita, “is that of Voltaire
and the French Revolution.” Names and methods are
varied, but that end is ever the same. The clubs
at the period of the French Revolution were,
after all, local. Masonry now endeavours to
generalise their principles and their powers of
destructive activity on a vastly more extended
scale. We therefore no longer hear of Jacobins or
Girondins, but we hear of movements destined to
be for all countries what the Jacobins and the
Girondins were for Paris and for France. As
surely, and for the same purpose, as the clubs
proceeded from the lodges in 1789, so, in the
latter half of the nineteenth century, the lodges
sent out upon the whole civilized world, for the
very same intent, the terrible Socialist
organizations, all founded upon the lines of
Communism, and called according to the exigencies
of time, place, and condition.
XX
THE INTERNATIONAL, THE NIHILISTS, THE BLACK HAND,
&c. THERE are multitudes in Freemasonry – even in
the most “advanced” Freemasonry of Italy and
France – who have no real wish to see the
principles of these anarchists predominate.
Those, for instance, who in advocating the
theories of Voltaire, and embracing for their
realization the organization of Weishaupt, saw
only a means to get for themselves honours,
power, and riches, which they could never
otherwise obtain but by Freemasonry, would be
well pleased enough to advance no further, once
the good things they loved had been gained. “Nous
voulons, Messieurs”, said Thiers, “la république,
mais la république conservatrice.” He and his
desired, of course, to have the Republic which
gave them all this world had to bestow, at the
expense of former possessors. They desired also
the destruction of a religion which crossed their
corrupt inclinations, and which was suspected of
sympathy for the state of things which Masonry
had supplanted. But they had no intention, if
they could help it, to descend again to the level
of the masses from which they had sprung. In
Italy, for instance, this class of Freemasons
have had supreme power in their hands for over a
quarter of a century. They obtained it by
professing the strongest sympathy for the
downtrodden millions whom they called slaves.
They stated that these slaves – the bulk of the
Italian people in the country and in the cities –
were no better than tax-paying machines, the
dupes and drudges of their political tyrants.
Victor Emmanuel, when he wanted, as he said, “to
liberate them from political tyrants”, declared
that a cry came to him from the “enslaved Italy”,
composed of these down-trodden, unregenerated
millions. He and his Freemasons and Carbonari –
the party of direction and the party of action –
therefore drove the native princes of the people
from their thrones, and seized supreme sway
throughout the Italian peninsula. Were the
millions of “slaves” served by the change? The
whole property of the Church was seized upon.
Were the burdens of taxation lightened? Very far
from it. The change simply put hungry Freemasons,
and chiefly those of Piedmont, in possession of
the Church lands and revenues. It dispossessed
many ancient Catholic proprietors, in order to
put Freemasons in their stead. But with what
consequence to the vast mass of the people, to
the peasantry and the working population – some
twenty-four out of the twenty-six millions of the
Italian people? The consequence is this, that
after a quarter of a century of vaunted
“regenerated Masonic rule”, during which “the
liberators” were at perfect liberty to confer any
blessings they pleased upon the people as such,
the same people are at this moment more miserable
than at any past period of their history, at
least since Catholicism became predominant as the
religion of the country. If their natural princes
ever “whipped them with whips” for the good of
the state, Freemasonry, under the House of Savoy,
slashes them with scorpions, for the good of the
fraternity. To keep power in the hands of the
Atheists an army, ten times greater, and ten
times more costly than before, had to be
supported by the “liberated” people. A worthless
but ruinously expensive navy has been created and
must be kept by the same unfortunate
“regenerated” people. These poor people,
“regenerated and liberated”, must man the fleets
and supply the rank and file of Army and Navy;
they must give their sons, at the most useful
period of their lives, to the “service” of
Masonic “United Italy.” But the officials in both
army and navy – and their number is legion –
supported by the taxes of the people, are
Freemasons or the sons of Freemasons. They
vegetate in absolute uselessness, so far as the
development of the country is concerned, living
in comparative luxury upon its scanty resources.
The civil service, like the army and navy, is
swelled with “government billets”, out of all
proportion to the wants of the people. It is
filled with Freemasons. It is a paradise of
Freemasons, where Piedmontese patriots, who have
intrigued with Cavour or fought under Garibaldi,
enjoy otium cum dignitate at the expense of the
hard earnings of a people very poor at any time,
but by the present “regenerated” regime made more
wretched and miserable than any Christian
peasantry – not even excepting the peasantry of
Ireland – on the face of the earth.
The consequence of the “liberation” wrought by
the Freemasons in Italy is this: They clamoured
for representative institutions. All their
revolutions were made under the pretext that
these were not granted – and yet the mass of
Italian people – seven-eighths of them – are as
yet unenfranchised, after a quarter of a century
of Masonic supremacy in the land. The Masons
represented the lot of the poor man as
insupportable under the native princes. But under
themselves the poor man’s condition, instead of
being ameliorated, has been made unspeakably
worse. He is positively, at present, ground down,
in every little town of Italy, by insupportable
exactions. His former burdens are increased
fourfold – in many cases tenfold. To find money
for all the extravagances of Masonic rule – to
make fortunes for the men at the top, and
comfortable places for the rank and file of the
sect – a system of taxation, the most elaborate,
severe, and searching ever yet invented to crush
a nation, has been devised. The peasant’s rent is
raised by Masonic greed whenever a Mason becomes
a proprietor, as is often the case with regard to
confiscated church lands. Land taxes cause the
rents to rise everywhere. The tenant must bear
them. Then every article of the produce of his
little rented holding is taxed as he approaches
the city gates to sell it. At home his pig is
taxed, his dog, if he can keep one, his fowl, his
house, his fireplace, his window light, his
scanty earnings, titulo servizio, all are
specially, and for the poor, heavily taxed. The
consequence of this is that few Italian peasants
can, since Italy became “United”, drink the wine
they produce, or eat the wheat they grow. Flesh
meat, once in common use, is now as rare with
them as it used to be with the peasantry in
Ireland. Milk or butter they hardly ever taste.
Their food, often sadly insufficient, is reduced
to pizzi, a kind of cake made of Maize or Indian
meal and vegetables or fruit when in season.
Their drink is plain water. They are happy when
they can mingle with it a little vinaccio, a
liquid made after the grapes are pressed and the
wine drawn off, by pouring water on the refuse.
Their homes are cheerless and miserable, their
children left to live in ignorance, without
schooling, employed in coarse labour, and clothed
in rags. The Grand Duke of Tuscany had by wise
and generous regulations placed hundreds, yea,
even thousands of these peasants, happy as
independent farmers on their own land. The
crushing load of taxation has caused these to
disappear, and their little holdings have been
sold by auction to pay taxes, and have passed, of
course, into the hands of speculators, generally
Freemasons, who, when they become landlords, vie
with the worst of their class, in Ireland, in
greed. In the States of the Church, where the
careful, most Christian, and compassionate spirit
and legislation of the Vicar of Christ prevailed,
the peasantry ate their own bread, drank their
own wine, and were decently, nay even
picturesquely clad, as all travellers know,
before the “liberation” of the Masonic
Piedmontese. Not a family was without a little
hoard of savings for the age of the old, and for
the provision and placing in life of the young.
Now, gaunt misery, even starvation, is the
characteristic of these populations, after only
some fifteen years of Masonic rule. The vast
revenues of the Church are gone, none know
wither. The nation is none the better for them,
and the populace, in their dire poverty, can no
longer go to the convent-gate, where before the
poor never asked for bread in vain. The
religious, deprived of their possessions, and
severely repressed, have no longer food to give.
They are fast disappearing, and the people
already experience that the promises of
Freemasonry, like the promises of its real
author, are but apples of ashes, given but to
lure, to deceive, and to destroy.
The Freemasonry
of France and other Continental nations, which
has done so much to give effect to the principles
of Voltaire and Weishaupt, wishes decidedly not
to go beyond the role played by the Freemasonry
of Italy. But in France, as in Italy, an
inexorable power is behind them, pushing them on,
and also fanatically determined to push them off
the scene when the time is ripe for doing so.
This the Freemasons of Italy well know; this the
men now in power in France feel. But if they move
against the current coming upon them from the
depths of Freemasonry, woe to them. The knife of
the assassin is ready. The sentence of death is
there, which they are too often told to remember,
and which has before now reached the very
foremost men of the sect who refused, or feared,
for motives good or bad, to advance as quickly as
the hidden chiefs of the Revolution desired and
decreed. It “removed” Nubius in the days of
Mazzini. It “removed” Gambetta before our eyes.
It aimed frequently at Napoleon III and would
most assuredly have struck home, but its aim was
only to terrify him so that he as a Carbonaro
would be made to do its work soon and
effectively. Masonry obtained its end, and
Napoleon marched to the Italian war, and to his
doom.
It is this invisible power, this secret,
sleepless, fanatical Directory, which causes the
solidarity most evidently subsisting between
Freemasonry in its many degrees and aspects and
the various parties of anarchists which now arise
everywhere in Europe. In the last century [18th]
kings, princes, nobles, took up Masonry. It swept
them all away before that century closed. In the
beginning and progress of this century [19th],
the Bourgeoisie took it up with still greater
zest, and made it all their own. For a long time
they would not tolerate such a thing as a poor
Mason. Poverty was their enemy. What has come to
pass? The Bourgeoisie at this moment are the
peculiar enemy of the class of workmen who have
invaded “Black” or “Illuminated” Masonry, and
made it at last completely theirs. The
Bourgeoisie are now called upon by the Socialists
to be true to the real levelling principles of
the brotherhood – to practise as well as preach
“liberty, equality, and fraternity”; to divide
their possessions with the working men – to
descend to that elysium of Masonry, the level of
the Commune – or die.
It is strange howeffect Masonry,
being what it is, has always managed to get a
princely or noble leader for every one of its
distinct onward movements against princes,
property, and society. It had Egalité to lead the
movement against the throne of France in the last
century. It had the Duke of Brunswick, Fredrick
II and Joseph II to assist. In this century we
see it ornamented by Louis Philippe, Napoleon
III, Victor Emmanuel and others as figureheads;
Nubius and Palmerston, both won from the leaders
of the Conservative nobility, were its real
chiefs. Now, when it appears in its worst
possible form, it is championed by no less a
personage than a Russian Prince, of high lineage,
a representative of the wealthiest, most
exclusive, and perhaps richest aristocracy in the
world. We find that in all cases of seduction
like this, the promise of mighty leadership has
been the bait by which the valuable dupe has been
caught by the sectaries. The advice of Piccolo
Tigre for the seduction of princes has thus never
been without its effect.
These new anarchical societies are not mere
haphazard associations. They are most ably
organised. There is, for instance, in the
International, three degrees, or rather distinct
societies, the one, however, led by the other.
First come the International Brethren. These know
no country but the Revolution; no other enemy but
“reaction.” They refuse all conciliation or
compromise, and they regard every movement as
“reactionary” the moment it ceases to have for
its object, directly or indirectly, the triumph
of the principles of the French Revolution. They
cannot go to any tribunal other than a jury of
themselves, and must assist each other, lawfully
or otherwise, to the “very limits of the
possible.” No one is admitted who has not the
firmness, fidelity, intelligence, and energy
considered sufficient by the chiefs, to carry out
as well as to accept the programme of the
Revolution. They may leave the body, but if they
do, they are put under the strictest
surveillance, and any violation of the secret or
indiscretion, damaging to the cause, is punished
inexorably by death. They are not permitted to
join any other society, secret or otherwise, or
to take any public appointment without permission
from their local committee; and then they must
make known all secrets which could directly or
indirectly serve the International cause.
The
second class of Internationalists are the
National Brethren. These are local socialists,
and are not permitted even to suspect the
existence of the International Brethren, who move
among them and guide them in virtue of higher
degree. They figure in the meetings of the
society, and constitute the grand army of
insurrection; they are, without knowing it,
completely directed by the others. Both classes
are formed strictly upon the lines laid down by
Weishaupt.
The third class compromises all manner of
workmen’s societies. With these the two first
mingle, and direct to the profit of the
Revolution. The death penalty for indiscretion or
treason is common in every degree.
