Grand Orient Freemasonry Unmasked As the Secret Power Behind

That's French for "the ancient system," as in the ancient system of feudal privileges and the exercise of autocratic power over the peasants. The ancien regime never goes away, like vampires and dinosaur bones they are always hidden in the earth, exercising a mysterious influence. It is not paranoia to believe that the elites scheme against the common man. Inform yourself about their schemes here.

Grand Orient Freemasonry Unmasked As the Secret Power Behind

Postby admin » Thu Jan 17, 2019 3:46 am

Grand Orient Freemasonry Unmasked As the Secret Power Behind Communism
by Monsignor George F. Dillon DD. with Preface by The Rev. Denis Fahey, C.S.SP., B.A., D.PH., D.D.
1885 / 1950

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PHOTOGRAPH OF ORIGINAL EDITION PUBLISHED BY MESSRS. M.H.GILL & SON, DUBLIN, IN 1885
The War of AntiChrist With the Church and Christian Civilization. A Review of the Rise and Progress of Atheism; Its Extension Through Voltaire; Its Use of Freemasonry and Kindred Secret Societies for AntiChristian War; The Union and "Illuminism" of Masonry by Weishaupt; Its Progress Under the Leaders of the First French Revolution, and Under Nubius, Palmerston, and Mazzini; The Control of Its Hidden "Inner Circle" Over All Revolutionary Organizations; Its Influence Over British Freemasonry; Its Attempts Upon Ireland; Oaths, Signs, and Passwords of the Three Degrees, Etc., Etc. The Spoliation of the Propaganda.
LECTURES delivered in Edinburgh in October, 1884, by Monsignor George F. Dillon, D.D., Missionary Apostolic, Sydney.
"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."
-- Encyclical Humanum Genus of Leo XIII.

DUBLIN: M.H. GILL & SON, UPPER SACKVILLE-STREET. LONDON AND NEW YORK: BURNS AND OATES.
1885


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DEDICATION

This work is dedicated to the memory of His Holiness Pope Leo XIII whose command to the faithful to "tear away the mask from Freemasonry" inspired the title of the new edition in 1950.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

• PUBLISHERS FOREWORD
• FOREWORD
• I. GOOD VERSUS EVIL
• II. THE RISE OF ATHEISM IN EUROPE
• III. VOLTAIRE
• IV. FREEMASONRY
• V. THE UNION AND "ILLUMINISM" OF FREEMASONRY
• VI. THE ILLUMINISM OF ADAM WEISHAUPT
• VII. THE CONVENT OF WILHELMSBAD
• VIII. CABALISTIC MASONRY OR MASONIC SPIRITISM
• IX. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
• X. NAPOLEON AND FREEMASONRY
• XI. FREEMASONRY AFTER THE FALL OF NAPOLEON
• XII. KINDRED SECRET SOCIETIES IN EUROPE
• XIII. THE CARBONARI
• XIV. PERMANENT INSTRUCTION OF THE ALTA VENDITA
• XV. LETTER OF PICCOLO TIGRE
• XVI. THE INTELLECTUAL AND THE WAR PARTY IN MASONRY
• XVII. LORD PALMERSTON
• XVIII. WAR OF THE INTELLECTUAL PARTY
• XIX. A WAR PARTY UNDER PALMERSTON
• XX. THE INTERNATIONAL, THE NIHILISTS, THE BLACK HAND, ETC.
• XXI. FREEMASONRY WITH OURSELVES
• XXII. FENIANISM
• XXIII. CONCLUSION
• INDEX

"Lying is their rule, Satan is their God, and shameful deeds their sacrifice."

-- Pius VIII, Traditae Humilitati Nostrae, 1829.


Gregory XVI compares the secret societies to a sink in which "are congregated and intermingled all the sacrileges, infamy and blasphemy which are contained in the most abominable heresies."

-- Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos, 1832.


"Those baneful secret sects which have come forth from the darkness for the ruin and devastation of Church and State," Pius IX, Quo Pluribus, 1846, to whom he later applied the words of Our Lord: "You are from your father the devil, and it is the works of your father that you wish to do."

