At Reading, Massachusetts, on the same occasion, Caleb Prentiss, a non-Mason, told the members and friends of Mt. Moriah Lodge that the lodges were under suspicion as they had never been before.[906] The eyes of the _world_ were now turned upon Masonry. The suspicion that nefarious conspiracies had been formed or countenanced within the lodges was well fixed in the public mind. Masons would need to walk with more than ordinary circumspection. They must sedulously keep themselves spotless from the imputation of such designs, that the craft be not blamed. By striving to show themselves to be lovers of God and mankind, friends of religion, friends of their country, and firm and study supporters of the latter’s civil constitution, government, and laws, they would be able to vindicate the principles, professions, and constitutions of true ancient Masonry.[907] At Ashby, New Hampshire, on the same festival day, an assembly of Masons and their friends listened to a discourse which by way of concessions to the opponents of Masonry outstripped anything that went before or followed after.[908] The Reverend Seth Payson, that fatuous aspirant to literary fame who elected to be a tardy echo of the speculations of Robison, Barruel, and Morse,[909] informed his auditors that while Masonry in its essential principles and constitution had shown itself to be useful to society, unhappily its name, veil of secrecy, symbols, and associative principles had been seized by a body of men in Europe, in order to mask their hellish purposes of eradicating from the human mind “all belief of a God, of a governing providence, of the immortality of the soul, and a future state,—to extinguish every principle of natural and revealed religion and moral sentiments, and to demolish every government but its own.”[910] In all its horrid appendages, the French Revolution was the result of this conspiracy. This “vine of Sodom” was transplanted to the United States: witness the opposition which in this country developed against those “eminent benefactors to mankind in general,” Drs. Robison, Morse, _et al._[911] Without the faithful researches of Morse, in particular, a very much more serious infection of the Masonic body assuredly would have occurred.[912] Such isolated and generally indefinite utterances, it may be urged, are scarcely to be trusted as offering an accurate reflection of the state of the Masonic mind. They do not, however, stand altogether alone. From various and perhaps more solid sources, the evidence is forthcoming that the year 1799 was a year of deep anxiety and concern on the part of the Masons of New England.