or their possessions, vanished in the presence or under the power of the crown. Thus, every person thought that the parti cular class of the community, to which he belonged, was depressed below its proper level; and even the monarch, though apparently exalted to the highest pinnacle of human greatness, felt some embarrassments from which he most anxiously wished to be delivered. Thus, in France, all descriptions of men concurred in wishing for a material alteration in the form and principles of the government; and though none of them desired the events which have actually taken place, all agreed in desiring, and all readily took part in any operation that was likely to produce, a new order of things. To this discontent of each class of men with its own rank in the state, the situation and temper of the public mind in England forms a most striking contrast. There, however the individual may repine at his particular lot, he is satisfied with the degree of consequence and respect attached to the body to which he belongs. The sovereign is contented with his throne; the noble with the splendid pre-eminence of the peerage; the country gentleman with the deference always shewn to family, and family posses sions; the merchant with the importance and influence of commercial men; and even the poor of England feel a pleasure in thinking that they are the poor of England, and not the poor of another country. This is one of the most comfortable consolations that present themselves to us, when we hear of the probability that a revolution, like that in France, will take place in this country. We see how greatly the French revolution was owing to the circumstance which we have mentioned; and when we reflect that nothing of the kind exists among us, we have the satisfaction of knowing that a principal cause of the lamentable transactions in France is not discoverable in England. When to the preceding consideration we add the general alienation from royalty, produced in the public mind of the French, by the discussions and conversations to which the American war gave rise; the general disbelief in revealed religion, which had been disseminated by the infidel writers; the profligacy of the court; the corruption of the people; the vul gar debauchery of the military; the spirit of resistance to government infused into all ranks by the contests between the sovereign and the parliaments; the unreasonable inequality of the different orders of the nation; and above all, the enormous deficiency of the public treasury, and that there was no legal nor constitutional form or mode of opposition to government; we have perhaps a complete list of the causes of the revolution,APP, REY. VOL. XXIII, "These JOHNSON'S IRENE, These were the prodigies that told its fate, A feeble government, eluded laws, A factious populace, luxurious nobles, And all the maladies of sinking states." If, however, we may credit the publication which now claims. our notice, the real causes of the French revolution are much more recondite and terrible. A sect (says our author) seemed on a sudden to rise from the bosom of the earth.-On its first appearance, it mustered three hundred thousand adepts, with two millions of men armed with torches, pikes, hatchets, and all the thunder-bolts of revolution. Whence did this sect draw its adepts, its systems, its rage against the throne and the altar? Where did it exist before its public appearance? At what school was it educated? Who were its masters? What are its farther projects?~When the French revolution is complete, will this faction cease to torment the earth, to assassi nate kings, to fanaticise nations -The author tells us that he thought it his duty to study the sect, its projects, its systems, its plots, and its means; and to make a public discovery of them is the professed object of his present work. He says that, long before the revolution, a three-fold conspiracy existed, sworn to effect the ruin of the altar, the throne, and all civil society 5 and he thus proceeds: 1st. Many years before the French Revolution, a set of men who obtained the name of Philosophers conspired against the God of the Gospel, against Christianity, without any distinction of Protestant, Catholic, Church-of-England-man, or Presbyterian. The essential object of this conspiracy was to destroy all the altars of Jesus Christ. It was the conspiracy of the sophists of incredulity and impiety. 2d. The sophists of impiety were shortly afterward joined by the sophists of rebellion; and these, associating to the conspiracy of impicty against the altars of Christ, the conspiracy against the thrones of kings, affiliated an antient sect, the machinations of which formed the secrets of the arrere or occult lodges of free masonry. These played with the honest simplicity of the first or primary lodges, and reserved to the elect among the elect the secret of their profound hatred towards the religion of Christ and towards kings. 3d. From the sophists of impiety and rebellion, arose the sophists of impiety and anarchy. Here the conspiracy was no longer directed against the Christian religion only. It was a conspiracy aganist every religion, against even the religion of nature; not a con spiracy against kings alone, but against all government, against all civil society, and even against every species of property. This third sect, under the name of the illuminated, united themselves to the sophists who conspired against Christ, and to the sophists and free masons who conspired against Christ and kings. This coalition of the adeptsof impiety, of the adepts of rebellion, and of the adepts of anarchy, formed formed the club of Jacobins *; and under this name the threefold sect still continues its threefold conspiracy against the altar, the throne, and society in general. Such were the origin, the progress, and the plot, of the sect which has since unhappily become too famous under the denomination of the Jacobins.' The reader will probably smile when he perceives what a part in this tremendous machination is ascribed, by our author, to the free masons:--but he must observe that Abbé BARRUEL supposes that the first or primary lodges were not let into the secret; and he asserts that the arrere or occult lodges were not known in England; so that, at all events, the English free masons are not implicated in the charge.-The Abbé proceeds as follows: • About the middle of the present century, three persons met, and all the three had the most profound hatred of Christianity. They were Voltaire, d'Alembert, and Frederic the 2d, King of Prussia. Voltaire hated the Christian religion, because he was jealous of its author, and of all those to whom it had been a cause of fame; d'Alembert, because his cold heart could love nothing: Frederic, because his knowlege of the Christian religion was derived only from its enemies. To these three we must add a fourth,-Diderot, who hated religion from a love of nature that approached to madness; and because, in his enthusiasm for the chaos of his own ideas, he preferred building chimæras and fabricating his own mysteries, to submitting his faith to the gospel. 