-- Pius IX, Singulari Quadam, 1864.


"You see then before you the two systems .... On the one side is the Church of 'men of goodwill', one, holy, visible and universal; on the other, the ecclesia malignantium, as the Scriptures call it, the Church of men of evil will; one in enmity against the Church of God, though manifold as the multiplicity of evil; unholy in thought, word, deed, intention and will; invisible because secret, stealthy, subterraneous, working out of sight, and in darkness undermining the private purities of homes, the public order of States, the thrones of princes."

-- Cardinal Manning: Rome and the Revolution, 1867.


"Filled with the spirit of Satan, who knows how to transform himself into an angel of light. Freemasonry puts forward as its pretended aim the good of humanity. Paying a lip service to the authority of law, and even to the obligations of religion, it aims (as its own statutes declare), at the destruction of civil authority and of the Christian priesthood, both of which it regards as the foes of human liberty."

-- Leo XIII: Parvenu a la Vingtcinquieme annee, 1902.
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Re: Grand Orient Freemasonry Unmasked As the Secret Power Be

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PUBLISHER'S FOREWORD

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 by 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 seducing men and 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 version 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. 1885).

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 international 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.
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Re: Grand Orient Freemasonry Unmasked As the Secret Power Be

Postby admin » Thu Jan 17, 2019 5:22 am

FOREWORD
by Denis Fahey, C.S.Sp., Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus
June 16, 1950

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. 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 [2], 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, supernational 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 Messias. Since Our Lord Jesus Christ, the True Messias, is the Source of the Supernatural Life through membership of His Mystical Body, the future Messias must be anti-supernatural or naturalistic, and membership of Christ will have to be eliminated in preparation for him. Since the True Supernatural Messias came to found the supranational kingdom of His Mystical Body into which he asked the Jewish nation to lead all nations, the future Messias must be a purely Jewish National Messias 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 diagramatically 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 Messias 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.)" [3]

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." [4]

Jewish Naturalism or Anti-Supernaturalism, by its striving for a new Messianic age, contains a two-fold 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 Messias 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." [5]


From what we know to-day 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)." [6] 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. [7] 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." [8] 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. [9] 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. [10] 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'abbe Joseph Lemann, "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." [11]

By the Revolution of 1789 then, the French State not only decreed the ostracism of the True Supernatural Messias 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. [12] 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." [13]

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. [14]

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. [15] 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." [17]


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 sections 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. [18] Neither does this article mean that English Masonry professes belief in a transcendant God as we know Him, for it is compatible with acceptence of pantheism, that is, with the identification of God with man. [19] 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 Poncins [20]. 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. [21] Thus "between Anglo-Saxon Freemasonry and Latin Freemasonry there are indirect but effective relations which are far closer than is admitted." [22]

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 Messias 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 submasonry trained for anti-Catholic action). [23] 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. [24] 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." [25] If Mgr. Dillon were alive to-day he would tell the Catholic Irish " to remember all (heir obligations to Our Divine Lord Jesus Christ who sustained their fathers through centuries of trial," [26] 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 Messias, 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 Messias. [27]

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 anti-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." [28] 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 easy-going 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."

_______________

Notes:

1. cf. My book, The Mystical Body of Christ and the Reorganisation of Society.

2. This note will be found on page 43 of the present edition.

3. Translated from the original Italian as it appeared in Ada Apostolicae Sedis, Jan, 31, 1949.

4. 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.

5. 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'Antisemitisme, p. 339). Both sides of the Jewish mind mentioned by B. Lazare are opposed to ordered submission to God through Our Lord Jesus Christ.

6. 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.

7. 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.)

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. La Franc-Maconnerie Francaise el la Preparation de la Revolution, by Brother Gaston Martin. Cf. La Dictature des Puissances Occultes, by Leon de Poncins, pp. 80-95.

11. L'Entree des Israelites dans la Societe Francaise, 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 Preponderance juive, Part I. Father Lemann 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 Lemann also mentions l'abbe Gregoire 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."

12. 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 is.) See also Hollywood Reds are on "the Run" by Myron C. Fagan.

13. 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.

