Such will be the explanation of the revolutionary rage and madness which has levelled beneath its blows such a multitude of majestic and invaluable monuments of the arts and sciences—The cry of indignation rising from every class suspends for a moment the sanguinary crimes of the Jacobin Vandal, and he even pretends to weep.—Wait, and the last mysteries shall be accomplished; wait, and you shall see the awful bodings of the Hierophant fulfilled, and with fire and sword shall he annihilate your laws, your sciences and arts, and erase your towns and habitations.
Here in particular is to be found the origin of that revolutionary ferocity, that thirst of blood, those insatiable proscriptions, those incessant executions, and finally those banishments more artfully cruel than the relentless guillotine. Yes, the time draws near when they shall bind the hands, subjugate, and crush in their origin, what the Sect calls the wicked, or, in other words, all who are proof against their vile efforts; the time for subjugating and destroying every citizen zealous in the cause of Religion, or wishing to support the laws, civil society, or property. Like Huns and Vandals, the Sect has begun its career; but it will carefully avoid terminating it like them; the devastations of its followers
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shall be perpetuated, and they will be Vandals to the last, until Religion, property, and the laws shall be irrecoverably lost. Such atrocious plots are only the consequences of the lesser mysteries; but trust the author of the Sect, the modern Spartacus, for the farther developement of them. Has he not told you, that his last mysteries were but the consequences, a clearer and more absolute exposition of the foregoing secrets of the Order? He informed you, that nations, together with their laws and social institutions, shall vanish, and that they shall disappear before the all-powerful arm of his adepts, or his modern Vandals. What new secret then remains to be discovered, unless it be that no time shall blunt the sword or slack the unrelenting fury of his proselytes; that they shall persevere until the end of time in their Vandalism, lest Religion, society, science, arts, the love of their country, and respect for property, should shoot forth again, and overshadow the venemous growth of his Illuminized Equality and Liberty?
But Spartacus is not to be contented with these last secrets of the Conspiracy; his pride cannot endure that others should usurp the glory of the invention. Hitherto we have seen him play upon the credulity of his adepts, inflame their zeal, and acquire their respect by the pretended antiquity of his Order; and successively attribute the honour of instituting his mysteries to the children of the Patriarchs, the Sages, even to the god of Christianity, and to the founders of the Masonic Lodges. But now the time is come when the adept, initiated in the higher mysteries, is supposed to be sufficiently enthusiastic in his admiration of the Order for the chiefs no longer to fear to disclose the real history of Illuminism. 26 Here they inform him, that this secret society, which so artfully led him from mystery to mystery, which has with such persevering industry rooted from his heart every principle of Religion, all false ideas of love of the country or affection for his family, all pretensions to property, to the exclusive right to riches, or to the fruits of the earth; this society, which took such pains to demonstrate the tyranny and despotism of all that he calls the laws of empires; this society, which has declared him free, and teaches him that he has no sovereign but himself, no rights to respect in others, but those of perfect Equality, of absolute Liberty, and of the most entire independence; this society is not the offspring of an ignorant and superstitious antiquity, it is that of modem philosophy; in a word, it is of our own invention. The true father of Illuminism is no other thanSpartacus Weishaupt.
We must also perceive by many of Weishaupt’s letters, that this latter part of the secret, which attributed to him the whole honour of the invention, always remained a mystery to the greater part of his Mages and Men-Kings. Those alone who, under the title of Areopagites, formed the grand council of the Order, were to be made acquainted with the real chief and founder, except in certain cases where an adept was judged worthy of so distinguished a mark of confidence. 27 Whatever merit the adept might boast, Weishaupt knew no higher recompence than to tell them in the end, “This general
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