I might fill a volume with extracts from the criticisms which were published on the _Religion Edict_ so often mentioned already. The Leipzig catalogue for one year contained 173. Although it concerned the Prussian States alone, these appeared in every corner of Germany; nay, also in Holland, in Flanders, in Hungary, in Switzerland, in Courland, and in Livonia. This shows it to have been the operation of an Associated Band, as was intimated to the King, with so much petulance by Mirabeau. There was (past all doubt) such a combination among the innumerable scribblers who supplied the fairs of Leipzig and Frankfort. Mirabeau calls it a _Conjuration des Philosophes_, an expression very clear to himself, for the myriads of gareteers who have long fed the craving mouth of Paris (always thirsting after some "new thing") called themselves philosophers, and, like the gangs of St. Giles's, conversed with each other in a cant of their own, full of _morale_, of _energie_, of _bienvillance_, &c. &c. &c. unintelligible or misunderstood by other men, and used for the purpose of deceit. While Mirabeau lived too, they formed a _Conjuration_. The 14th of July 1790, the most solemn invocation of the Divine presence ever made on the face of this earth, put an end to the propriety of this appellation; for it became necessary (in the progress of political Illumination) to declare that oaths were nonsense, because the invoked was a creature of the imagination, and the grand federation, like Wieshaupt and Bahrdt's Masonic Christianity, is declared, to those initiated into the higher mysteries, to be a lie. But if we have no longer a _Conjuration des Philosophes_, we have a gang of scribblers that has got possession of the public mind by their management of the literary Journals of Germany, and have made licentious sentiments in politics, in morals, and in religion, as familiar as were formerly the articles of ordinary news. All the sceptical writings of England put together will not make half the number that have appeared in Protestant Germany during the last twelve or fifteen years. And, in the Criticisms on the Edict, it is hard to say whether infidelity or disloyalty fills the most pages.