The Black Hand
and the Nihilists are directed by the same secret
agency, to violence and intrigue. Amongst them,
but unknown to most of them, are the men of the
higher degrees, who in dark concert, easily guide
the others as they please. They administer oaths,
plan assassinations, urge on to action, and
terrorize a whole country, leaving the rank and
file who execute these things to their fate. It
is unnecessary to dwell longer upon these
sectaries, well known by the outrages they
perpetrate.
These terrible societies are unquestionably
connected with, and governed by, the dark
directory, which now, as at all times since the
days of Weishaupt, rules the secret societies of
the world. Mahommedanism permitted the assassins
gathered under the “old man of the mountain”, to
assist in spreading the faith of Islam by
terrorising its Christian enemies. For a like
purpose, whenever it judges it opportune, the
dark Alta Vendita employs the assassins wholesale
and retail of the secret societies. It believes
it can control when it pleases these ruthless
enemies of the human race. In this, as Nubius
found out, it is far mistaken. But the
encouragement of murderers as a “skirmishing”
party of the Cosmopolitan Revolution remains
since the day of Weishaupt – a policy kept
steadily in view. Today, that party is used
against some power such as that of the Popes, or
the petty princes of Italy. Great powers like
England, in the belief that the mischief will
stop in Italy, rejoice in the results attained by
assassination. Tomorrow it suits the policy of
the Alta Vendita to make a blow at aristocracy in
England, at despotism in Russia, at monarchy in
Spain; and at once we find Invincibles formed
from the advanced amongst the Fenians; Nihilists
and the Black Hand from the ultras of the
Carbonari; and Young Russia, ready to use
dynamite and the knife and the revolver, reckless
of every consequence, for the ends of the secret
directory with which the diplomacy of the world
has now to count. The professional lectures on
the use and manufacture of dynamite given to
Nihilists in Paris, the numbers of them gathered
together in that capital, the retreat afforded
them there to the known murderers of the Emperor
Alexander, excited little comment in England. If
referred to at all in the press, it was not with
that vigorous abhorrence which such proceedings
should create. Often a chuckle of satisfaction
has been indulged in by some at the fact. The
utterances of the “advanced” members of the
Masonic Intellectual party in the French Senate
excusing Nihilists, were quoted with a kind of
“faint damnation” equivalent to praise. There is
no doubt that in Russia a similar kind of tender
treatment is given to the Fenian dynamitards
employed by O’Donovan Rossa. So long as the
leading nations in Europe do not see in these
anarchists and desperate miscreants the
irreconcilable enemies of the human race, Paris,
completely Masonic as it is, will afford them a
shelter; and when French tribunals fine or
imprison them, it will be as in Italy with a
tenderness still further exhibited in gaols. The
salvation of Europe depends upon a manly
abhorrence of secret societies of every
description, and the pulling up root and branch
from human society of the sect of the Freemasons
whose “illuminated” plottings have caused the
mischief so far, and which if not vigorously
repressed by a decided union of Christian nations
will yet occasion far more. Deus fecit nationes
sanabiles. The nations can be saved. But if they
are to be saved, it must be by a return to
Christianity and to public Christian usages; by
eradicating Atheism and its socialistic doctrines
as crimes against the majesty of God and the
well-being of individual men and nations; by
rigorously prohibiting every form of secret
society for any purpose whatever; by shutting the
mouth of the blasphemer; by controlling the voice
of the scoffer and the impure in the Press and in
every other public expression; by insisting on
the vigorous Christian education of children;
and, if they can have the wisdom of doing it, by
opening their ears to the warning voice of the
Vicar of Jesus Christ. It is not an expression of
Irish discontent finding a vent in dynamite which
England has most to fear from anarchy. Its value
to the Revolution is the knowledge it gives to
those millions whom English education methods are
depriving of faith in God, of the use of a
terrible engine against order, property, and the
very existence of the country as such. The dark
directory of Socialism is powerful, wise and
determined. It laughs at Ireland and her wrongs.
It hates, and ever will hate, the Irish people
for their fidelity to the Catholic faith. But it
seizes upon those subjects which Irish discontent
in America affords, to make them teach the
millions everywhere the power of dynamite, and
the knife, and the revolver, against the
comparatively few who hold property. This is the
real secret of dynamite outrages in England, in
Russia, and all the world over; and I fear we are
but upon the threshold of a social convulsion
which will try every nation where the wiles of
the secret societies have obtained, through the
hate of senseless Christian sectaries, the power
for Atheism to dominate over the rising
generation, and deprive it of Christian faith,
and the fear and the love of God. I hope these my
forebodings may not be realized, but I fear that
even before another decade passes, Socialism will
attempt a convulsion of the whole world equal to
that of France in 1789; and that convulsion I
fear this country shall not escape. Our only
chance lies in a return to God, of which, alas,
there are as yet but little signs amongst those
who hold power amongst us. I mean of course a
return to the public Christianity of the past.
To
this pass Freemasonry has brought the world and
itself. Its hidden Directory no outsider can
know. Events may afterwards reveal who they were.
Few can tell who is or is not within that dark
conclave of lost but able men. There is no
staying the onward progress of the tide which
bears on the millions in their meshes to ruin.
The only thing we can hope to do is to save
ourselves from being deceived by their wiles.
This, thank God, we may and will do. We can, at
least, in compliance with the advice of our Holy
Father, open the eyes of our own people, of our
young men especially, to the nature and atrocity
of the evil, that seeing, they may avoid the
snare laid for them by Atheism. To do this with
greater effect we shall now, for a while,
consider the danger as it appears amongst
ourselves.
XXI
FREEMASONRY WITH OURSELVES
WE hear from every side a great deal regarding
the difference said to exist between Freemasonry
as it has remained in the United Kingdom, and as
it has developed itself on the Continent of
Europe since its introduction there chiefly, we
must remember, by British Jacobites in the last
century. It is argued, that the Illuminism of
Weishaupt, or that of Saint Martin, did not cross
the Channel to any great extent; and that on the
whole the lodges of England, Ireland, and
Scotland remained loyal to Monarchy and to
religion. There is much truth in all this. The
Conservative character of the mass of English
Freemasons, and the fact, that amongst them were
found the real governors and possessors of the
country, made it impossible that such men could
conspire against their own selves. But, as I have
already shown, the fact that British lodges have
always had intercourse with the lodges of the
Continent1, makes it equally impossible that
some, at least, of the theories of the latter
should not have got into the lodges on this side
of the water. I believe it is owing mainly to
this influence over British Freemasons that so
many revolutionary movements have found favour
with our legislators, who are, when they are not
Catholics, generally of the craft. It was through
it, that the fatal foreign policy of Lord
Palmerston obtained such support, even against
the conviction and instincts of the best and most
far-seeing statesmen of the country, as, for
instance, the late Lord Derby. It was through it,
certainly, that the cry for secular education was
welcomed amongst us; that divorce and “liberal”
marriage laws came into force, and that attacks
were permitted upon the sanctity of the Sabbath
and other Christian institutions.
The doing away by degrees of the “Lord’s Day” is
a favourite aim of Atheism; and it is by
resisting this aim – by resisting all its aims on
morality and religion – that we can hope to
sustain the Christianity and the religious
character of this country and its people.2
But granting that British lodges remain
unaffected by Atheism and Anti-Christianity
which, as we have seen, influence the whole mass
of Continental Freemasonry, would they on that
account be innocent? Could a conscientious man of
any Christian denomination join them? The
question is, of course, decided for Catholics.
The Church forbids her children to be members of
British or any Freemasonry under penalty of
excommunication. The reasons which have led the
Church to make a law so stringent and so serious
must have been very grave. We have seen some at
least of these reasons; and it is certainly with
a full knowledge of facts that she has decreed
the same penalties against such of her children
as join the English lodges as she has against
those who join the lodges of the Continent. Then,
though parsons have become “chaplains” to lodges,
Anglicans generally have shown no sympathy with
the Freemasonry of England. I am not aware that
Protestant denominations assume, or that their
members grant them, the power of making laws
which could bind in conscience. If they did
possess such power, many of them, I have no
doubt, would forbid Freemasonry, as dangerous and
evil in itself. But it needs not a law from man
to guide one in determining what is clearly
prohibited by reason and revelation. Now that
which is called harmless Freemasonry with us, is
– besides the evident danger to which it is
exposed, of being made what it has become in the
rest of the world – both sacrilegious and
dangerous. If it be only a society for brotherly
intercourse and mutual help, where can be the
necessity of taking for such purposes a number of
oaths of the most frightful character? I shall
now quote some of these oaths – the most ordinary
ones taken by every English Freemason who
advances to the first three degrees of the Craft.
Oaths far more blasphemous and terrible are taken
in the higher degrees both in England and on the
Continent. I shall also give you the passwords,
grips, and signs for these three main degrees.
One can then judge of the nature of the travesty
that is made of the name of God for purposes
utterly puerile, if not meant to cover such real
and deadly secrecy as that of Continental
Masonry.
The first of these oaths is administered to the
candidate who wishes to become an apprentice. He
is divested of all money and metal. His right
arm, left breast and left knee are bare. His
right heel is slipshod. He is blindfolded, and a
rope called a “cable tow”, adapted for hanging,
is placed round his neck. A sword is pointed to
his breast, and in this manner he is placed
kneeling before the Master of the Lodge, in whose
presence he takes the following oath, his hand
placed on a Bible:–
“I, N. N., in the presence of the great Architect
of the Universe, and of this warranted, worthy
and worshipful lodge of free and accepted Masons,
regularly assembled and properly dedicated, of my
own free will and accord, do hereby and hereon,
most solemnly and sincerely swear, that I will
always hail, conceal, and never reveal, any part
or parts, point or points, of the secrets and
mysteries of, or belonging to, free and accepted
Masons in masonry, which have been, shall now, or
hereafter may be, communicated to me, unless it
be to a true and lawful brother or brothers, and
not even to him or them, till after due trial,
strict examination, or sure information from a
well-known brother, that he or they are worthy of
that confidence, or in the body of a just,
perfect, and regular lodge of accepted
Freemasons. I further solemnly promise that I
will not write those secrets, print, carve,
engrave, or otherwise delineate them, or cause or
suffer them to be done so by others, if in my
power to prevent it, on anything movable or
immovable under the canopy of heaven, whereby or
whereon any letter, character or figure, or the
least trace of a letter, character or figure may
become legible or intelligible to myself, or to
anyone in the world, so that our secrets, arts,
and hidden mysteries, may improperly become known
through my unworthiness. These several points I
solemnly swear to observe, without evasion,
equivocation, or mental reservation of any kind,
under no less a penalty, on the violation of any
of them, than to have my throat cut across, my
tongue torn out by the root, and my body buried
in the sand of the sea at low water mark, or a
cable’s length from the shore, where the tide
regularly ebbs and flows twice in the twenty-four
hours, or the more efficient punishment of being
branded as a wilfully perjured individual, void
of all moral worth, and unfit to be received in
this warranted lodge, or in any other warranted
lodge, or society of Masons, who prize honour and
virtue above all the external advantages of rank
and fortune: so help me, God, and keep me
steadfast in this my great and solemn obligation
of an Entered Apprentice Freemason.”
W.M.– “What you have repeated may be considered a
sacred promise as a pledge of your fidelity, and
to render it a solemn obligation, I will thank
you to seal it with your lips on the volume of
the sacred law.” (Kisses the Bible.)
When the above oath is duly taken, the “sign” is
given. This for an Apprentice, consists of a
gesture made by drawing the hand smartly across
the throat and dropping it to the side. This
gesture has reference to the penalty attached to
breaking the oath. The grip is also a penal sign.
It consists of a distinct pressure of the top of
the right hand thumb to the first joint from the
wrist of the right hand forefinger, grasping the
finger with the hand. The password is BOAZ, and
is given letter by letter.
There are a number of quaint ceremonial charges
and lectures which may be seen by consulting any
of the Manuals of Freemasonry, and which are
perfectly given in a treatise by one Carlile, an
Atheist, who undertook for the benefit of
Infidelity to divulge the whole of the mere
ceremonial secrecy of English Freemasons, in
order to advance the real secret of it all,
namely Pantheism or Atheism, and hatred for every
form of Christianity. The English Freemasons made
too much of the ceremonies and too little of
Atheism, and hence the design of real Infidelity
to get the “real secret” into English lodges by
expelling the pretended one.
