Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe: carried on in the secret meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and reading societies.Robison, John
History
Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe: carried on in the secret meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and reading societies.
Robison, John
Freemasonry -- Early works to 1800; Illuminati -- Early works to 1800
The book _Des Erreurs et de la Verité_, must therefore be considered
as a classical book of these opinions. We know that it originated
in the _Loge des Chev. Bienfaisants _at Lyons. We know that this
Lodge stood as it were at the head of French Free Masonry, and
that the fictitious Order of Masonic Knights Templars was formed
in this Lodge, and was considered as the model of all the rest of
this mimic chivalry. They proceeded so far in this mummery, as
even to have the clerical tonsure. The Duke of Orleans, his son,
the Elector of Bavaria, and some other German Princes, did not
scruple at this mummery in their own persons. In all the Lodges of
reception, the Brother Orator never failed to exclaim on the topics
of superstition, blind to the exhibition he was then making, or
indifferent as to the vile hypocrisy of it. We have, in the lists
of Orators and Office-bearers, many names of persons, who have had
an opportunity at last of proclaiming their sentiments in public.
The Abbé Sieyes was of the Lodge of Philalethes at Paris, and also
at Lyons. Lequinio, author of the most profligate book that ever
disgraced a press, the _Prejuges vaincus par la Raison_, was Warden
in the Lodge _Compacte Sociale_. Despremenil, Bailly, Fauchet,
Maury, Mounier, were of the same system, though in different Lodges.
They were called Martinists, from a St. Martin, who formed a schism
in the system of the _Chevaliers Bienfaisants_, of which we have not
any very precise account. Mercier gives some account of it in his
_Tableau de Paris_, and in his _Anné_ 2440. The breach alarmed the
Brethren, and occasioned great heats. But it was healed, and the
Fraternity took the name of _Misa du Renis_, which is an anagram of
_des Amis Reunis_. The Bishop of Autun, the man so bepraised as the
benevolent Citizen of the World, the friend of mankind and of good
order, was Senior Warden of another Lodge at Paris, established in
1786, (I think chiefly by Orleans and himself,) which afterwards
became the Jacobin Club. In short, we may assert with confidence,
that the Mason Lodges in France were the hot-beds, where the seeds
were sown, and tenderly reared, of all the pernicious doctrines
which soon after choaked every moral or religious cultivation, and
have made the Society worse than a waste, have made it a noisome
marsh of human corruption, filled with every rank and poisonous weed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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