Who does not know, or who does not remember, that the ruler of the world in the period just passed, made use of this vehicle in all the countries he conquered, to delude and deceive the nations with false hopes. And on this account he was styled by his partisans the man of his age, and in fact he was a slave to the spirit of his age. A society, from whose bosom, as from the secret laboratory of Revolution, the Illuminés, the Jacobins, and the Carbonari, have successively proceeded, cannot possibly be termed, or be in fact very beneficial to mankind, politically sound, or truly Christian in its views and tendency. Still I must here observe, that it has been the fate of the oldest of all secret societies, that its venerable forms which are known to all the initiated, should serve as a cloak to every new conspiracy. In the next place, we must not forget that this order itself appears to be split and divided into a multitude of different sects and factions; and that on this account we must not suppose that all those fearful aberrations, and wild excesses of impiety, all those openly destructive or secretly undermining principles of Revolution were universally approved of by this society. On the contrary, such a supposition would be utterly false, or at least, very exaggerated. The mere notice of all the highly estimable characters, mistaken but on this point--of most distinguished and illustrious personages in the eighteenth century, members of this association,--would suffice to annul, or at least materially modify, this sweeping censure. From many indications, we may consider it certain, or at least extremely probable, that in no country did this esoteric society so well harmonize with the state and the whole established order of things, as in that country where all the conflicting elements of morals and society are brought into a sort of strange and artificial equipoise--I mean England. If now we turn our view to the Continent of Europe, and even to those countries which were the chief theatre of the Revolution, we shall see that there, among many other factions, a Christian party had sprung up in this society--a party which, though it formed a very small minority in point of numbers, possessed by its profounder doctrines, and the interesting fragments of ancient tradition it had preserved, a great moral ascendancy; and this many historical facts, and many written documents, which have since obtained publicity, place beyond the shadow of a doubt. Instead of bringing forward the names of some German writers less generally known, I prefer to allege, in confirmation of what I have said, the example of a French writer, who well denotes the internal and more hidden character of the Revolution. The Christian theosophist, St. Martin, who was a disciple of this school, stands in his age quite apart from the other organs of the then prevailing Atheistical philosophy. He was however a most decided Revolutionist, (but a