The oath of the second degree, that of
Fellow-Craft, is as follows:–
“I, N. N., in the presence of the Grand
Geometrician of the Universe, and in this
worshipful and warranted Lodge of Fellow-Craft
Masons, duly constituted, regularly assembled,
and properly dedicated, of my own free will and
accord, do hereby and hereon most solemnly
promise and swear that I will always hail,
conceal, and never reveal any or either of the
secrets or mysteries of, or belonging to, the
second degree of Freemasonry, known by the name
of the Fellow-Craft, to him who is but an entered
Apprentice, no more than I would either of them
to the uninitiated or the popular world who are
not Masons. I further solemnly pledge myself to
act as a true and faithful craftsman, obey signs,
and maintain the principles inculcated in the
first degree. All these points I most solemnly
swear to obey, without evasion, equivocation, or
mental reservation of any kind, under no less a
penalty, on the violation of any of them, in
addition to my former obligation, than to have my
left breast cut open, my heart torn therefrom,
and given to the ravenous birds of the air, or
the devouring beasts of the field, as a prey: so
help me Almighty God, and keep me steadfast in
this my great and solemn obligation of a
Fellow-Craft Mason.”
After taking this oath with all formality, the
Fellow-Craft Mason is entrusted with the sign,
grip and password by the Master, who thus
addresses him:–
“You, having taken the solemn obligation of a
Fellow-Craft Freemason, I shall proceed to
entrust you with the secrets of the degree. You
will advance towards me as at your initiation.
Now take another pace with your left foot,
bringing the right heel into its hollow, as
before. That is the second regular step in
Freemasonry, and it is in this position that the
secrets of the degree are communicated. They
consist as in the former instance, of a sign,
token, and word; with this difference that the
sign is of a threefold nature. The first part of
a threefold sign is called the sign of fidelity,
emblematically to shield the repository of your
secrets from the attacks of the cowan. (The sign
is made by pressing the right hand on the left
breast, extending the thumb perpendicularly to
form a square). The second part is called the
hailing sign, and is given by throwing the left
hand up in this manner (horizontal from the
shoulder to the elbow, and perpendicular from the
elbow to the ends of the fingers, with the thumb
and forefinger forming a square.) The third part
is called the penal sign, and is given by drawing
the hand across the breasts and dropping it to
the side. This is in allusion to the penalty of
your obligation, implying that as a man of
honour, and a Fellow-Craft Mason, you would
rather have your heart torn from your breast,
than to improperly divulge the secrets of this
degree. The grip, or token, is given by a
distinct pressure of the thumb on the second
joint of the hand or that of the middle finger.
This demands a word; a word to be given and
received with the same strict caution as the one
in the former degree, either by letters or
syllables. The word is JACHIN. As in the course
of the evening you will be called on for this
word, the Senior Deacon will now dictate the
answers you will have to give.”
The next oath is that of the highest substantial
degree in old Freemasonry, namely, that of
Master. Attention is specially to be paid to the
words “or at my own option.”
“I, N. N., in the presence of the Most High, and
of this worthy and worshipful lodge, duly
constituted, regularly assembled, and properly
dedicated, of my own free will and accord, do
hereby and hereon, most solemnly promise and
swear, that I will always hail, conceal, and
never reveal, any or either of the secrets or
mysteries of, or belonging to, the degree of a
Master Mason, to anyone in the world, unless it
be to him or them to whom the same may justly and
lawfully belong; and not even to him or them,
until after due trials, strict examination, or
full conviction, that he or they are worthy of
that confidence, or in the bosom of a Master
Mason’s Lodge. I further most solemnly engage
that I will keep the secrets of the Third Degree
from him who is but a Fellow-Craft Mason, with
the same strict caution as I will those of the
Second Degree from him who is but an Entered
Apprentice Freemason; the same or either of them,
from anyone in the known world, unless to true
and lawful Brother Masons. I further solemnly
engage myself to advance to the pedestal of the
square and compasses, to answer and obey all
lawful signs and summonses sent to me from a
Master Mason’s Lodge, if within the length of my
cable-tow, and to plead no excuse except
sickness, or the pressing emergency of my own
private or public avocations. I furthermore
solemnly pledge myself to maintain and support
the five points of fellowship, in act as well as
in word; that my hand given to a Mason shall be
the sure pledge of brotherhood; that my foot
shall traverse through danger and difficulties,
to unite with his in forming a column of mutual
defence and safety; that the posture of my daily
supplications shall remind me of his wants, and
dispose my heart to succour his distresses and
relieve his necessities, as far as may fairly be
done without detriment to myself or connexions;
that my breast shall be the sacred repository of
his secrets, when delivered to me as such;
murder, treason, felony, and all other offences
contrary to the law of God, or the ordinances of
the realm, being at all times most especially
excepted or at my own option: and finally, that I
will support a Master Mason’s character in his
absence as well as I would if he were present. I
will not revile him myself, nor knowingly suffer
others to do so; but will boldly repel the
slander of his good name, and strictly respect
the chastity of those that are most dear to him,
in the persons of his wife, sister, or his child:
and that I will not knowingly have unlawful
carnal connexion with either of them. I
furthermore solemnly vow and declare, that I will
not defraud a Brother Master Mason, or see him
defrauded of the most trifling amount, without
giving him due and timely notice thereof; that I
will also prefer a Brother Master Mason in all my
dealings, and recommend him to others as much as
lies in my power, so long as he shall continue to
act honourably, honestly and faithfully towards
me and others. All these several points I promise
to observe, without equivocation or mental
reservation of any kind, under no less a penalty,
on the violation of any of them, than to have my
body severed in two, my bowels torn thereout, and
burned to ashes in the centre, and those ashes
scattered before the four cardinal points of
heaven, so that no trace or remembrance of me
shall be left among men, particularly among
Master Masons: So help me God, and keep me
steadfast in this grand and solemn obligation,
being that of a Master Mason.”
A long ceremony follows, in which the newly-made
Master is made to sham a dead man and to be
raised to life by the Master, grasping, or rather
clawing his hand or wrist, by putting his right
foot to his foot, his knee to his knee, bringing
up the right breast to his breast, and with his
hand over the back. This is practised in Masonry
as the five points of Fellowship.
Then the Master gives the signs, grip, and
password, saying:
“Of the signs, the first and second are casual,
the third is penal. The first casual sign is
called the sign of horror, and is given from the
Fellow-Craft’s hailing sign, by dropping the left
hand and elevating the right, as if to screen the
eyes from a painful sight, at the same time
throwing the head over the right shoulder, as a
remove or turning away from that sight. It
alludes to the finding of our murdered Master
Hiram by the twelve Fellow-Crafts. The second
casual sign is called the sign of sympathy or
sorrow, and is given by bending the head a little
forward, and by striking the right hand gently on
the forehead. The third is called the penal sign,
because it alludes to the penalty of your
obligation, and is given by drawing the hand
across the centre of the body, dropping it to the
side, and then raising it again to place the
point of the thumb on the navel. It implies that,
as a man of honour and a Master Mason, you would
rather be severed in two than improperly divulge
the secrets of this Degree. The grip or token is
the first of the five points of fellowship. The
five points of fellowship are: first, a grip with
the right hand of each other’s wrist, with the
points of the fingers; second right foot parallel
with right foot on the inside; third, right knee
to right knee; fourth, right breast to right
breast; fifth, hand over shoulder, supporting the
back. It is in this position, and this only,
except in open lodge, and then but in a whisper,
that the word is given. It is MAHABONE or
MACBENACH. The former is the ancient, the latter
the modern word.”
I have here given an idea of the principal
ceremonies used in making English Freemasons. I
could not in the space I have allotted to myself,
enter, as I would wish to do, upon other features
of its ridiculous rites and observances, many of
which in still higher degrees, get a gradually
opening, Atheistic and most anti-Christian
interpretation. But it will suffice for my
purpose to bring one fact under your observation.
In the ceremonies accompanying initiations, many
charges are made to the candidates, and lectures
and catechisings are given. In these, in the
highest degrees, the real secret is gradually
divulged in a manner apparently the most simple.
For instance in the degree of the Knights Adepts
of the Eagle or the Sun, the Master in his charge
describing the Bible, Compass, and Square, says:–
“By the Bible, you are to understand that it is
the only law you ought to follow. It is that
which Adam received at his creation, and which
the Almighty engraved in his heart. This law is
called natural law, and shows positively that
there is but one God, and to adore only him
without any subdivision or interpolation. The
Compass gives you the faculty of judging for
yourself that whatever God has created is well,
and he is the sovereign author of everything.
Existing in himself, nothing is either good or
evil, because we understand by this expression an
action done which is excellent in itself, is
relative, and submits to the human understanding,
judging to know the value and price of such
action, and that God, with whom everything is
possible, communicates nothing of his will but
such as his great goodness pleases; and
everything in the universe is governed as he has
decreed it with justice, being able to compare it
with the attributes of the Divinity. I equally
say, that in himself there is no evil, because he
has made everything with exactness, and that
everything exists according to his will;
consequently, as it ought to be. The distance
between good and evil, with the Divinity, cannot
be more justly and clearly compared than by a
circle formed with a compass: from the points
being reunited there is formed an entire
circumference; and when any point in particular
equally approaches or equally separates from its
point, it is only a faint resemblance of the
distance between good and evil, which we compare
by the points of a compass, forming a circle,
which circle, when completed, is God!”
From this it will be clear to what the so-called
veneration for die Bible and for religion comes
to, at last, in all Freemasonry. From apparent
agreement with Christianity it ends in Atheism.
In the essentially Jewish symbolism of Masonry,
the Trinity is ignored from the commencement, and
God reduced to a Grand Architect. The mention of
Christ is carefully avoided. By degrees the Bible
is not revelation at all – only the laws written
on the heart of every man by the one God – the
one God, yet, however, somewhat respected. But in
a little while, we find the “one God” reduced to
very small dimensions indeed. You may judge for
yourself by the Compass that God exists in
himself, “therefore” – though it is hard here to
see the therefore – “nothing is either good or
evil.” Here is a blow at the moral law. Finally,
“God”, spoken of with such respect in all the
preceding degrees, is reduced to a nonentity –
“which circle when completed is God.” This is a
perfect introduction on Weishaupt’s lines to
Weishaupt’s Pantheism.
But the theories of Masonry, however developed,
do less practical mischief than the conduct it
fosters. The English, happily for themselves,
are, in many useful respects, an eminently
inconsistent people. The gentry amongst them can
join Freemasonry and yet keep, in the most
illogical manner possible, their very diluted
form of Christianity. It has been otherwise with
the more reasoning Continental Masons. They
either abandon the Craft or abandon their
Christianity. But the morality inculcated by
Freemasonry has done immense damage in
English-speaking countries nevertheless. The very
oath binding a Master Mason to respect the
chastity of certain near relations of another
Master Mason, insinuates a wide field for
licence; and Masons, even in England, have never
been the most moral of men. It leads them, we too
well know, to the neglect of home duties, and it
leads them to an unjust persecution of outsiders,
for the benefit of Craftsmen – a matter more than
once complained of as injurious in trade,
policies, and social life. I need not call to
your mind what mischief – what foul murder – it
has led to in America. I prefer to let Carlile,
the Infidel apologist of dark Masonry, speak on
this point. He says:–
“My exposure of Freemasonry in 1825 led to its
exposure in the United States of America; and a
Mason there of the name of William Morgan, having
announced his intention to assist in the work of
exposure, was kidnapped under pretended forms and
warrants of law, by his brother Masons, removed
from the State of new York to the borders of
Canada, near the falls of Niagara, and there most
barbarously murdered. This happened in 1826. The
States have been for many years much excited upon
the subject; a regular warfare has arisen between
Masons and anti-Masons; societies of and Masons
have been formed; newspapers and magazines
started; and many pamphlets and volumes, with
much correspondence, published; so that, before
the Slavery Question was pressed among them, all
parties had merged into Masons and anti-Masons.
Several persons were punished for the abduction
of Morgan; but the murderers were sheltered by
Masonic Lodges, and rescued from justice. This
was quite enough to show that Masonry, as
consisting of a secret association, or an
association with secret oaths and ceremonies, is
a political and social evil.”
