nearly four centuries. Christian Rosencreutz died in 1484, and a periodical publication devoted to astrology and other occult lore of the like kind, and which had a brief existence about thirty years ago, stated that the Order of the Rosy Cross was not wholly extinct even then, and had many members in England, as well as on the Continent. It would seem therefore that the Freemasons of the present day repudiate the Templars only on account of the alleged affiliation, which claim has not been set up on behalf of the Rosicrucians, though Freemasonry is not generally credited with a greater antiquity than the seventeenth century, at the beginning of which the Order of the Rosy Cross first became known.

The Carbonari claim descent from the KohlenBrenners of Germany; but it may be regarded as certain that no Carbonaro ever knew anything more of the genealogy than the dim traditions which are known to all who have studied the under-currents of political progress. It is said that the charcoal burners of Germany formed themselves into an association for mutual assistance, and recognised each other by secret signs and pass-words. Their secrets, and the oath which bound them to each other, were called the Faith of the Kohlen-Brenners. Important services rendered to the Order sometimes obtained admission into the society for persons of rank. The organisation must have had an early origin, for Theobald de Brie, who is said to have been one of the honorary members, died in 1066, and, being canonised, became the patron saint of the society-a circumstance which led to his adoption in the same capacity by the modern Carbonari.

The association in the course of time acquired more consistency, and extended its ramifications into France, Flanders, and Holland. Francis I. is said to have been initiated into its secrets when, being separated from his company in the chase, and benighted in an extensive forest, he shared the hospitality of some of its members. The French branch is alleged to have existed in the mountains of the Jura down to the close of the last century, and several members of the provincial parliaments are said to have been enrolled in it between the years 1770 and 1790. The members were called Good Cousins, as the Carbonari afterwards called each other in their lodges.

Whatever may be thought of the evidence of the affiliation of the modern secret societies to those of the Middle Ages, there is no reason for doubting that the descent of the Freemasons from the Templars, and of the Carbonari from the Kohlen-Brenners, has been honestly believed by at least past generations of the modern societies. It is rarely, if ever, that more than a few of the members of a secret society are acquainted with the true date and circumstances of its origin. Hence the Freemasons, though claiming in the seventeenth century an origin for their Order among the masons employed in the building of Solomon's temple, received with avidity in the first half of the eighteenth century the suggestion of Ramsay that it dated from the time of the Crusades, and the statements of adherents of the Swedish system that it was a continuation of the Temple Order. It is obvious. that the Masons, as a body, knew nothing at that time of the Order's origin beyond the fact that it had been grafted at an unknown period upon the guild of

Masons, from which, it is equally obvious, it did not derive its rites and mysteries.

Whence then were the Masonic rites and mysteries derived? It is at least as probable that they have descended from the Templars as that they should have been instituted no longer ago than the seventeenth century, and yet nothing be known concerning their origin. Masonic writers who reject the hypothesis of descent from the Templars throw no light upon the matter; in casting from them that theory they seem to have left themselves entirely in the dark. The vague allusions of the initiatory discourse used in the Swedish system to the Essenes are as little to be regarded as the reference to the mysteries of Eleusis in an address used by the Carbonari, or the statement in the dissertation prefixed to the rules of the A.O.F. that Forestry originated in the garden of Eden.

Though the Masonic Order is, at the present day, counted among the secret forces of the European revolution only by the Pope and the Ultramontane section of the priesthood of Rome, so much of the organisation and the symbolism of the secret societies of the last hundred years has been derived from it, and it forms so important a link of the connexion between the medieval and the modern societies of a secret character, that the foregoing considerations are strictly in place. It may be that the Freemasons of the nineteenth century have no secret doctrine, no aims which distinguish them from the Foresters and the Odd Fellows; but this was not always the case, and I shall now proceed to show how they have served to link the Templars of the fourteenth century with the Illuminati of the eighteenth.

CHAPTER I.

A

THE ILLUMINATI.

T the time when a variety of causes, the respective shares of which in producing the great European convulsion of the last century have formed the theme of hundreds of volumes, were operating towards the production of that tremendous political and social tornado, the professorship of canon law in the university of Ingolstadt, in Bavaria, was held by Dr. Adam Weishaupt, a man possessing moral and intellectual qualities of a rare order, but who had not, in the first year of the period under review, made any mark in the world. He had been educated in a seminary of the Jesuits, and may have owed to his training by priests of that Order the abhorrence of sacerdotal influence which he displayed in after life, as well as much of his skill in the organisation of societies and his aptitude in availing of the capacities of those around him for the furtherance of his aims. He quitted the seminary animated by an inveterate hostility to the Jesuitical system, and, though he devoted himself to the study of the canon law, the influence of such works as the "Contrat Social" of Rousseau is distinctly perceptible in the tone of his letters to his friends Zwackh and Knigge.

The time at which he conceived the idea of

founding a secret Order that should be a counterpoise to the formidable organisation of Loyola cannot be fixed with any degree of precision. The date given by Robison* as that of the institution of the Illuminati is 1775, when the founder was in his twenty-eighth year; but I am disposed to regard this as an error, as Weishaupt is said to have found his first disciples in the lodges of the Masonic Order, of which he was not a brother until two years later, when he was initiated in the Lodge Theodore of Good Counsel, held at Munich.† Findel, who denies the statement of Robison that the first members of the Illuminati were Masons, says that Weishaupt adapted the rites of Masonry and the rules of the Society of Jesus to the purposes with which he founded the new Order, which he could not have done unless he had been himself initiated prior to the commencement of the work with which his name is associated. It is probable therefore that the Order of the Illuminati was not founded, or at least not definitely constituted, until two or three years later than the date assigned by Robison.

No evidence is adduced by Findel in support of his denial that the first members of the Illuminati were Masons, though the fact that Weishaupt was a brother of the latter Order renders it probable that he would seek recruits among the Masonic brethren, and it is well known that speculation on questions of religion and government, and the organisation of

* Proofs of a Conspiracy against Government and Religion by the Illuminati and the Freemasons. London, 1798. Barruel fixes the date a year later than Robison does.

+ Findel's History of Freemasonry.