14. The Jewish writer, Louis Levine, in Soviet Russia To-day (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).

15. 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.

16. MISSING.

17. Encyclical Letter Humanum Genus, April 20, 1884.

18. Cf. pp. 206, 207 of The Mystical Body of Christ and the Reorganisation of Society, where texts are given.

19. 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."

20. A summary of what he says is given in my book, The Mystical Body of Christ and the Reorganization of Society, pp. 207-209.

21. Annual of Universal Masonry (1923), pp. 241-242.

22. 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.

23. 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."

24. 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.

25. 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.

26. Cf. the beautiful Prologue to the Irish Constitution.

27. The question of the conversion of the Jewish nation has been beautifully treated by the Jewish convert priest, Canon Augustine Lemann in his works, Histoire Complete de l'Idee Messianique, L'Avenir de Jerusalem.

28. The Jewish writer, B. Lazare, expressed that quite clearly: "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-Seraitisme, p. 361. Italics mine).
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Re: Grand Orient Freemasonry Unmasked As the Secret Power Be

Postby admin » Thu Jan 17, 2019 9:18 pm

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.
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Re: Grand Orient Freemasonry Unmasked As the Secret Power Be

Postby admin » Thu Jan 17, 2019 9:18 pm

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 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 Spinosa 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 elite 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.
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Re: Grand Orient Freemasonry Unmasked As the Secret Power Be

Postby admin » Thu Jan 17, 2019 9:19 pm

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 Cretineau-Joly [1] 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 e'crasons nous l'infame, "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 watch-word.

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'infame, ecrasez l'infame." '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 others [2] 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 practice, and even feign a zeal for religion. On the expectation of a pension from the King, he wrote to M. Axgental, 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 following [3]. 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, 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, imposters, 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 speedy 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 Debats, 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.

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Notes:

1. L'Eglise Romaine en face de la Revolution, par J. Cretineau-Joly, ouvrage  compose sur des documents inedits et ome des portraits de Leurs Saintete's  Les Tapes Pie VII. Et Pie IX. dessines 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-Maconnerie, by Mgr. A. J. Fava, Bishop of  Grenoble, Lille, 1883, p. 38.
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Re: Grand Orient Freemasonry Unmasked As the Secret Power Be

Postby admin » Thu Jan 17, 2019 9:21 pm

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 tranquility 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 to-day under the name of Freemasons." For this information Feller refers us to a work entitled Le Voile Leve, by the Abbe 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 Abbe 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 Macons Ecrases — the Abbe 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 Abbe Lefranc believes (Le Voile Leve, 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 Abbe 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 dAnville, 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, perfect 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 roue, 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, encyclopedists, 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.

_______________

Notes:
 
1. Opus cit. p. 8.
 
2. Gougenot des Mousseaux, in his work Le Juif, le Judaisme et la Judaisation des Peuples Chiretiens (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 elite 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. Cretineau-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 re-unite the Jews, and to proclaim himself as their long looked-for Messias. 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.
 
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Re: Grand Orient Freemasonry Unmasked As the Secret Power Be

Postby admin » Thu Jan 17, 2019 9:21 pm

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-Egalite, 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 Egalite. 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 aid [1]; 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 Societies, 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 Memoires sur le Jacobinisme, vol. iv. p. 334, says "that M. Leseure, the father of the hero of La Vendee, 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.

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Notes:

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 Galileans, 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.
 
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Re: Grand Orient Freemasonry Unmasked As the Secret Power Be

Postby admin » Thu Jan 17, 2019 9:22 pm

VI: THE ILLUMINISM OF ADAM WEISHAUPT

BUT the Illuminism of Lyons was destined soon to have a world-wide 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 to-day, we know well enough what to hold. But it was necessary to know 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 to-day, 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-Maconnerie, 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, Germany, and Spain, and of its continuance through the "Illuminated" reigns of Nubius and Palmerston, the successors of Weishaupt to our own day. 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.  
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Re: Grand Orient Freemasonry Unmasked As the Secret Power Be

Postby admin » Thu Jan 17, 2019 9:24 pm

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 succomb 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.
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