While writing this, I have been informed that
individual members of Orange Lodges have smiled
at the dissolution of their lodges, with the
observation, that precisely the same association
can be carried on under the name of Masonry. This
is an evil that secret associations admit. No
form of anything of the kind, when secret, can
protect itself from abuses; and this is a strong
reason why Masonic associations should get rid of
their unnecessary oaths, revise their
constitutions, and throw themselves open to
public inspection and report. There is enough
that may be made respectable in Masonry, in the
present state of mind and customs, to admit of
scrutinising publicity.
The question of the death of Morgan, and other
unhappy incidents in the history of Freemasonry
in the United States, are very fully treated by
Father Muller, C.SS.R. Yet, strange to say,
notwithstanding anti-Masonic societies being
formed extensively in the Great Republic, and the
horror created by the murder of Morgan, there is
no part of the world where Masonry flourishes
more than in America. I believe it will yet
become the greatest enemy of the free
institutions of that country. I am willing to
admit, however, that Freemasonry has, thank God,
made little progress amongst Catholics in
Ireland, or Catholics of Irish birth or blood
anywhere. This is true, and the same may be said
of millions of Protestants who have not joined
Masonry. But the evil is amongst us for all that,
and it is necessary that we should know what it
is and how it manifests itself.
We know too, that besides the movements which
Masonry has been called upon to serve by means of
Masonic organs, and resolutions inspired by
Atheism, and advocated by its hidden friends
scattered through British lodges, there have been
at all times, at least in London, some lodges
affiliated to Continental lodges, and doing the
work of Weishaupt. Of this class were several
lodges of foreigners and Jews, which existed in
London contemporaneously with Lord Palmerston,
and which aided him in the government and
direction of the secret societies of the world,
and in the Infidel Revolution which was carried
on during his reign with such ability and
success. In the works of Deschamps, a detailed
account will be found of several of these high
temples of iniquity and deadly, anti-Christian
intrigue. But besides Masonry of any description
– and every description, for reasons already
stated, even the most apparently harmless, is
positively bad, bad because of its oaths, because
of its associations, and because of its
un-Christian character – there were other
societies formed on the lines of Illuminated
Masonry under various names in Great Britain, and
especially in Ireland, of which I deem it my duty
while treating of the subject to speak as plainly
as I possibly can.
XXII
FENIANISM
FROM the establishment of Illuminated Masonry,
its Supreme Council never lost sight of a
discontented population in any part of the earth.
Aspiring to universal rule, it carefully took
cognizance of every national or social movement
among the masses, which gave promise of advancing
its aims. It was thus it succeeded with the
operative and peasant population of France, so as
to accomplish the first and every subsequent
revolution in that country. The letters of the
Alta Vendita, and of Piccolo Tigre especially,
have carefully had in view the corruption of the
masses of working men, so as to de-Christianize
them adroitly, and fit and fashion them into
revolutionists. Now amongst all the peoples of
the earth, those who most impeded Atheistic
designs were the Catholics of Ireland. Forced to
leave their country in millions, they brought to
Scotland, to England, to the United States, to
Canada, to the West Indies, to our growing
Colonies – all empires in germ – of Australia,
and as soldiers of England, to India, Africa and
China, the strongest existing faith in that very
religion which Atheistic Freemasonry so much
desires to destroy. It would be impossible to
imagine that the dark Directories of the
Illuminati did not take careful account of this
population. And they did. In the years preceding
1798, they had emissaries, like those sent
subsequently amongst the Catholic Carbonari of
Naples, active amongst the ranks of the United
Irishmen. France, then completely under the
control of the Illuminati, sent aid which she
sorely wanted at home, at the instigation of
these very emissaries, to found an Irish
Republic, of course on the Atheistic lines, upon
which all the Republics then founded by her arms
were established. That expedition ended in
failure; but organisations on the lines of
Freemasonry continued for many years afterwards
to distract Ireland. As in Italy, the Illuminati
had taught the peasantry of Ireland how to
conspire in secret, oath-bound, and, of course,
often murderous, but always hopeless, league
against their oppressors. These societies never
accomplished one atom of good for Ireland. They
did much mischief. But what cared the hidden
enemies of religion for the real happiness of the
Irish? Their gain consisted in placing antagonism
between the faithful pastors of the people and
the members of those secret societies of
Ribbonmen, Molly Maguires, and other such
associations, organized by designing and,
generally, traitorous scoundrels. In 1848, there
was something like a tendency in Ireland to
imitate the secret revolutionary movements
established on the Continent by Mazzini. We had a
Young Ireland Organization. That was not
initiated as a secret society. Neither was the
Society of United Irishmen at first. But the open
United Irishmen led to the secret society; and so
very easily might the Young Ireland movement of
1848, if it had not been prematurely brought to a
conclusion. As it was, it led, without its
leaders desiring it – indeed against the will of
many of them – to the deepest, most cunningly
devised, widespread, and mischievous, secret
organization into which heedless young Irishmen
have been ever yet entrapped. This was the Fenian
Secret Society.
We can speak of the action of the originators of
this movement as connected with the worst form of
Atheistic, Continental, secret-society
organization; for they boasted of having gone
over to France “to study” the plans elaborated by
the most abandoned revolutionists in that
country. For my own part, I believe that these
hot-headed young men, as they were at the time,
never took the initiative themselves, but were
entrapped into this course of action by agents of
the designing Directory of the Atheistic
movement, at that moment presided over by Lord
Palmerston himself. That the association of the
Fenians should be created and afterwards
sacrificed to England, would be but in keeping
with the tradition of the Alta Vendita, in whose
place Lord Palmerston and his council stood. We
read in the life of the celebrated Nubius, the
monarch who preceded Palmerston, that he often
betrayed into the hands of the Pontifical
Government some lodges of the Carbonari under his
own rule, for the purpose of screening himself
and of punishing those very lodges. If he found a
lodge indiscreet, or possessing amongst its
members too much religion to be tractable enough
to follow the Infidel movement, he betrayed it.
He told the Government how to find it out; where
it had its arms concealed; who were its members;
and what were their misdeeds. They were
accordingly taken red-handed, tried, and
executed. Nubius got rid of a difficult body, for
whom he felt nothing but contempt; and his
position at Rome was rendered secure to gnaw, as
he himself expressed it, at the foundations of
that Pontifical power, which thought that any
connection such a respectable nobleman as he was,
might have with assassins, could be only in
reality for the good of religion and the
government, to which by station, education, and
even class-interest he was allied. Palmerston,
too, if he wanted a blind to lead his colleagues
astray, could, in the knowledge to be obtained of
Fenian plots in Ireland and America, have a ready
excuse for his well-known, constant intercourse
with the heads of the Revolution of the world.
What scruple would he have, any more than his
predecessor, Nubius, in urging on a few men whom
he despised, to revolution; and then using means
to strangle their efforts and themselves if
necessary? It was good policy in the sight of
some at least of his colleagues, to manifest
Ireland as revolutionary, especially when such a
man as Palmerston had all the threads of the
conspiracy which aimed at the revolution in his
hand. They knew that he knew where to send his
spies, and thwart at the opportune moment the
whole movement. He could cause insurrections to
be made in the most insane manner, as to time and
place, just as they were made, and cover the
conspirators with easy defeat and ridicule.
However this may be, the Fenian movement after
being nursed in America, appeared in Ireland, as
a society founded upon lines not very unlike
those of the Carbonari of Italy. It was
Illuminated Freemasonry with, of course, another
name, in order not to avert the pious Catholic
men it meant to seduce and destroy from its
ranks. But being what it was, it could not long
conceal its innate, determined hostility to the
Catholic religion; and it proved itself in
Ireland, and wherever it took a hold of the
people in the three kingdoms, one of the most
formidable enemies to the souls of the Irish
people that had ever appeared.
When I say this, do not imagine that I mean for a
single moment to infer, that many of those who
joined it, held or knew its views. If all I have
hitherto stated proves anything, it is this: the
nature of the infernal conspiracy which we are
considering is essentially hypocritical. It comes
as Freemasonry comes, with a lie in its mouth. It
comes under false pretences always. So it came to
Italy under the name of Carbonarism. It came, not
only professing the purest Catholic religion, but
absolutely made the saying of prayers, the
frequentation of the sacraments, the open
confession of the Faith, and devotion to the
Vicar of Christ, a matter of obligation. I do not
believe that Fenianism came to Ireland with so
many pious professions. But it came in the guise
of patriotism, which in Ireland, for many
centuries, was so bound up with religion that in
the minds of the peasantry the one became
inseparably connected with the other. The friend
of the one was looked upon as the friend of the
other; and the enemy of the one was regarded as
the enemy of the other. Hence, in the minds of
the Irish, in my own boyhood, the French who came
over under Hoche, were regarded as Catholic. The
Irish held, that France was then as she was when
the “wild geese” went over to fight for the
Bourbons, a Catholic nation. The truth was, of
course, quite the opposite; but so long had the
Irish people been accustomed to regard the French
as Catholic, that they still cherished the
delusion, and would hear or believe nothing to
the contrary. It was enough, therefore, for
Fenianism to appear in the guise of a national
movement meant to free the country from
Protestant England, that it should without
question be looked upon as – at least in the
first instance – essentially Catholic.
Nevertheless, after its leaders had gone to Paris
to study the methods of the French and Italian
Carbonari, and returned to create circles and
centres on the plan of the Vendita of the
Italians, they showed a large amount of the
Infidel spirit of the men they found in France,
and determined to spread it in Ireland. They well
knew that the Catholic clergy would be sure to
oppose and denounce them as would every wise and
really patriotic man in the country. The utter
impossibility of any military movement which
could be made by any available number of
destitute Irish peasantry succeeding at the time,
was in itself reason enough why any man of
humanity, not to speak at all of the clergy,
should endeavour to dissuade the people from the
mad enterprise of the Fenians. Every good and
experienced Irishman, Smith O’Brien, the editors
of the Nation and others, did so; yet strange to
say, the leaders of the disastrous movement, the
Irish, and the American organizers, were
permitted by the English Government, at least so
long as Lord Palmerston lived, to act almost as
they pleased in Ireland. The Government knew,
that while impotent to injure England, these
agitators and conspirators were doing the work
which English anti-Catholic hate desired to do,
more effectively than any delusion, or bribe, or
persecution which heresy had been able to invent.
They were undermining the Faith of the people and
destroying secretly but surely that love and
respect for the clergy which had distinguished
the country ever since the days of St. Patrick. A
paper edited by one of these men was circulated
for at least two years in the homes of nearly all
the population. It contained, to be sure, much
incitement to revolution; but it contained also
that which in Lord Palmerston’s eyes compensated
for the kind of revolution Fenians could make a
thousand fold – it contained the most able,
virulent, and subtle attacks upon the clergy.
This paper remained undisturbed until Palmerston
passed away and affairs in America made Fenianism
a real danger for his successors in office. Its
issues contained letters written in its own
office, but purporting to come from various
country parishes, calumniating many of the most
venerable of the priests of the people. Men who
so loved their flocks as to sacrifice all for
them during the famine years – men who had lived
with them from youth to old age, were now so
artfully assailed as foes of their country’s
liberation, that the people, maddened and deluded
by such attacks, passed them on the road without
the usual loving salutation Catholics in Ireland
give to and receive from their priests. The Sect
backed up the action of the newspaper. Its
leaders got the “word of command” for that
purpose, and had to be obeyed. Matters proceeded
daily from bad to worse, until at last Divine
Providence manifested clearly the deadly designs
against religion underlying the Fenian movement,
and the people of Ireland recoiled from it and
were saved.
It was hard to keep even the leaders themselves
bad to the end. At death, few of them like to
face the God they have outraged without
reconciliation. But in life these men, like the
informers with whom they are so often in
alliance, do desperate things to deceive first,
and then, for a passing interest, to ruin their
unfortunate dupes afterwards. For my own part, I
am of opinion that the man who deludes a number
of brave young hearts to rush into a murderous
enterprise, hopeless from the outset, is as
dangerous as the man who seduces men to become
assassins and then sacrifices their lives to save
his own neck from the halter. At most there is
but the difference of degree in the guilt and
malignity of the leaders who urged on impetuous
youth to such risings as those of the snowstorms
in 1867, and of the scoundrel who planned
assassination, entrapped and excited the same
kind of youth to execute it, and then swore their
lives away to save himself from his justly
deserved doom. I am led to this conclusion
inevitably from the account given of the Fenian
rising by one of the purest Irish patriots of
this century, one just gone amidst the tears of
his fellow-countrymen, with stainless name after
a career of glorious labour, to his eternal
reward. Mr. Alexander M. Sullivan, in his
interesting “Story of Ireland”, says:
“There was up to the last a fatuous amount of
delusion maintained by the ‘Head Centre’ on this
side of the Atlantic, James Stephens, a man of
marvellous subtlety and wondrous powers of
plausible imposition; crafty, cunning, and quite
unscrupulous as to the employment of means to an
end. However, the army ready to hand in America,
if not utilized at once, would soon be melted
away and gone, like the snows of past winters. So
in the middle of 1865 it was resolved to take the
field in the approaching autumn.
