"'We are reproached with believing with the sages of old, that Fate is blind, and as such presides over our lot. And why should we not believe it?... Humbling and sad as is this admission, still we must make it: imperceptible elements of the great social organization appearing upon this earth as living beings, fragments of matter agitated by a spirit, we are born, we live, and we die, unconscious of our destiny, playing our part without any precise notion of the end, and in the midst of the darkness which covers our origin and our end, having only one consolation--the love of our fellow-man. "'This simple philosophy alone,' M. Verneuil continues, 'assuages our grief and ends by drying our tears. By the side of the half-open tomb we ask, whether he whom it contains served the good cause without deceit.... If, by his intelligence or his kindness of heart, he labored in the great work, we say he has paid his part of the common debt, and whether he returns to his original nothing or not, whether he is destroyed or merely changes his form, whether he hears our words or not, we thank him in the name of the past and of the future.'" Another distinguished Professor published, in 1866, _Lectures on the Physiology of the Nervous System_, in which we find the following passage: "We admit,' he says, '_without any restriction_, that intellectual phenomena in animals are of the same order as in man....' 'As for _free-will_, we comprehend a certain kind of free-will in the more intelligent animals; and, on the other hand, we may add, that perhaps man is not so free as he would fain persuade himself he is.' And '_as to feeling the distinction between good and evil_, it is a grave question, _which we must first study in man himself!_'" Let it not be supposed that these principles are merely announced as abstractions; conclusions are drawn from them which must fill every thinking mind with horror. Eighty students of the Normal School, the great training institution of teachers for the North of France, applauded such conclusions in a public letter. Several of the infidel Professors of the Faculty of Medicine received ovations from crowded class-rooms; millions of immoral and irreligious books were scattered throughout the country. Thus Freemasonry, under the pretext of combating ignorance, wages a deceitful and implacable war against religion. "We too," says the organ of Freemasons,[E] "we too expect our Messiah, the true Messiah, of the mind and reason--universal education!"