puted doctrines. Christ, during his ministry in Palestine, is brought into contact with all known orders of men, Scribes and Doctors, Sadducees and Pharisees, Herodians and followers of the Baptist, Roman officers, insolent with authority, tax-gatherers, the Pariahs of the land; Galileans, the most undervalued of the Jews, Samaritans, hostile to the very name of Jew, rich men clothed in purple, and poor men, fishing for their daily bread; the happy, and those that sat in darkness, wedding parties and funeral parties, solitaries among hills or sea-shores, and multitudes that could not be counted; mighty cities, and hamlets the most obscure; golden sanhedrims, and the glorious temple, where he spoke to myriads of the worshippers, and lone corners, where he stood in conference with a single, contrite heart." Yet, under none of these circumstances, do we hear of any interview betweer. him and the Essenes. They are mentioned by none of his biographers; their name does not occur in the Acts of the Apostles; St. Peter, St. James, and St. Paul, never allude to them; and the Apocalypse of St. John is equally silent. Again, as the same writer is at pains to indicate, there was a singular resemblance between both the doctrine of the Essenes and those of the earlier Christians, and their practical, moral, as well as religious observances. Their hospitality, their antelucan worship, their aversion to marriage, their scrupulosity as to oaths, their faithfulness to friends, and love of peace, their contempt of pain and death, their white robes, their meals, their silence and gravity, and, above all, their lofty and spiritual religious principles, seem but mere echoes of the primitive economy of the Christians, as it is declared to us in the Apostelical constitutions. But, whether the Essenes were Christians or not, we have every reason to infer that the Christians were, at first, a secret society, or, at least, that they cherished a secret discipline and doctrine, which only the initiated were allowed to know. Neander and Mosheim, for certain reasons, pass lightly over the fact, which is abundantly established by Pagan and Christian authorities. Their rites were celebrated in secret, and guarded from profane eyes with jealous vigilance, a peculiar costume of the order was customary, on certain solemn occasions, as when baptism was administered to the

candidates, and secret signs of recognition were used among the members, in order that the dispensers of the fraternal charities might know to whom to administer relief, and that travellers, sojourn ing in strange countries, might discern their true friends.

The origin of Freemasonry is lost in the mist of the ages, or rather in the mist of words which learned men are apt to throw about that exceedingly remote and indefinite period of time. Some_trace it to the Collegia fabrorum of Rome, and others to King Solomon, while Captain George Smith, of the Royal Artillery at Woolwich, cuts the question short (or long rather) by making it coeval with the creation of the globe. "When the Sovereign," says he, “raised on Masonic principles the beauteous globe "* &c., &c. But, as a society, the Masons first attracted attention, during the Middle Ages, when the trades began to be incorporated, as the corporation of the Architects, because they were concerned in the structure of those grand religious edifices, which have come down to us under the name of Cathedrals, at first, assumed a leading and conspicuous position. Confining their mysteries to the secrets of the craft, they were afterwards extended to scientific principles, as their religious tenets. Protected by charters from the clerical and secular powers, and composed of members selected out of all the nations of Europe, they grew into great power, and dropping their technical character, came at last to be mere social and charitable societies, having for their motto, "Brotherly Love, Relief and Truth," and interesting themselves in the establishment of schools, the extension of hospitality, and the practice of a pure morality. The conversion of the world to the principles of social equality and freedom has always been imputed to them as a main design of their organization, by the despots in Church or State, who have from time to time anathematized or persecuted them.

Whether this comprehensive scheme was cherished by the Free-Masons or not, it was confessedly an object with the secret order of the Illuminati, which arose in Germany previous to the French Revolution, and which, as revived by that arch-quack and mystagogue, Count Cagliostro, had, according to Louis Blanc, a great deal to do with the preparation

of that event. Founded in 1776, by Adam Weishaupt, a professor of law at Ingoldstadt, it soon spread over Europe, and sent a shiver through all the established governments. A student of Pythagoras and the Rosicrucians, Weishaupt's primary object appears to have been to organize a movement against the Jesuits, with whom he had had a long and sore quarrel; but he was not slow in giving his order a cosmopolitan extension. A republican, a moralist, and a scholar, he sought to extend republicanism, morality and learning to the whole human family. In order to do this more effectually, he resorted to the known influences of decorations, symbolic initiations, &c., which impress the popular imagination and heart. By these attraction of mystery, by the single power of association, to submit to one will, and to animate with the same breath thousands of men in every country of the globe; to make entirely new beings of these men by a slow and progressive education; to render them obedient to madness, to death, to invisible and unknown leaders; to weigh secretly, with such a legion upon courts, to envelop sovereigns, to direct governments at their pleasure, and to lead Europe to that point, that every superstition should be annihilated, every monarchy abated, every privilege of birth declared unjust, the very right of property abolished, and the equality of the first christians proclaimed-such was the gigantic plan of the founder of the IllumiLati. He appeared, too, at a time most favorable to the adoption of hidden practices. The German mind was agitated with wonders and novelties. A curate named Gassner, who exorcised devils and cured the sick, by simple formalaries, counted almost a million of adherents. At Leipsic immense crowds gatered on the public square to see the ght of the magician Schoffa; numeroas interpretations of the mystic book of the Revelations were circulated; and the Queen of Prussia and her women theruselves maintained that they had seen the White Lady. Thus sensibiEity to the marvellous was widely awake; and thus Weishaupt attracted the simple by their hopes and fears, and the great by their love of pow

er.

