The way is prepared, too, for a more rational method of living. Houses are built so as to be more comfortable, and the land is better cultivated. Even the pulpit uses its influence to promote improvements of this kind. The theory that reason has been given to man to be used consistently and in every department of life plays at this time an important and beneficent part in the preaching of the Gospel, even if the way in which this is done often makes queer demands on our belief. Sermons, for example, often treated incidentally of the best methods of manuring, irrigating, and draining the fields. That Jenner’s discovery of vaccination was so readily adopted in many districts was due to the enlightenment which was spread abroad by the clergy. Characteristic of the age of rationalism are the private societies formed to promote the moral and utilitarian progress of mankind. In 1717 members of the higher ranks of society in London reorganize as “The Order of Freemasons” the brotherhood which in earlier times had been built up by the union in a single body of the members of the mediæval building-lodges, but was now in a state of decay, and to this new organization was assigned the duty of labouring to build up a new humanity. About the middle of the century this order had spread all over Europe, and reached the zenith of its success. Princes, officials, and intellectuals alike joined it in great numbers, and were inspired by it to the achievement of a huge amount of reform. Similar aims were pursued by the “Order of the Illuminate” (or enlightened) which was founded in Bavaria in 1776, but was suppressed in 1784 by the reactionary Bavarian Government, which was still under the influence [pg 098] of the Jesuits. It is said to have been the intellectual counterpart of the Jesuit order, on the model of whose organization it was formed. That private societies aiming at the rational and moral perfecting of mankind should work effectively seemed to the men of the eighteenth century so much a matter of course that they assumed them to have existed in earlier times. In a series of rationalist descriptions of the life of Jesus it is assumed that the sect of the Essenes, near the Dead Sea, of whom we learn from Josephus, the Jewish writer of the first century A.D., was such an order, and that it was in touch with similar brotherhoods in Egypt and India. Jesus, it is said, was trained by them, and then helped by them to carry through the _rôle_ of the Messiah, in order that with the authority given by a holy yet popular personality he might work to spread true illumination. The famous _Life of Jesus_ by Karl Venturini carries this assumption out in complete detail. According to him, the miracles of Jesus were staged by brothers of this secret association.