“It is hard to contemplate this decision or
declaration without deeming it either insincere
or wicked on the part of the leader or leaders,
who at the moment knew the real condition of
affairs in Ireland. That the enrolled members,
howsoever few, would respond when called upon,
was certain at any time; for the Irish are not
cowards; the men who joined this desperate
enterprise were sure to prove themselves
courageous, if not either prudent or wise. But
the pretence of the revolutionary chief, that
there was a force able to afford the merest
chance of success, was too utterly false not to
be plainly criminal.
“Towards the close of 1865 came almost
contemporaneously the Government swoop on the
Irish Revolutionary executive, and the deposition
– after solemn judicial trial, as prescribed by
the laws of the society – of O’Mahony, the
American ‘Head Centre’ for crimes and offences
alleged to be worse than mere imbecility, and the
election in his stead of Colonel William R.
Roberts, an Irish American merchant of high
standing and honourable character, whose fortune
had always generously aided Irish patriotic,
charitable, or religious purposes. The deposed
official, however, did not submit to the
application of the society rules. He set up a
rival association, a course in which he was
supported by the Irish Head Centre; and a painful
scene of factious and acrimonious contention
between the two parties thus antagonised, caused
the English Government to hope – nay, for a
moment, fully to believe – that the disappearance
of both must soon follow.”
Mr. A. M. Sullivan, after speaking of the history
of the Fenian movement in America, continues:–
“This brief episode at Ridgeway was for the
confederated Irish the one gleam to lighten the
page of their history for 1866. That page was
otherwise darkened and blotted by a record of
humiliating and disgraceful exposures in
connection with the Irish Head Centre. In autumn
of that year he proceeded to America, and finding
his authority repudiated and his integrity
doubted, he resorted to a course which it would
be difficult to characterize too strongly. By way
of attracting a following to his own standard,
and obtaining a flush of money, he publicly
announced that in the winter months close at
hand, and before the new year dawned, he would
(sealing his undertaking with an awful invocation
of the Most High) be in Ireland, leading the
long-promised insurrection. Had this been a mere
‘intention’ which might be ‘disappointed’, it was
still manifestly criminal thus to announce it to
the British Government, unless, indeed, his
resources in hand were so enormous as to render
England’s preparations a matter of indifference.
But it was not as an ‘intention’ he announced it
and swore to it. He threatened with the most
serious personal consequences any and every man
soever, who might dare to express a doubt that
the event would come off as he swore. The few
months remaining of the year flew by; his
intimate adherents spread the rumour that he had
sailed for the scene of action, and in Ireland
the news occasioned almost a panic. One day,
towards the close of December, however, all New
York rang with the exposure that Stephens had
never quitted for Ireland, but was hiding from
his own enraged followers in Brooklyn. The scenes
that ensued were such as may well be omitted from
these pages. In that bitter hour thousands of
honest, impulsive and self-sacrificing Irishmen
endured the anguish of discovering that they had
been deceived as never had men been before; that
an idol worshipped with frenzied devotion was,
after all, a thing of clay.”
The plottings of the “Head Centre”, however, were
not at an end. Mr. A. M. Sullivan continues:–
“In Ireland, where Stephens had been most
implicitly believed in, the news of this collapse
– which reached her early in 1867 – filled the
circles with keen humiliation. The more
dispassionate wisely rejoiced that he had not
attempted to keep a promise, the making of which
was in itself a crime; but the desire to wipe out
the reproach supposed to be cast on the whole
enrolment by his public defection became so
overpowering, that a rising was arranged to come
off simultaneously all over Ireland on the 5th
March, 1867.
“Of all the insensate attempts at revolution
recorded in history, this one assuredly was
pre-eminent. The most extravagant of the ancient
Fenian tales supplies nothing more absurd. The
inmates of a lunatic asylum could scarcely have
produced a more impossible scheme. The one
redeeming feature in the whole proceeding was the
conduct of the hapless men who engaged in it.
Firstly, their courage in responding to such a
summons at all, unarmed and unaided as they were.
Secondly, their intense religious feeling. On the
days immediately preceding the 5th March, the
Catholic churches were crowded by the youth of
the country, making spiritual preparations for
what they believed would be a struggle in which
many would fall and few survive. Thirdly, their
noble humanity to the prisoners whom they
captured, their scrupulous regard for private
property, and their earnest anxiety to carry on
their struggle without infraction in aught of the
laws and rules of honourable warfare.”
XXIII
CONCLUSION
IN conclusion, it is proper that I
should say a word to you upon the attitude of the
Church at the present moment, in the face of the
forces of the Organized Atheism of the world.
That organization has now arrived at the
perfection of its dark wisdom, and is making
rapid strides to the most complete and universal
exercise of its power. It has succeeded. Through
it the Church is despoiled... The religious
orders are virtually suppressed in nearly every
country of Europe. Freemasonry is supreme in the
governments of France, Spain, Portugal, Italy,
and Switzerland, and works its will in nearly all
the Republics of Southern America. It rules
Germany, terrifies Russia, distracts Belgium, and
secretly gnaws at the heart of Austria.1
Everywhere it advances with rapid strides both in
its secret movements against Catholicism and the
Christian religion generally, and in open
persecution according to the measure of its
opportunity and power. No hope, humanly speaking,
appears on the horizon to warrant us at this
moment to look for a change for the better. But
God has promised never to desert His Church. That
promise never can be broken. When the darkest
hour comes, it is not for Catholics to look for
dissolution, but for life and hope. The crisis in
the conflicts of Christianity is the hour of
victory.
By his immortal Bull, Humanum Genus, Leo XIII has
dealt a death blow to the progress of
Freemasonry, which exerted the utmost efforts of
every kind to keep itself hidden. That it had
power to remain hidden is looked upon by some as
one of the most remarkable evidences of its real
power. Exposure is its death – the death at least
of its influence over its intended dupes amongst
Catholics. Therefore comes the word of command to
us all:– “Tear off the mask from Freemasonry and
make plain to all what it really is.”
Consequently it becomes a plain duty, in season
and out of season, to expose Freemasonry.
ENDNOTES
Foreword
(1) Cf. my book, The Mystical Body of Christ and
the Reorganisation of Society. (2) Translated
from the original Italian as it appeared in Acta
Apostolicae Sedis, Jan. 31, 1949.
(3) The contrast between the Programme of Christ,
the King through His Mystical Body, the Catholic
Church, and the Programme of the Jewish nation
since the rejection of Our Lord Jesus Christ
before Pilate and on Calvary is set out in
parallel columns in my book, The Kingship of
Christ and Organised Naturalism, pp. 52, 53. (4)
Philip II, pp. 308, 309. The Jewish writer,
Bernard Lazare, so remarkable for his hatred of
Our Divine Lord and the Catholic Church, is in
full agreement with William Thomas Walsh, who was
a splendid Catholic. “It is certain”, writes
Lazare, “that there were Jews at the cradle of
Freemasonry – Kabbalistic Jews, as is proved by
some of the rites that have been preserved.
During the years that preceded the French
Revolution, they very probably entered in greater
numbers still into the councils of the society
and founded secret societies themselves. There
were Jews around Weishaupt, and Martinez de
Pasqualis, a Jew of Portuguese origin, organised
numerous groups of Illuminati in France,
recruiting many adepts to whom he taught the
doctrine of reintegration. The lodges founded by
Martinez were mystical, whilst the other orders
of Freemasonry were rather rationalist. This
permits one to say that the secret societies
represented the two sides of the Jewish mind:
practical rationalisation and pantheism.”
(L’Antisémitisme, p. 339). Both sides of the
Jewish mind mentioned by B. Lazare are opposed to
ordered submission to God through Our Lord Jesus
Christ.
(5) Philip II, by W. T. Walsh, p. 315. All those
who have been brought up on “official history”
would do well to examine what took place in the
16th century in the light of what William T.
Walsh reveals in his books, Philip II, Isabella
of Spain and Characters of the Inquisition. (6)
For the manner in which the Jewish nation
exercises control over Freemasonry, see The
Mystical Body of Christ and the Reorganisation of
Society, pp. 234-236. “The Jews have swarmed into
it (Freemasonry) from the earliest times and
controlled the higher grades and councils of the
ancient and accepted Scottish rite since the
beginning of the nineteenth century.” (The X-Rays
in Freemasonry, by A. Cowan, p. 61.)
(7) A full translation of the Encyclical Letter,
Humanum Genus, will be found in my book, The
Kingship of Christ and Organised Naturalism, pp.
55-80. (8) Readers will find the six points
outlined in the opening chapter of The Kingship
of Christ and Organised Naturalism, and on pp.
96-97, the opposing programmes of Christ the King
and of Freemasonry are given in parallel columns.
(9) La Franc-Maçonnerie Française et la
Préparation de la Révolution, by Brother Gaston
Martin. Cf. La Dictature des Puissances Occultes,
by Léon de Poncins, pp. 80-95. (10) L’Entrée des
Israélites dans la Société Française, p. 356. The
significance of the Declaration of 1789 and the
import of the French Revolution are admirably set
forth by this distinguished Jewish convert, in
the work just quoted and in La Prépondérance
juive, Part I. Father Lémann shows that in
promulgating the Rights of Man, the Revolution
knowingly and deliberately eliminated the Rights
of the God-Man, Our Lord Jesus Christ. Amongst
the prominent Freemasons who worked for the
emancipation of the Jews, Father Lémann also
mentions l’abbé Grégoire and Talleyrand, Bishop
of Auten. In his able work, Les Pourquoi de la
Guerre Mondiale (Vol. III, p. 304), Mgr. H.
Delassus says: “The servants of the Jews, the
Freemasons, got this decree voted, but only in
the fourteenth session, after thirteen fruitless
attempts... Thus was this foreign nation
introduced into the bosom of the French nation.”
(11) For an outline of the antecedents and
preparations for the United States of Europe,
see: The United States of Europe Conspirators, by
B. Jensen (published by W. L. Richardson, Lawers,
by Aberfeldy, Scotland. Price 1s.) See also
Hollywood Reds are on “the Run”, by Myron C.
Fagan. (12) The foreword of the White Paper
stated that it was issued in accordance with a
decision of the English War Cabinet in January,
1919. The White Paper speedily became
unobtainable. Later, an abridged edition was
issued, from which the passage quoted had been
eliminated, without any indication of the
omission. No reason was ever given for the
suppression of the original White Paper.
(13) The Jewish writer, Louis Levine, in Soviet
Russia Today (Nov. 1946), wrote: “Stalin and the
father of his prospective Jewish son-in-law drank
‘Lachaim’ together in the Kremlin.” Again, David
Weissman, in an article in The B’nai B’rith
Messenger (March 3, 1950), says that Stalin is a
Jew. Cf. also Judaism and Bolshevism (The Britons
Publishing Society). (14) The universality of
Papal condemnations of Freemasonry is treated by
Fr. Cahill, S.J. in Freemasonry and the
Anti-Christian Movement, pp. 131, 132, 254. See
also The Mystical Body of Christ and the
Reorganisation of Society, pp. 204-223.
(15) Encyclical Letter Humanum Genus, April 20,
1884. (16) Cf. pp. 206, 207 of The Mystical Body
of Christ and the Reorganisation of Society,
where texts are given.
(17) On pages 18-20 of his book, English-Speaking
Freemasonry, Sir Alfred Robbins gives clear proof
of the vagueness of meaning of the “fundamental
Grand Architect of the Universe” as well as of
the fact that Freemasonry is not Christian. He
there writes: “The foundations on which English
speaking Freemasonry so long has stood are a
reverential belief in the Eternal, with an inner
realization of His revealed will and word. It
recognizes that both belief and revelation exist
in many forms... In England many Lodges are
entirely composed of... Jews.” (18) A summary of
what he says is given in my book, The Mystical
Body of Christ and the Reorganisation of Society,
pp. 207-209.