Counts, dukes, and noblemen of all grales became his disciples, and a perfect fanaticism, in the cause of en

lightenment in the new light sprang up, when the order was formally suppressed, amid storms of rage and conflict, by the King of Bavaria. But Cagliostro took up its rent and dissevered mantle, and, in that wonderful compound of mesmerism, legerdemain, magic, exorcism and folly, by which he, as the Grand-Kophta, (which Goethe has finely ridiculed) humbugged the visionaries and simpletons of France, restored the order to more than its pristine glory. The story of the Diamond Necklace, with which his impostures were connected, has gone to the ends of the earth, but his own end was in the castle of St. Leo, on the Adriatic, where he languished for three years in the horrible pits of a dungeon, and then gave up the ghost, in 1795.

We have no space now to speak of of the Santa Hermandad of Spain, the Carbonari of Italy, the Lomburg brothers of Denmark, and a score of other secret institutions which have arisen at different times and in different countries; and we refer to those we have named, only as an illustration of one or two important principles. They show that this bent to mysterious brotherhoods is a permanent phenomenon of history, while they help us to explain the causes of their sudden and prodigious success, as well as their inevitable tendency, after a temporary triumph, to dissolution and decay. A great many people ascribe their advent and sway to mere delusion or trickery; but they have a deeper foundation in human nature, for which the cunning of the few and the folly of the many, that easy solution for troublesome problems, will not entirely account. In their origin, the greater number of these associations have been really benevolent, and of sincere and earnest purposes. A true, honest sympathy in the cause of mankind, a chivalric and heroic enthusiasm, and profound religious convictions have often lain at their roots. This was the case with the ancient mysteries, with the Knight Templars, with the Illuminati, with the revolutionary societies of Europe, and with many of our own secret charitable societies. And it was this which mainly fastened upon them the regards and attachments of their followers; for the theory of delusion, of imposture, of a wilful trifling and hocus pocus which certain minds consider amply adequate for the clear

est explanation of whatever is strange or surprising in this strange world, we hold at the cheapest rate. Great and stirring movements-movements which extend over large tracts of space, which conquer a species of perplexity as to time, which, if they do not survive in a continuous line, still reappear with an evident constancy, diving down like a duck in one age (because the sportsman's shot-gun, perhaps, is levelled that way), to come up in another, do not argue a universal and undying gullibility in our race, but deeper principles at work, and striving to get acceptance.

The specific causes of the phenomena we are considering are several, and among the first, the inherent and irrepressible love of our poor human nature for mystery itself-mystery which is consubstantiate, if we may so express it, with the infinite depth and yearnings of our souls. We, all of us, feel at times, with Thomas Brown, as if there were not miracles enough in the universe to fill our boundless capacity for faith. But, without entering in these profounder regions, do we not know that a simple secret, shared between one or two persons, is a bond of union and amity, and a source of peculiar enthusiasm? When the heart of the young man has spoken the word, brooded over in silence so long with tremendous alternations of fear and hopes, to the heart of the maiden, does not the world take on another hue, and fill up with an unwonted glory? What sweet and blessed radiance hovers over the secret nuptial couch, which one glimmer of the day, one prying eye, or one listening ear, would wither and dash into darkness. Speech, says the German proverb, is silvern, but silence is golden. "Bees will not work, except in darkness," says Carlyle; "thought will not work except in silence; neither will virtue work except in secresy." It is not, however, secresy itself, so much as a communion of secresy which weaves the charm. Let the silence and secresy relate not to a few but to a multitude, let it span the earth with its unseen mystic ties, let it trace itself back to hoar and venerable antiquity, and look forwards to the far visionary future, linking the two together by awful truths which dare not be avowed, and yet must be propagated, communicating in the broadest daylight by unseen telegraphs, and stretching out in the gloom of night a bloody hand as in

Spalatro's vision; while back of all there stands a vast, intangible, dark association, woven into a complicated network of affiliated association; having its agents everywhere, omniscient as the eye of Cæsar-omnipotent as the hand of Death, and what a mingled fascina tion of terror and power and glory steals into our thoughts. Connect the idea of benevolence with it, or the watch and ward of some high truth, and the secret spell becomes a grand enchantment. It recalls those imposing oriental fables of subterraneous spirits who guard the sacred treasure beneath the root of the sea; or we think of the mystic virgins, who, in the depths of caves, muffled from human sight,

shelter the flame of life; or fitting images of the everlasting wanderer, who bears from generation to generation, a knowledge of the sorrows and woes of his race, of which he must not wholly unburden his breast, impart a kind of supernatural sublimity, or at least an apparitional and portentous greatness to the conception.

nature.

