the Illuminés may be orthodox.-Swedenborg an atheist! Cart any assertion be delivered in human language more completely contradictory to the plainest evidence Yet on this the author dwells with perseverance and complacency, as if to astonish were the same as to convince. There are in most countries, which allow any toleration, two diametrically opposite classes of sects. -The one of these tends to more religiousness than is established by law; affects greater industry of observance, and greater scrupulosity of conscience, than fall to the average share of other men; and willingly lengthens its creed by hyperbolical articles of belief, and willingly amuses its leisure by supererogatory rites of devotion: a class which, with respect to morals, is puritanic, with respect to rites, is superstitious, and in regard to doctrines, is credulous. The other and freer class tends to less religion than is claimed by the magistrate; it affects a negligence of observance which avoids the temple, and a robustness of conscience which despises peccadillos, it is continually narrowing its creed towards an almost hair's-breadth tenuity, and curtailing its worship of some (as they deem it) superannuated holiday: comparatively speaking, in morals it is libertine,-in ritual, lax,-in doctrine, sceptical. To the former of these descriptions of sects, some have referred the Swedenborgians, and to the latter the Illuminés. Seets so different are naturally hostile, and ill-adapted to coalesce and to co-operate. When the puritans had rebelled against Charles I. of England, his cause was soon espoused by all the libertine sects; and of late, when the libertine sects had in general declared for the French revolution, they soon repelled and drove into the arms of government the faithful zeal of the Methodists, and of the vital Christians. The religious instinct operates in Germany as here. Go among the puritan sects, they are alarmed at the dissoluteness of the age and the growth of infidelity; they seem to expect that the world itself will shortly be consumed, with its present inheritors. Go among the libertine sects, - they are alarmed at the prolific breed of fanatical extravagance : they quake at the threatened intolerance of sour asceticism; and they seem to expect the barbarous docility of new Attilas to the designing Leos of triumphant superstition. To confound these antagonistic forces is not the part of judgment; and to describe them as conspiring is to err against probability. The Abbé BARRUEL attributes to private information from the very respectable and well-informed Mr. Böttiger, (whom he styles les (p. 245) famous among the Illuminés of Germany, and whom he incorporates (p. 285) with the adept Wieland in the Minerval lodges of Weimar,) the opinion of those English journalists, journalists, who believe it to have been the intention of the German Illuminés to consolidate the multitudinous sovereignties of their country under one-or at most two-representatively constituted governments. With us, this inference has been the immediate result of a perusal of their writings. Sub jects cannot indeed say, even to petty sovereigns, " we wish to cashier you, and you, and you:" but they can write against local jurisdictions, topical laws, geographical parties, villagepatriotism, and invisible frontiers, which change the denominations of right and wrong. It is precisely among the preparatory phrases of this kind, that we should place the position denounced at p. 247: Fürsten und Vaterlands liebe wiedersprechen den weitaussehenden Gesichtspunkten des Ordens. "Love of prince and country withstands the far-sighted views of the Order." To this end again, in our opinion, were directed those literary essays of the aspirants, in which they were de sired to answer the questions-How might an uniform constitution be introduced over all Europe? Would Christianity be necessary for that purpose?-Europe appears in the essay, for reasons of decorum and security: but Germany floats in the imagination of the essayist, where an union of the three Christian denominations was a serious project of the emperor. By a like natural scale of analogy, Rome stands for Vienna, and Nation for a circle or province, in the dictionary of illuminism. The vague phrase "Nations must disappear"-indicates at most a new division of Germany into convenient departments: not, as the Abbé affects to believe, a systematic annihilation of the human race. This can alone be accomplished by that most horrible of all extant and possible conspiracies, a conspiracy to which, if report says true, the Abbé BARRUEL himself is bound by the most solemn of all oaths, a conspiracy imagined perhaps by some starveling anchoret in the untrodden deserts of Thebais; hatched and brooded into practical activity in the subterraneous crypts and chill catacombs of the early Christian worshippers; rearing after a while, with insolent misanthropy, its dispeopling monasteries and infanticidal cloisters in every corner of Europe; and conferring on orbation a triple crown, -the conspiracy of the clergy of the church of Rome to assume, to execute, and to recommend to others, irrevocable vows of celibacy and virginity, tending towards the universal extinction of mankind. We have already observed (Rev. vol. xxv. p. 505) that no satisfactory nor even presumptive evidence has been produced by the Abbé BARRUEL, of an attack on property, science, or * We have met with no evidence for this duplicity of intentions habitual Nn3 habitual order, being a part of the plan of the Illuminés. The symptoms of it, -equivocal, faint, and evanescent as they are,have chiefly resulted from his mistranslations. In addition to those which we formerly exposed, we ought to have noticed the passage extracted by us at p. 508, App. to Rev. vol. xxv. where, in answer to the question: Who has reduced man to this state of slavery? the catechumen answers, Die geselschaft, der staat, die gelehrsamkeit die falsche religion By geselschaft, society, the writer alludes to those distinctions of rank, such as nobility, with which in their opinion, and as it subsists in their country, the present forms of society are encumbered ; by staat, the state, is specified the actual constitution, in contradistinction to government in general; by gelehrsamkeit, erudition, theological literature is exclusively meant; by the epithet falsche religion, it is implied that there is a true religion. Yet in the version of the Abbé B. by employing the word governments for the state, and sciences for erudition, the doctrines of anarchy and of vandalism are hitched and foisted into a passage which contains no trace of either, and are afterward attributed to the Illuminés on the faith of such fabricated evidence. The Abbé often reminds us of those early corrupters of Christianity, who first altered their gospels, and then proved their heresy out of them. It