(19) Annual of Universal Masonry (1923), pp.
241-242. (20) La Dictature des Puissances
occultes, p. 236. On page 176 the author gives a
striking example of pressure brought to bear on
the Hungarian government by American Freemasonry,
in order to get Freemasonry restored in Hungary
after the Revolution (1918-1919). Hungarian
Freemasonry had prepared the Revolution, yet the
Anglo-Saxon Brothers championed its cause.
(21) The Home Rule for Ireland Acts of 1914 and
1920, precluded the Irish Parliaments from any
power to “abrogate or prejudicially affect any
privilege or exemption of the Grand Lodge of
Freemasons in Ireland.” (22) According to Art. 44
of the Constitution, the Irish State does not
acknowledge the Catholic Church, for which our
ancestors died, as the One True Church of Christ.
(23) Senator Lehman’s programme for the union of
Ireland under Marxist domination will undoubtedly
be along the lines of The Daily Worker pamphlet,
The Partition of Ireland, June 6, 1949. (24) Cf.
the beautiful Prologue to the Irish Constitution.
(25) The question of the conversion of the Jewish
nation has been beautifully treated by the Jewish
convert priest, Canon Augustine Lémann in his
works, Histoire Complète de l’Idée Messianique,
L’Avenir de Jérusalem. (26) The Jewish writer, B.
Lazare, expressed that quite dearly: “The Jew”,
he said, “is the living testimony of the
disappearance of the State founded on theological
principles, and which the Christian Anti-Semites
dream of reconstructing.” (L’Anti-Sémitisme, p.
361. Italics mine).
Chapter III
(1) L’Église Romaine en face de la Révolution, by
J. Crétineau-Joly, ouvrage composé sur des
document inédits et orné des portraits de Leurs
Saintetés Les Papes Pie VII. Et Pie IX. dessinés
per Stall. Paris, 1861. (2) To show how early the
confederates of Voltaire had determined upon the
gradual impoverishment of the Church and the
suppression of the Religious orders, the
following letters from Frederick II will be of
use. In the first dated 13th August, 1775, the
Monarch writes to the then very aged Patriarch of
Ferney”, who had demanded the secularization of
the Rhine ecclesiastical electorates and other
episcopal benefices in Germany, as follows:– “All
you say concerning our German bishops is but too
true; they grow fat upon the tithes of Sion. But
you know, also, that in the Holy Roman Empire the
ancient usage, the Bull of Gold, and other
antique follies, cause abuses established to be
respected. If we wish to diminish fanaticism, we
must not touch the bishops. But, if we manage to
diminish the monks, especially the mendicant
orders, the people will grow cold and less
superstitious, they will permit the powers that
be to dispose of the bishops in the manner best
suited to the good of each State. This is the
only course to follow. To undermine silently and
without noise the edifice of infatuation is to
oblige it to fall of itself. The Pope, seeing the
situation in which he finds himself, is obliged
to give briefs and bulls as his dear sons demand
of him. The power founded upon the ideal credit
of the faith loses in proportion as the latter
diminishes. If there were now found at the head
of nations some ministers above vulgar
prejudices, the Holy Father would become
bankrupt. Without doubt posterity will enjoy the
advantage of being able to think freely.”
(3) In 1768 Voltaire wrote as follows to the
Marquis de Villevielle:– “No, my dear Marquis,
no, the modern Socrates will not drink the
hemlock. The Socrates of Athens was, between you
and me, a pitiless caviller, who made himself a
thousand enemies and who braved his judges very
foolishly. “Our modern philosophers are more
adroit. They have not the foolish and dangerous
vanity to put their names to their works. Theirs
are the invisible hands which pierce fanaticism
from one end of Europe to the other with the
arrows of truth. Damilaville recently died. He
was the author of ‘Christianism unveiled’, and
many other writings. No one ever knew him.”
(4) See Le Secret de la Franc-Maçonnerie, by Mgr.
A. J. Fava, Bishop of Grenoble, Lille, 1883, p.
38.
Chapter IV
(1) Opus cit. p. 8.
(2) Gougenot des Mousseaux, in his work Le Juif,
le Judaïsme et la Judaïsation des Peuples
Chrétiens (Paris 1869), has brought together a
great number of indications on the relations of
the high chiefs of Masonry with Judaism. He thus
concludes:– “Masonry, that immense association,
the rare initiates of which, that is to say, the
real chiefs of which, whom we must be careful not
to confound with the nominal chiefs, live in a
strict and intimate alliance with the militant
members of Judaism, princes and imitators of the
high Cabal. For that élite of the order–these
real chiefs whom so few of the initiated know, or
whom they only know for the most part under a nom
de guerre, are employed in the profitable and
secret dependence of the cabalistic Israelites.
And this phenomenon is accomplished thanks to the
habits of rigorous discretion to which they
subject themselves by oaths and terrible menaces;
thanks also to the majority of Jewish members
which the mysterious constitution of Masonry
seats in its sovereign counsel.” M.
Crétineau-Joly gives a very interesting account
of the correspondence between Nubius and an
opulent German Jew who supplied him with money
for the purposes of his dark intrigues against
the Papacy. The Jewish connection with modern
Freemasonry is an established fact everywhere
manifested in its history. The Jewish formulas
employed by Masonry, the Jewish traditions which
run through its ceremonial, point to a Jewish
origin, or to the work of Jewish contrivers. It
is easy to conceive how such a society could be
thought necessary to protect them from
Christianity in power. It is easy also to
understand how the one darling object of their
lives is the rebuilding of the Temple. Who knows
but behind the Atheism and desire of gain which
impels them to urge on Christians to persecute
the Church and to destroy it, there lies a hidden
hope to reconstruct their Temple, and at the
darkest depths of secret society plotting there
lurks a deeper society still which looks to a
return to the land of Juda and to the re-building
of the Temple of Jerusalem. One of the works
which Antichrist will do, it is said, is to
reunite the Jews, and to proclaim himself as
their long looked-for Messiah. As it is now
generally believed that he is to come from
Masonry and to be of it, this is not improbable,
for in it he will find the Jews the most
inveterate haters of Christianity, the deepest
plotters, and the fittest to establish his reign.
(3) See section xxi. “Freemasonry with
Ourselves”, pp. 142-154.
Chapter V
(1) Before the celebrated “Convent” of
Wilhelmsbad there was a thorough understanding
between the Freemasons of the various Catholic
countries of Continental Europe. This was
manifested in the horrible intrigues which led to
the suppression of the Society of Jesus in
France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, and Naples; and
which finally compelled Clement XIV to dissolve
the great body by ecclesiastical authority. No
doubt the Jesuits had very potent enemies in the
Jansenists, the Gallicans, and in others whose
party spirit and jealousy were stronger than
their sense of the real good of religion. But
without the unscrupulous intrigues of the
Infidels of Voltaire’s school banded into a
compact active league by the newly-developed
Freemasonry, the influence of the sects of
Christians hostile to the Order could never
effect an effacement so complete and so general.
Anglican lodges, we must remember, appeared in
Spain and Portugal as soon as in France. One was
opened in Gibraltar in 1726, and one in Madrid in
1727. This latter broke with the mother lodge of
London in 1779, and founded lodges in Barcelona,
Cadiz, Vallidolid, and other cities. There were
several lodges at work in Lisbon as early as
1735. The Duke of Choiseul, a Freemason, with the
aid of the abominable de Pompadour, the harlot of
the still more abominable Louis XV, succeeded in
driving the Jesuits from France. He then set
about influencing his brother Masons, the Count
De Aranda, Prime Minister of Charles III of
Spain, and the infamous Carvalho-Pombal, the
alter ego of the weak King of Portugal, to do the
same work in the Catholic States of their
respective sovereigns. The Marquis de L’Angle, a
French Freemason Atheist, and friend of Choiseul,
thus writes of De Aranda – “He is the only man of
which Spain can be proud of at this moment. He is
the sole Spaniard of our days whom posterity will
place on its tablets. It is he whom it will love
to place on the front of all its temples, and
whose name it will engrave on its escutcheon
together with the names of Luther, of Calvin, of
Mahomet, of William Penn, and of Jesus Christ! It
is he who desired to sell the wardrobe of the
saints, the property of virgins, and to convert
the cross, the chandeliers, the patens, &c., into
bridges and inns and main roads.” We cannot be
surprised at what De Aranda attempted after this
testimony. He conspired with Choiseul to forge a
letter as if from the General of the Jesuits,
Ricci, which purported to prove that the King’s
mother was an adulteress, and that the King had
no claim to the Spanish throne. Secretly,
therefore, an order was obtained from the weak
Monarch, and on a given day and hour the Jesuits
in all parts of the Spanish dominions were
dragged from their homes, placed on board ships,
and cast on the shores of the Pontifical States
in a condition of utter destitution. A calumny as
atrocious and unfounded enabled Pombal to inflict
a worse fate on the Jesuits of Portugal and its
dependencies.
Chapter IX
(1) It is commonly believed that the
encyclopaedists and philosophers were the only
men who overturned by their writings altar and
throne at the time of the Revolution. But, apart
from the facts that these writers were to a man
Freemasons, and the most daring and plotting of
Freemasons, we have abundant authority to prove
that other Freemasons were everywhere even more
practically engaged in the same work. Louis
Blanc, who will be accepted as an authority on
this point, thus writes:– “It is of consequence
to introduce the reader into the mine which at
that time was being dug beneath thrones and
altars by revolutionists, very much more profound
and active than the encyclopaedists: an
association composed of men of all countries, of
all religions, of all ranks, bound together by
symbolic bonds, engaged under an inviolable oath
to preserve the secret of their interior
existence. They were forced to undergo terrific
proofs while occupying themselves with fantastic
ceremonies, but otherwise practised beneficence
and looked upon themselves as equals though
divided in three classes, apprentices,
companions, and masters. Freemasonry consists in
that. Now, on the eve of the French Revolution,
Freemasonry was found to have received an immense
development. Spread throughout the whole of
Europe, it seconded the meditative genius of
Germany, agitated France silently, and presented
everywhere the image of a society founded on
principles contrary to those of civil society.”
Mgr. Segur writes on this:– “See to what a point
the reign of Jesus Christ was menaced at the hour
the Revolution broke out. It was not France alone
that it agitated, but the whole of Europe. What
do I say? The world was in the power of Masonry.
All the lodges of the world came in 1781 to
Wilhelmsbad by delegates from Europe, Asia,
Africa and America; from the most distant coasts
discovered by navigators, they came, zealous
apostles of Masonry... They all returned
penetrated with the Illuminism of Weishaupt, that
is Atheism, and animated with the poison of
incredulity with which the orators of the Convent
had inspired them. Europe and the Masonic world
were then in arms against Catholicism. Therefore,
when the signal was given, the shock was
terrible, terrible especially in France, in
Italy, in Spain, in the Catholic nations which
they wished to separate from the Pope and cast
into schism, until the time came when they would
completely de-Christianize them. This accounts
well for the captivities of Pius VI and Pius
VII.”
Chapter X
(1) Alexander Dumas in his Mémoires de Garibaldi,
first series, p. 34, tells us:– “Illuminism and
Freemasonry, these two great enemies of royalty,
and the adopted device of both of which was L. P.
D., lilia pedibus destrue, had a grand part in
the French Revolution. “Napoleon took Masonry
under his protection. Joseph Napoleon was Grand
Master of the Order, Joachim Murat second Master
adjoint. The Empress Josephine being at
Strasbourg, in 1805, presided over the fete for
the adoption of the lodge of True Chevaliers of
Paris. At the same time Eugene de Beauharnais was
Venerable of the lodge of St. Eugene in Paris.
Having come to Italy with the title of Viceroy,
the Grand Orient of Milan named him Master and
Sovereign Commander of the Supreme Council of the
thirty-second grade, that is to say, accorded him
the greatest honour which could be given him
according to the Statutes of the Order.