The symbolism of these societies-the impressive rites and ceremonies-the brilliant decorations-the dignities and orders-is a second cause of the powerful appeal which they make to human Our ordinary life, save under certain exceptional circumstances, is prosaic, but our souls are full of poetry, and glad to escape from its dryness and monotony. We tire of the arid deserts over which, with our halting caravans and heavy merchandise, we pass wearily, and we run like children towards any verdurous plain, or purling brook, though it prove only a fata morgana. Our souls feel themselves regal, while our environments are squalid and beggarly. Lying in mangers-swaddled in rags-toiling as the ox or the ass never toiled-exhausted, overtasked, feeding on huskswith a curtain of drab drawn across the glories of the landscape and the sunrise, we are yet conscious natives of palaces -at home amid flowers, and wine, and music, and dresses studded with gems, and a high and stately intercourse, and a life whose appliances are splendor, and whose motions are graces and harmonies. Even the simulation or mere appearance of these is seductive. Whatever recalls to us a sense of our true destiny-whatever represents it to our imaginations, though intrinsically puerile and flatulent -high-sounding titles-regalia — the pomp of ceremonies-banners, orna

ments-is welcome in the absence of the reality. Not one logical, mensurative faculty," exclaims Teufelsdröckh, "but our imaginative one is king over us; priest and prophet to lead us heavenward, or magician and wizard to lead us hell-ward." The State and the Church have long known this, and addressed themselves to its nice application. By the brilliancy of courts, heraldic coats of arms, military ensigns, the insignia of office, baldricks and caparisons, buttons and decorations, and the magnificence of rites, they have wielded the minds, by first dazzling the imaginations of men. Consider an army without its gay trappings and uniforms, its standards and parades its pomp and glorious circumstance! Consider Catholicism without its robes and cassocks, and painted windows, and gilded altars, and waving incense, and the daily miracle of the host!

Secret societies, in the third place, are often a necessary resort under the lynxeyed and powerful despotisms, which lie in wait for the appearance of new truth. More, perhaps, than any other cause, has this one led to the formation of hidden azencies for the defence and nurture of cherished doctrines and hopes. It is well said by Confucius, that when light came into the world, a thousand spirits of darkness stand ready to seize upon Ler, and strangle her in her birth. Every new truth, especially if it be important truth, which menaces old establishments, or rebukes ancient manners and opinions, has to fight its way inch by inch to general acceptance. Consuming fires of persecution are kindled round it-legions of stipendiaries hang over it with their swords-popular maignity watches it with jealous care-or mitred priests and crowned kings let loose their ubiquitous police of spies and spearmen to dog its track, and arrest, or thwart, or crush out its life. It was for this reason that the early Christians garded so zealously the admissions to the small number of their disciplesthat they celebrated their worship in caves and catacombs, and stole furtively from land to land, like outcasts hunted by dogs, or guilty wretches flying from the presence of their fellows. And it is for this reason, that the aspiring minds of Europe, who would cast from the baks of the people the heavy weight of wrong, which centuries of royal and priestly oppression have heaped upon them, must machinate in secret, must move in the shadow of the woods, or

under the pale light of stars, must bury their papers in tombs, and send their dispatches through the air-and gather adherents by conspiracy-or undermine and elude, and ferret, and circumvent. "Echo must not babble of their whereabouts," nor the lightest footfall betray them to sudden death. Argus, with his hundred eyes, hovers around them, while Briareus, with his hundred hands, is eager to seize them. All the dread machinery of government, all the selfish instincts of power, are their enemies. Ah! what a story of hair-breadth escapes and adventures-of heroic daring, and subtle sagacity-of impossible communications across barriers and cordons finally achieved-insuperable obstacles overcome secrets of cabinets wrung from their inmost archives-espionage submitted to a keener espionage and made to witness unwittingly of facts whose discovery became its despair. What a story of such things could Kossuth and Mazzini tell, if policy permitted them to unseal their lips, and declare the solicitudes and shifts by which the spark of republican freedom has been kept alive and carried over Europe! "Take the young child, and go into Egypt," is a command addressed to all who bear with them a precious deposit of truth.

The last cause to be mentioned of the prevailing disposition to fly into secret organizations, is one that has not been sufficiently dwelt upon by those who have thought or written of the subject. We mean the obvious inability of existing society to meet the wants of the human soul. The actual relations of men to each other, are almost univer sally felt as a burden, if not a curse. The struggles they engender, the long and painful warfare against poverty and disease, the meanness, the falsehood, the competition, the cut-throat conditions of success, the smallness of the recompense when you do succeed, the exaggerated importance given to the mere physical life, and the low estimate put on all kinds of spiritual greatness, the anarchy of opinion in politics, philosophy, and religion, the hollowness of church worship, "the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely;" in short, a thousand flagrant departures from our conceptions of what is just and true, force us to take refuge, not as Hamlet contemplated in the" undiscovered country," but in associations which promise an escape and relief. The harmonies of