is, however, no corruption of his text, when, on the authority of the informer Cosandey, he ascribes great currency in the order to a maxim in French doggrel: "Tous les rois, et tous les prêtres, There is so much solemn trifling (witness the congress of Wilhelmsbad) among the Illuminés, that we rather suppose these ludicrous jacobinical rhimes to have been a by-word among the students, or the motto of some favourite essay, than that they were ever formally inrolled with the first principles of the Order. At page 259, the Abbé observes that Frederic II. of Prussia was the first to denounce the Illuminés at Munich. That monarch probably suspected them of intending to favor the extension of the Austrian sovereignty over Bavaria. The emperor Joseph II. was popular among the Illuminés. His ecclesiastical reforms were in a great degree concerted with members of their persuasion. Had he lived, and not been deterred by the experience of the French revolution, he would probably have thrown himself wholly under their guidance; have bestowed a mixed but representative constitution on his hereditary states; and have proceeded to incorporate all Germany under his single sceptre. A free constitution was the price at which : which the Illuminés seemed to hold their country at auction; and they would gladly have knocked it down whole to the first Austrian or Prussian sovereign who had the courage to bid. Whatever were the motives of Frederic's denunciation, the Abbé BARRUEL has the cause of a dearly-beloved Order to avenge: the Illuminés had cleared (p. 71) the university of Ingolstadt of all the jesuits. An analogous though hostile body-spirit (esprit du corps) has, in all catholic countries at least, distinguished the philosophers and the jesuits; there, the rival leaders of heretical and orthodox literature. To the natural operation of this spirit, the Abbé BARRUEL gives the name of conspiracy. In his sense of the word, popery was established in England by a conspiracy of Christians, in France by a conspiracy of non-christians, and Christianity itself was founded by a conspiracy of apostles and presbyters. The institution of Christianity, and the abolition of popery, have nevertheless been eventually useful to mankind.-Body-spirit is no doubt an equivocal virtue; yet no sect has ever thriven without it. It is an extension of the principle of fidelity in friendship, to a more numerous description of friends. As we applaud the man who, with some sacrifice of impartiality, defends the character of his friend when attacked, or rescues him from the weight of impending poverty, at an expence which he would not bestow on the equal distress of some more useful man, of some celebrated poet or philosopher, personally unknown; - ought we harshly to blame him who, in proportion to the importance which he attaches to the views of his sect or party, becomes the general panegyrist of its friends, and the general antagonist of its foes? English philosophers, as Mr. Burke very justly observed, have never been gregarious. They have consequently never been efficient. They have fallen singlyby the pin-stabs of old women, unlamented.-Body-spirit often arises from a benevolent sense of the importance of a cause :but it has still oftener been founded by the chieftains of sects, on the vindictive passions of human nature. It has most usually and most powerfully been excited by ascribing it in a high degree to the adversary: which never fails to beget a countereffort, and a spirit of retaliation. This game is now playing, with considerable success, by the Anti-jacobins of England; who are endeavouring to give a paper currency to the once sterling doctrines of passive obedience to the church, and divine authority to the king: they seem to deem public opinion the creature of mechanical agency; and they impute conspiracy against the public constitution and religion, to every admirer of Dr. Adam Smith and Mr. Gibbon. Something of this kind was possibly founded in Germany, under other auspices. Nn4 The The pompous description of the German Union, on which the Abbé enters at p. 322, is little else than the mode of describing in the form of a plot a very innocent and natural process in the republic of letters. The German authors took a pleasure in founding book-clubs and subscription-libraries; and what is more natural than to court an increase of custom ers?-Factions broke out in these literary societies, and pains were taken to secure managers in the interest of the friends of innovation, often with success. This again may very naturally have resulted from a simple pecuniary calculation. Thi The friends of stability usually tend to literary intolerance: they are afraid of new books, particularly of such as make a noise in the world; and if entrusted with the selection of circulating libraries, they frequently reject such books, By those who read for conversation and amusement, these are most desired; and such readers are reduced, therefore, to the costly necessity of perpetual private disbursements in order to procure them, under a system of exclusion. The friends of innovation, on the contrary, are seldom afraid of old books, or even of new-vamp'd defences of what has been defended to satiety: they have the rash con fidence of vanity in the inefficacy of such defences; and their selection of 'books tends, consequently, to be more compre hensive and popular. Booksellers, again, must eventually lean to those writers whose publications most rapidly find an extensive market. Quickness of return is more important to their profit than a slow but eventually entire sale. Their preference of authors who are in favor with the book-societies and eritics was a cool preference of interest; conducive, no doubt, to the farther progress of the popular opinions, but very distinct from any criminal subserviency to them. The number of periodical publications, continually starting up in Germany, was still less the result of a plot to illuminate. Authors like to appear in mass, not in detail; in quarto volumes, not in single sheets: but the booksellers can afford to allow more for the composition of periodical publications, which risk little capital at once, and are continued only while they sell, than for huge works, of which the paper and printing may long remain a dead stock; - and certainly it is for the real interests of literature, that every thing should first incur, in a fugacious form, the criticisms of cotemporaries, before it be laid-by for posterity in a splendid quarto edition. From the importance to booksellers of a quick return, results also the fatiguing effort of authors to give to every thing an amusing form for this end, religion is taught in novels, and philosophy in plays. To all who write books of amusement, the new in opinions, manners, and institutions, is of value: it strikes because it is not familiar. Such writers usually lean |