Bernadottc was a Mason. His son Oscar was Grand
Master of the Swedish lodge. In the different
lodges of Paris were successively initiated,
Alexander, Duke of Wurtemburg; the Prince Bernard
of Saxe-Weimar, even the Persian Ambassador,
Askeri Khan. The President of the Senate, Count
de Lacipede, presided over the Grand Orient of
France, which had for officers of honour the
Generals Kellerman, Messina, and Soult. Princes,
Ministers, Marshals, Officers, Magistrates, all
the men, in fine, remarkable for their glory or
considerable by their position, ambitioned to be
made Masons. The women even wished to have their
lodges into which entered Mesdames de Vaudemont,
de Carignan, de Gerardin, de Narbonne and many
other ladies.” Frère Clavel, in his picturesque
history of Freemasonry, says that, “Of all these
high personages the Prince Cambacérès was the one
who most occupied himself with Masonry. He made
it his duty to rally to Masonry all the men in
France who were influential by their official
position, by their talent, or by their fortune.
The personal services which he rendered to many
of the brethren, the éclat which he caused to be
given to the lodges in bringing to their sittings
by his example and invitations all those
illustrious amongst the military and judicial
professions and others, contributed powerfully to
the fusion of parties and to the consolidation of
the imperial throne. In effect under his
brilliant and active administration the lodges
multiplied ad infinitum. They were composed of
the elect of French society. They became a point
of reunion for the partisans of the existing and
of passed regimes. They celebrated in them the
feasts of the Emperor. They read in them the
bulletins of his victories before they were made
public by the press, and able men organized the
enthusiasm which gradually took hold of all
minds.”
(2) Deschamps says that it was at this period
that the order of the Templars (for Masonry is
divided into any amount of rites which exercise
one over the other a kind of influence in
proportion to the members of the inner grades
which they contain) was resuscitated in France.
It publicly interred one of its members from the
Church of St. Antoine. The funeral oration of
Jacques Molay was publicly pronounced. Napoleon
permitted this. The danger his permission created
was foreseen, and M. de Maistre writes:– “A very
remarkable phenomenon is that of the
resuscitation of Freemasonry in France, so far,
that a brother has been interred solemnly in
Paris with all the attributes and ceremonies of
the order. The Master who reigns in France does
not leave it to be even suspected that such a
thing can exist in France without his leave.
Judging from his known character and from his
ideas upon secret societies, how then can the
thing be explained? Is he the Chief, or dupe, or
perhaps the one and the other of a society which
he thinks he knows, and which mocks him.”
Illustrating these remarks we have the comments
of M. Bagot in his Codes des Franc-Maçons, p.
183:– “The Imperial Government took advantage of
its omnipotence, to which so many men, so many
institutions, yielded so complacently, in order
to dominate over Masonry. The latter became
neither afraid nor revolted. What did it desire
in effect? To extend its empire – “It permitted
itself to become subject to despotism in order to
become sovereign.” This gives us the whole reason
why Masonry first permitted Napoleon to rule,
then to reign, then to conquer, and finally to
fall.
Chapter XI
(1) At the Council of Verona, held by the
European sovereigns in 1822, to guard their
thrones and peoples from the revolutionary
excesses which threatened Spain, Naples, and
Piedmont, the Count Haugwitz, Minister of the
King of Prussia, who then accompanied his master,
made the following speech:– “Arrived at the end
of my career, I believe it to be my duty to cast
a glance upon the secret societies whose power
menaces humanity today more than ever. Their
history is so bound up with that of my life that
I cannot refrain from publishing it once more and
from giving some details regarding it. “My
natural disposition, and my education, having
excited in me so great a desire for information
that I could not content myself with ordinary
knowledge, I wished to penetrate into the very
essence of things. But shadow follows light, thus
an insatiable curiosity develops itself in
proportion to the efforts which one makes to
penetrate further into the sanctuary of science.
These two sentiments impelled me to enter into
the society of Freemasons. “It is well known that
the first step which one makes in the order is
little calculated to satisfy the mind. That is
precisely the danger to be dreaded for the
inflammable imagination of youth. Scarcely had I
attained my majority, when, not only did I find
myself at the head of Masonry, but what is more,
I occupied a distinguished place in the chapter
of high grades. Before I had the power of knowing
myself, before I could comprehend the situation
in which I had rashly engaged myself, I found
myself charged with the superior direction of the
Masonic reunions of a part of Prussia, of Poland,
and of Russia. Masonry was, at that time, divided
into two parts, in its secret labour. The first
place in its emblems, the explanation of the
philosopher’s stone: Deism and non-Atheism was
the religion of these Sectaries. The central seat
of their labours was at Berlin, under the
direction of the Doctor Zumdorf. It was not the
same with the other part of which the Duke of
Brunswick was the apparent chief. In open
conflict between themselves, the two parties gave
each other the hand in order to obtain the
dominion of the world, to conquer thrones, to
serve themselves with Kings as an order, such was
their aim. It would be superfluous to explain to
you in what manner, in my ardent curiosity, I
came to know the secrets of the one party and of
the other. The truth is, the secret of the two
Sects is no longer a mystery for me. That secret
is revolting. “It was in the year 1777 that I
became charged with the direction of one part of
the Prussian lodges, three or four years before
the Convent of Wilhelmsbad and the invasion of
the lodges by Illuminism. My action extended even
over the brothers dispersed throughout Poland and
Russia. If I did not myself see it, I could not
give myself even a plausible explanation of the
carelessness with which Governments have been
able to shut their eyes to such a disorder, a
veritable state within a State. Not only were the
chiefs in constant correspondence, and employed
particular cyphers, but even they reciprocally
sent emissaries one to another. To exercise a
dominating influence over thrones, such was our
aim, as it had been of the Knight Templars. “I
thus acquired the firm conviction that the drama
commenced in 1788 and 1789, the French
Revolution, the regicide with all its horrors,
not only was then resolved upon, but was even the
result of these associations and oaths, &c. “Of
all my contemporaries of that epoch there is not
one left. My first care was to communicate to
William III all my discoveries. We came to the
conclusion that all the Masonic associations,
from the most humble even to the very highest
degrees, could not do otherwise than employ
religious sentiments in order to execute plans
the most criminal, and make use of the first in
order to cover the second. This conviction, which
His Highness Prince William held in common with
me, caused me to take the firm resolution of
renouncing Masonry.”
Chapter XV
(1) Mazzini, after exhorting his followers to
attract as many of the higher classes as possible
to the secret plotting, which has resulted in
united Italy, and is meant to result in
republican Italy as a prelude to republican
Europe, says: “Associate, associate. All is
contained in that word. The secret societies can
give an irresistible force to the party who are
able to invoke them. Do not fear to see them
divided. The more they are divided the better it
will be. All of them advance to the same end by
different paths. The secret will be often
unveiled. So much the better. The secret is
necessary to give security to members, but a
certain transparency is necessary to strike fear
into those wishing to remain stationary. When a
great number of associates who receive the word
of command to scatter an idea abroad and make it
public opinion, can concert even for a moment
they will find the old edifice pierced in all its
parts and falling, as if by a miracle, at the
least breath of progress. They will themselves be
astonished to see kings, lords, men of capital,
priests, and all those who form the carcass of
the old social edifice, fly before the sole power
of public opinion. Courage, then, and
perseverance.” (2) The following extracts from
the rules of the Carbonari of Italy, “Young
Italy”, will give an idea of the spirit and
intent of the order as improved by the warlike
and organizing genius of Mazzini:– ART. I. – The
society is formed for the indispensable
destruction of all the Governments of the
Peninsula and to form of Italy one sole State
under a Republican Government. ART. II. – Having
experienced the horrible evils of absolute power
and those yet greater of constitutional
monarchies, we ought to work to found a Republic
one and indivisible. ART. XXX. – Those who do not
obey the orders of the secret society, or who
shall reveal its mysteries, shall be poniarded
without remission. The same chastisement for
traitors. ART. XXXI. – The secret tribunal shall
pronounce the sentence and shall design one or
two affiliated members for its immediate
execution. ART. XXXII. – Whoever shall refuse to
execute the sentence shall be considered a
perjurer, and as such shall be killed on the
spot. ART. XXXIII. – If the culpable individual
escape, he shall be pursued without intermission
in every place, and he ought to be struck by an
invisible hand, even should he take refuge in the
bosom of his mother or in the tabernacles of
Christ. ART. XXXIV. – Every secret tribunal shall
be competent not only to judge the culpable
adepts, but also to cause to be put to death
every person whom it shall have stricken with
anathema. ART. XXXIX. – The officers shall carry
a dagger of antique form, the sub-officers and
soldiers shall have guns, and bayonets, together
with a poniard a foot long attached to their
cincture, and upon which they will take oath, &c.
A large number of inspectors of police, generals,
and statesmen, were assassinated by order of
these tribunals. The lodges assisted in that
work. Eckert says, La Franc-Maçonnnerie, vol. II,
p. 218, 219: “Mazzini was the head of that Young
Europe and of the warlike power of Freemasonry,
and we find in the Latomia that the minister
Nothorub, who had retired from it, said to M.
Vesbugem, even in the national palace in the
presence of six deputies, that Freemasonry at the
present time in Belgium had become a powerful and
dangerous arm in the hands of certain men, that
the Swiss insurrection had its resting place in
the machinations of the Belgian lodges, and that
Brother Defacqz, Grand Master of these lodges,
had undertaken, in 1844, a voyage to Switzerland,
only in order to prepare that agitation.”
(3) Nubius, who, in conjunction with the Templars
of France, and the secret friends of the
Revolution in England, had caused all the
troubles endured by the Church and the Holy
Father during the celebrated Congress of Rome and
during the entire reign of Louis Philippe, and
had so ably planned the revolutions afterwards
carried out by Palmerston and Napoleon III, was
written to before his death by one of his
fellow-conspirators in the following strain:– “We
have pushed most things to extremes. We have
taken away from the people all the gods of heaven
and earth that they had in homage. We have taken
away their religious faith, their monarchical
faith, their virtue, their probity, their family
virtue; and, meantime, what do we hear in the
distance but low bellowing; we tremble, for the
monster may devour us. We have little by little
deprived the people of all honourable sentiment.
They will be without pity. The more I think on it
the more I am convinced that we must seek delay
of payment.” (4) Opus cit., ii, 23.
Chapter XVI
(1) La Franc-Maçonnerie dans sa véritable
signification, par Eckert, avocat à Dresde, trad.
par Gyr (Liège 1854), t. I., p. 287, appendice.
See also Les Sociétés Révolutionnaires,
Introduction de l’action des Sociétés Secrètes au
XIXe Siècle, par M. Claudio Jannet, Deschamps,
opus cit. xciii.
Chapter XVII
(1) M. Eckert (opus cit.), was a Saxon lawyer of
immense erudition, who devoted his life to
unravel the mysteries of secret societies, and
who published several documents of great value
upon their action. He has been of opinion that
“the interior order” not only now but always
existed and governed the exterior mass of
Masonry, and its cognate and subject secret
societies. He says:– “Masonry being a universal
association is governed by one only chief called
a Patriarch. The title of Grand Master of the
Order is not the exclusive privilege of a family
or of a nation. Scotland, England, France, and
Germany have in their time had the honour to give
the order its supreme chief. It appears that Lord
Palmerston is clothed today (Eckert wrote in Lord
Palmerston’s time) with the dignity of Patriarch.
“At the side of the Patriarch are found two
committees, the one legislative and the other
executive. These committees, composed of
delegates of the Grand Orients (mother national
lodges), alone know the Patriarch, and are alone
in relation with him. “All the revolutions of
modern times prove that the order is divided into
two distinct parties – the one pacific, the other
warlike. “The first employs only intellectual
means – that is to say, speech and writing. “It
brings the authorities or the persons whose
destruction it has resolved upon to succumb or to
mutual destruction. “It seeks for the profit of
the order all the places in the State, in the
Church (Protestant), and in the Universities; in
one word, all the positions of influence. “It
seduces the masses and dominates over public
opinion by means of the press and of
associations. “Its Directory bears the name of
the Grand Orient and it closes its lodges (I will
say why presently) the moment the warlike
division causes the masses which they have won
over to secret societies to descend into the
street. “At the moment when the pacific division
has pushed its works sufficiently far that a
violent attack has chances of success, then, at a
time not far distant, when men’s passions are
inflamed; when authority is sufficiently
weakened; or when the important posts are
occupied by traitors, the warlike division will
receive orders to employ all its activity. “The
Directory of the belligerent division is called
the Firmament. “From the moment they come to
armed attacks, and that the belligerent division
has taken the reins, the lodges of the pacific
division are closed. These tactics again denote
all the ruses of the order. “In effect, they thus
prevent the order being accused of co-operating
in the revolt. “Moreover, the members of the
belligerent division, as high dignitaries, form
part of the pacific division, but not
reciprocally, as the existence of that division
is unknown to the great part of the members of
the other division – the first can fall back on
the second in case of want of success. The
brethren of the pacific division are eager to
protect by all the means in their power the
brethren of the belligerent division,
representing them as patriots too ardent, who
have permitted themselves to be carried away by
the current in defiance of the prescriptions of
the order and prudence.”