6 England has her Hobbeses, her Collinses, her Woollstons, and many other infidels of the same cast: but each of these sophists acts from himself-whatever may have been said by Voltaire or Condorcet to the contrary, nothing has appeared that shews that these writers worked in concert-each of them is impious in his own way: there is no agreement among them: each of them attacks Christianity without advisers and without accomplices: this does not amount to a conspiracy of antichristians. A real conspiracy against Christianity pre-supposes not only a desire of its destruction, but a concert, a plan, in the mode of attacking it, of fighting against it, and of destroying it. When, therefore, I mention Voltaire and Frederic, Diderot and d'Alembert, as the chiefs of the antichristian conspiracy, I do not mean to confine myself to prove that their writings are the writings of impious men against the Christian religion; I assert that each of them had vowed the destruction of the religion of Jesus Christ; that each, in secret, communicated this resolution to the other; that they projected, in concert, the means of carrying it into execution; that they omitted nothing which the political resources of their impiety could suggest, to accomplish their end; that they were the support, the great movers, of the secondary agents who entered into their plot, and, in fine, that, in • * So denominated from holding their meetings in a convent of the order of Jacobins, which they had seized for that purpose." the Qoz the prosecution of it, they acted with all the co-operation, all the ardour, all the perseverance of real conspirators.' The means used by the conspirators to work the downfall of the Christian religion were, according to our author's account, the celebrated publication of the Encyclopædia, their successful labors in effecting the ruin of the Jesuits, their attacks on the religious orders, their influence on the elections of the royal academicians, their innumerable obscene and impious publications, and their efforts to induce the sovereigns to seize the ecclesiastical benefices. He endeavours to make it appear that, among their adepts and disciples, they counted some crowned heads, several princes, a multitude of ministers, a very large proportion of the nobility, magistrates, and men of letters; and that, finally, they corrupted a considerable part of the general body of the people. Such are the contents of the first volume of this curious work. That, in the opinion of many, the author will be thought, in some instances, to indulge his imagination too much, and to have been hasty in his conclusions, it is easy to foresee:-but, after every deduction is made on this account, more than sufficient both of his fact and argument will remain, to establish his assertion of the existence of an antichristian conspiracy. If every other proof of this were wanting, the correspondence of Voltaire, published since his decease, places it beyond controversy. That correspondence has disclosed to the world the important secret, that an alliance between bigotry and infidelity may exist, that the same bosom may contain the seemingly repugnant and incompatible principles of fanaticism and unbelief, that deism and atheism have their zealots as well as superstition, and that, in the ardor of propagating opinions, the modern philosophers of France were not inferior either to the missionaries of the Vatican, or to the disciples of Calvin and Luther. The work before us contains a selection of such parts of the letters of Voltaire, as shew this fact in the clearest light. The author also transcribes various important passages from other writers, and mentions several remarkable facts and anecdotes, that tend to establish the general truth of his position. As an exemplification of this volume, we transcribe the following detached extracts: which we shall give in the language of a translation that has just appeared: In the correspondence of the conspirators there is more than one letter which deposes against the Emperor Joseph II. with all the possible evidence of such testimony, that he was initiated and had been admitted into all the mysteries of the Antichristian Conspiracy by Frederick. In the first of these letters, Voltaire announced his victory in these terms: "You have afforded me great pleasure by reducing the infinite to its real value. But here is a thing far more interesting: Grimm assures us, that the Emperor is one of ours. That is lucky, for the Duchess of Parma, his sister, is against us." In another letter, Voltaire exulting in so important a conquest, writes to Frederick, "A Bohemian of great wit, and philosophy, called Grimm, has informed me that you had initiated the Emperor into our holy mysteries †," In a third in fine, Voltaire, after enumerating the princes and princesses whom he reckoned among the adepts, adds these words: "You have also flattered me with the Emperor's being in the way of perdition; that would be a good harvest for philosophy." This alludes to a letter written by Frederick to Voltaire a few months before, in which he says, "I am setting off for Silesia, and shall meet the Emperor, who has invited me to his camp in Moravia; not to fight as formerly, but to live as good neighbours. He is an amiable prince and full of merit. He likes your works and reads them as much as he can. He is the very reverse of being superstitious. In fine, he is an Emperor such as Germany has not seen long since. We neither of us like the ignorant and barbarous, but that is not a reason for exterminating them §.”— • Many other sovereigns are mentioned in the correspondence of the conspirators, as having imprudently engaged in these plots. D'Alembert complaining to Voltaire of the obstacles he sometimes encountered, and which he terms persecutions, from the public authorities, at length consoles himself by adding, "But we have on our side, the Empress Catherine, the King of Prussia, the King of Denmark, the Queen of Sweden and her son, many princes of the empire and all England ." Much about the same time, Voltaire writes to the King of Prussia, "I know not what Mustapha thinks (on the immortality of the soul); my opinion is, that he does not think at all. As for the Empress of Russia, the Queen of Sweden, your sister, the King of Poland, and Prince Gustavus son of the Queen of Sweden, I imagine that I know what they think ¶."— Immense was the distance between Frederick and this Empress, in whom the conspirators placed so much confidence. Seduced by the talents and homage of their premier chief, Catherine may have been indebted to him for her first taste for literature; she almost devoured those works, which she had mistaken for masterpieces, whether in history or philosophy, totally ignorant of their being disguised solely to forward the ends of impiety. On the fallacious encomiums of the Sophisters, she boldly pronounced, That all the miracles in the world could never efface the pretended blot of having hindered the printing of the Encyclopedia**. But we never see her, like Frederick, to obtain the fulsome flattery of the Sophisters, pay to impiety < No. 162, Nov, 1769.' 1770.' * 28th of Oct. 1769.' 21st of Nov. 1770. 28th of Nov. 1770.' ** Her correspondence with Voltaire, letter 1, 2, 3 and 8.' |