Thus it will appear that Tappan became an echo of Morse. As for Timothy Dwight, the contribution he made to the awakening of public interest in the subject of Illuminism requires somewhat stronger statement. In the person of the president of Yale this new idea of a definite and deep-laid conspiracy against religion and civil government encountered a highly sensitized mind. Upon the subjects of infidelity and the general irreligious tendencies of the times, Dwight had been speaking frequently and for years from his lecture-desk in the classroom and from his pulpit in the church. It is safe to say that among all the men of New England no man’s spirit was more persistently haunted by the fear that the forces of irreligion were in league to work general ruin to the institutions of society than his. When, therefore, on the occasion of the Fourth of July, 1798, the people of New Haven assembled to do honor to the day in listening to a sermon by the honored president of their college, it was to be expected that if the latter had any new information to impart or any new pronouncement to make respecting malign efforts that were making to plunge the world into irremediable scepticism and anarchy, he would seize the occasion that the day offered to arouse in his hearers a sense of the new perils which threatened. And President Dwight _had_ new information and a new pronouncement to offer. The subject which he chose to discuss on that Independence Day, and the text upon the elucidation of which he relied for the illumination of the subject, were in themselves calculated to excite concern. These were respectively, THE DUTY OF AMERICANS AT THE PRESENT CRISIS, and “Behold I come as a thief: Blessed is he that watcheth, and keepeth his garments, lest he walk naked, and they see his shame.” (Revelation xvi: 16.)[659] Having first explained the setting of the text, President Dwight then proceeded to define the thesis of his sermon in the following manner: “From this explanation it is manifest that the prediction consists of two great and distinct parts: _the preparation for the overthrow of the Antichristian empire; and the embarkation of men in a professed and unusual opposition to God, and to his kingdom, accomplished by means of false doctrines, and impious teachers_.”[660] The first of these predictions, it was asserted, had been fulfilled in the repressive and secularizing measures that during the century had operated to weaken greatly the Catholic hierarchy and its chief political supports among the states of Europe.[661] The second was experiencing a fulfilment not less remarkable in the open and professed war against God and his kingdom, in which Voltaire, Frederick II, the Encyclopedists, and the Societies of the Illuminati had confederated.[662]