(2) In page 340 of his work Le Juif, &c., already
quoted, Gougenot des Mousseaux reproduces an
article from the Political Blätter, of Munich, in
1862, in which is pointed out the existence in
Germany, in Italy, and in London, of directing
lodges unknown to the mass of Masons, and in
which Jews are in the majority. “At London, where
is found the home of the revolution under the
Grand Master, Palmerston, there exist two Jewish
lodges which never permit Christians to pass
their threshold. It is there that all the threads
and all the elements of the revolution are
reunited which are hatched in the Christian
lodges.” Further, des Mousseaux cites the opinion
(p. 368) of a Protestant statesman in the service
of a great German Power, who wrote to him in
December, 1865: “At the outbreak of the
revolution of 1845 I found myself in relation
with a Jew who by vanity betrayed the secret of
the secret societies to which he was associated,
and who informed me eight or ten days in advance
of all the revolutions which were to break out
upon every point in Europe. I owe to him the
immovable conviction that all these grand
movements of ‘oppressed people’, &c., &c., are
managed by a half-a-dozen individuals who give
their advice to the secret societies of the whole
of Europe.” Henry Misley, a great authority also,
wrote to Père Deschamps: “I know the world a
little, and I know that in all that ‘grand
future’ which is being prepared, there are not
more than four or five persons who hold the
cards. A great number think they hold them, but
they deceive themselves.”
(3) Mr. F. Hugh O’Donnell, the able M.P. for
Dungarvan, contributed to the pages of the Dublin
Freeman’s Journal a most useful and interesting
paper which showed on his part a careful study of
the works of Mgr. Segur and other continental
authorities on Freemasonry. In this, he says,
regarding his own recollections of contemporary
events:– “It is now many years since I heard from
my lamented master and friend, the Rev. Sir
Christopher Bellew, of the Society of Jesus,
these impressive word». Speaking of the tireless
machinations and ubiquitous influence of Lord
Palmerston against the temporal independence of
the Popes, Sir Christopher Bellew said:– “Lord
Palmerston is much more than a hostile statesman.
He would never have such influence on the
Continent if he were only an English Cabinet
Minister. But he is a Freemason and one of the
highest and greatest of Freemasons. It is he who
sends what is called the Patriarchal Voice
through the lodges of Europe. And to obtain that
rank he must have given the most extreme proofs
of his insatiable hatred of the Catholic Church.”
“Another illustration of the manner in which
European events are moved by hidden currents was
given me by the late Major-General Burnaby, M.P.,
a quiet and amiable soldier, who, though to all
appearance one of the most unobtrusive of men,
was employed in some of the most delicate and
important work of British policy in the East.
General Burnaby was commissioned to obtain and
preserve the names and addresses of all the
Italian members of the foreign legion enlisted
for the British service in the Crimean War. This
was in 1855 and 1856. After the war these men,
mostly reckless and unscrupulous characters –
“fearful scoundrels” General Burnaby called them
– dispersed to their native provinces, but the
clue to find them again was in General Burnaby’s
hands, and when a couple of years later Cavour
and Palmerston, in conjunction with the Masonic
lodges, considered the moment opportune to let
loose the Italian Revolution, the list of the
Italian foreign legion was communicated to the
Sardinian Government and was placed in the hands
of the Garibaldian Directory, who at once sought
out most of the men. In this way several hundreds
of “fearful scoundrels”, who had learned military
skill and discipline under the British flag, were
supplied to Garibaldi to form the corps of his
celebrated “Army of Emancipation” in the two
Sicilies and the Roman States. While the British
diplomatists at Turin and Naples carried on,
under cover of their character as envoys, the
dangerous portion of the Carbonarist conspiracy,
the taxpayers of Great Britain contributed in
this manner to raise and train an army destined
to confiscate the possessions of the Religious
Orders and the Church in Italy, and, in its
remoter operation, to assail, and, if possible,
destroy the world-wide mission of the Holy
Propaganda itself.”
Chapter XVIII
(1) The late celebrated Mgr. Dupanloup published,
in 1875, an invaluable little treatise, in which
he gave, from the expressions of the most eminent
Masons in France and elsewhere, from the
resolutions taken in principal lodges, and from
the opinions of their chief literary organs,
proofs that what is here stated is correct. The
following extracts regarding education will show
what Masonry has been doing in regard to that
most vital question. Mgr. Dupanloup says:– “In
the great lodge called the ‘Rose of Perfect
Silence’, it was proposed at one time for the
consideration of the brethren:– ‘Ought religious
education to be suppressed?’ This was answered as
follows:– ‘Without any doubt the principal of
supernatural authority, that is faith in God,
takes from a man his dignity, is useless for the
discipline of children, and there is also in it,
the danger of the abandonment of all morality’...
‘The respect, specially due to the child,
prohibits the teaching to him of doctrines, which
disturb his reason’.” To show the reason of the
activity of the Masons, all the world over, for
the diffusion of irreligious education, it will
be sufficient to quote the view of the Monde
Maçonnique on the subject. It says, in its issue
of May 1st, 1865, “An immense field is open to
our activity. Ignorance and superstition weigh
upon the world. Let us seek to create schools,
professorial chairs, libraries.” Impelled by the
general movement thus infused into the body, the
Masonic (French) Convention of 1870 came
unanimously to the following decision:– “The
Masonry of France associates itself with the
forces at work in the country to render education
gratuitous, obligatory, and laic.” We have all
heard how far Belgium has gone in pursuit of
these Masonic aims at Infidel education. At one
of the principal festivals of the Belgian
Freemasons, a certain brother Boulard exclaimed,
amidst universal applause: “When ministers shall
come to announce to the country that they intend
to regulate the education of the people, I will
cry aloud, ‘To me a Mason, to me alone the
question of education must be left, to me the
teaching, to me the examination, to me the
solution.’” Mgr. Dupanloup also attacked the
Masonic project of having professional schools
for young girls, such as are now advocated in the
Australian colonics and elsewhere in
English-speaking countries. At the time, the
movement was but just being initiated in France,
but it could not deceive him. In a pamphlet, to
which all the bishops of France adhered, and
which was therefore called the Alarm of the
Episcopate, he showed clearly that these schools
had two faces, on one of which was written
“Professional Instruction for Girls” and on the
other “Away with Christianity in life and death.”
“Without woman”, said Brother Albert Leroy, at an
International Congress of Masons, in Paris, in
1867, “all the men united can do nothing” –
nothing to effectually de-Christianize the world.
But as we have seen the great aim of the Alta
Vendita was to corrupt woman. “As we cannot
suppress her”, said Vindex to Nubius, “let us
corrupt her with the Church”. The method best
adapted for this was to alienate her from
religion by an infidel education.
Chapter XXI
(1) A curious proof of this fact is preserved in
the records of Dublin Castle, where, upon a
return of the members and officers of
Freemasonry, as it is with us, having been asked
for by the Government, the names of the delegates
from the Irish Lodges to various continental
national Grand Lodges were given. I do not place
much value upon the fact as a means to connect
British Freemasonry with its kind on the
Continent, because the REAL SECRET was, as a
rule, kept from British and Irish Masons. But the
intercourse had an immense effect in causing the
vanguard cries of the Continental lodges to find
a fatal support from British Masons in and out of
Parliament. These delegates brought back high
sounding theories about “education” without
“denominationalism”, etc., etc., but they were
never trusted with the ultimate designs of the
Continental directory to destroy the Throne, the
Constitution, and lastly, the very property of
British Masons. These designs are communicated
only to reliable individuals, who know full well
the REAL SECRET of the sect – and keep it. (2)
The Alta Vendita and the intellectual party in
Masonry have for a long time endeavoured to
revive practices which Christianity did away
with, and which were distinctly pagan. Amongst
others they have made every exertion to destroy
the Christian respect for the dead, and every
respect for the dead which kept alive in the
living the belief in the immortality of the soul.
Death is with man a powerful means to keep alive
in him a wholesome fear of his Creator and
respect for religion. Spiritual writers –
following the advice of the Holy Ghost in the
Scriptures, “Remember thy last end and thou shalt
never sin” – always place before Christians the
thought of death as the most wholesome lesson in
the spiritual life. The demon from the beginning
tried to do away with this salutary thought as
the most opposed to his designs. When Eve feared
to eat the forbidden fruit, it was because of the
terror with which death inspired her The devil
lied in telling her, “No, ye shall not die the
death.” She believed the liar and the murderer.
His followers in the secret societies established
by him, and which he keeps in such unity of aim
and action, second his desire to the utmost by
doing away with whatever may keep alive in man
the thoughts of his last end and of a future
resurrection, and, of course, of Judgment.
Weishaupt taught his disciples to look upon
suicide as a praiseworthy means of flying the
horrors of death and present inconvenience.
Cremation, instantly destroying the terrors of
corruption – the death’s head and crossbones –
the worst features in mortality, as exhibited in
a corpse, is therefore largely advocated by the
secret societies on plausibly devised sanitary,
aesthetic, and economical grounds. But is it a
pagan practice, opposed to that followed ever
since the creation of the world by all that had
the knowledge of the true God in the Primeval,
Jewish, and Christian dispensations. The
Revolution in Italy has established at Rome,
Milan and Naples means of cremating bodies, and
advanced Freemasons, like Garibaldi, have in
their wills, directed that their bodies should be
cremated. When in these days, a distinctive
anti-Christian custom is seen advocated without
any urgent reason in the press, now almost
entirely in the hands of members of the Sect, and
generally Jewish members, Christians may fear
that the cloven foot is in the matter. The cold
water, the ridicule, the contempt thrown upon
religious observances, the attempt to rob them of
their purely Christian character are other
methods employed by the Sects to loosen the
influence of Christianity. In opposition to
these, Christian people should carefully study to
keep the joy of Christmas, the penitential fasts,
the sanctity of holy Week, the splendour of
Easter, the feasts of god’s holy Mother and of
the saints – to fill themselves, in one word,
with the Christian spirit of the Ages of Faith.
Conclusion
(1) According to the Rev. Humphrey J. T. Johnson
in Freemasonry, A Short Historical Sketch
(Catholic Truth Society, July, 1950):– In Italy,
“Mussolini showed himself an implacable opponent
of the order” while “in Germany, the Führer,
convinced that not only Humanitarian but
Christian masonry as well was permeated by the
Judaic spirit, suppressed the latter, as well as
the former, and would not even allow its Grand
Lodges to continue a nominal existence under such
names as the National Christian Order of
Frederick the Great or the Order of Friendship.”
Father Johnson also points out that “with the
defeat of the Axis powers the anti-masonic
movement collapsed.” In Spain under General
Franco and in Portugal under Dr. Salazar,
Freemasonry is forbidden in spite of efforts by
American NATO representatives to establish lodges
there.
Freemasonry must die, or liberty must die." -- Charles G. Finney
FREEMASONRY IS KABBALISTIC, NOT CHRISTIAN!
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of Western magic rests." -- Sandra and Chic Cicero, the authors of "The
Essencial Golden Dawn: An Introduction to High Magic",
page 96. Llewlellyn Publications
"For by thy sorceries were all nations decieved." Rev. 18:23
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"Join me in battle, little children,
against the black beast, Masonry..."
Mother Mary [source: Father Gobbi,
Evolution & Freemasonry]
"THEIR GOD IS THE DEVIL.
THEIR LAW IS UNTRUTH.
THEIR CULT IS TURPITUDE."
Pope Pius IX, speaking of
Freemasonry
"Yea, ye took up the tabernacle of
Moloch,
and the star of your god
Remphan,
figures which ye make to worship
them; and I will carry you away
beyond Babylon." Acts 7:43 KJV
Wherefore come out from among
them, and be ye separate,
saith the Lord, and touch not
the unclean thing.." (II
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