which my deep cynicism and detestation of human hypocrisy yet anticipates a banquet of gratification in one day exposing. Oh, the millions of deaf hearts, deaf to everything really impassioned in music, that pretend to admire Mozart ! Oh, the worlds of hypocrites who cant about the divinity of scriptural morality, and yet would never see any lustre at all in the most resplendent of Christian jewels, provided the pagan thief had little disguised their setting. The thing has been tried long before the case of the Essenes; and it takes more than a scholar to detect the imposture. A philosopher who must also be a scholar is wanted. The eye that suspects and watches is needed. Dark seas were those over which the ark of Christianity tilted for the first four centuries; evil men and enemies were cruising, and an Alexandrian Pharos is required to throw back a light broad enough to search and sweep the guilty secrets of those times. The Church of Rome has always thrown a backward telescopic glance of question, of doubt, and uneasy suspicion, upon those ridiculous Essenes, and has repeatedly come to the right practical conclusion-that they were, and must have been, Christians under some mask or other; but the failure of Rome has been in carrying the Ariadne's thread through the whole labyrinth from centre to circumference. Rome has given the ultimate solution rightly, but has not (in geometrical language) raised the construction of the problem with its conditions and steps of evolution. Shall I tell you, reader, in a brief, rememberable form, what was the crime of the hound Josephus, through this fable of the Essenes in relation to Christ? It was the very same crime as that of the hound Lauder in relation to Milton. Lauder, about the middle of the last century, bearing deadly malice to the memory of Milton, conceived the idea of charging the great poet with plagiarismi. He would greatly have preferred denying the value in toto of the 'Paradise Lost.' But, as this was hopeless, the next best course was to sayWell, let it be as grand as you please, it is none of Milton's. And, to prepare the way for this, he proceeded to translate into Latin (but with plausible variations in the expression or arrangement) some of the most memorable passages in the poem. By this means he had, as it were, melted down or broken up the golden sacramental plate, and might now apply it to his own felonious purposes. The false swindling traveste of the Miltonic passage he produced as the undoubted original, professing to have found it in some rare or obscure author, not easily within reach, and then saying-Judge (I beseech you) for yourself whether Milton were indebted to this passage or not. Now, reader, a falsehood is a falsehood, though uttered under circumstances of hurry and sudden trepidation; but certainly it becomes, though not more a falsehood, yet more criminally and hatefully a falsehood, when prepared from afar, and elaborately supported by fraud, and dovetailing into fraud, and having no palliation from pressure and haste. man is a knave who falsely, but in the panic of turning all suspicion from himself, charges you or me with having appropriated another man's jewel. But how much more odiously is he a knave, if with no such motive of screening himself, if out of pure devilish malice to us, he has contrived, in preparation for his own lie, to conceal the jewel about our persons! This was what the wretch Lauder tried hard to do for Milton. This was what the wretch Josephus tried hard to do for Christ. THE ROMAN JUDICIAL SYSTEM. A This would require a separate volume, and chiefly upon this ground-that in no country upon earth, except Rome, has the ordinary administration of justice been applied as a great political engine. Men, who could not otherwise be removed, were constantly assailed by impeachments, and oftentimes for acts done forty or fifty years before the time of trial. But this dreadful aggravation of the injustice was not generally needed. The system of trial was the most corrupt that has ever prevailed under European civilisation. The composition of their courts, as to the rank of the numerous jury, was continually changed: but no change availed to raise them above bribery. The rules of evidence were simply none at all. Every hearsay, erroneous rumour, or atrocious libel, was allowed to be offered as evidence. Much of this never could be repelled, as it had not been anticipated. And, even in those cases where no bribery was attempted, the issue was dependent, almost in a desperate extent, upon the impression made by the advocate. And finally, it must be borne in mind, that there was no presiding judge, in our sense 124 The Expediency Employed by Roman Statesmen.-Secret Societies. of the word, to sum up, to mitigate the THE MORALITY OF EXPEDIENCY EM- The regular relief, furnished to Rome under the system of anarchy which Cæsar proposed to set aside, lay in seasonable murders. When a man grew potent in political annoyance, somebody was employed to murder him. Never was there a viler or better established murder than that of Claudius by Milo, or that of Carbo and others by Pompey, when a young man, acting as the tool of Sylla. Yet these, and the murders of the two Gracchi, nearly a century before, Cicero justifies as necessary. So little progress had law and sound political wisdom then made, that Cicero was not aware of any thing monstrous in pleading for a most villanous act-that circumstances had made it expedient. Such a man is massacred, and Cicero appeals to all your natural feelings of honour against the murderers. Such another is massacred, on the opposite side, and Cicero thinks it quite sufficient to reply, 'Oh, but I assure you he was a bad man-I knew him to be a bad man. And it was his duty to be murdered, as the sole service he could render the commonwealth.' So again, in common with all his professional brethren, Cicero never scruples to ascribe the foulest lust and abominable propensities to any public antagonist; never asking himself any question but this, Will it look plausible? He personally escaped such slanders, because, as a young man, he was known to be rather poor, and very studious. But in later life a horrible calumny of that very class settled upon himself; and one peculiarly shocking to his parental grief; for he was then sorrowing in extremity for the departed lady who had been associated in the slander. Do I lend a moment's credit to the foul insinuation? No. But I see the equity of this retribution revolving upon one who had so often slandered others in the same malicious way. At last the poisoned chalice came round to his own lips, and at a moment when its venom reached his heart of hearts. SECRET SOCIETIES. At a very early age commenced my own interest in the mystery that surrounds Secret Societies; the mystery being often double-1. what they do; and 2. what they do it for. Except for the prema turity of this interest, in itself it was not surprising. Generally speaking, a child may not-but every adult will, and must, if at all by nature meditative-regard, with a feeling higher than vulgar curiosity, small fraternities of men forming themselves as separate and inner vortices within the great vortex of society; communicating silently in broad daylight by signals not even seen; or, if seen, not understood except among themselves; and connected by the link either of purposes not safe to be avowed, or by the grander link of awful truths which, merely to shelter themselves from the hostility of an age unprepared for their reception, are forced to retire, possibly for generations, behind thick curtains of secresy. To be hidden amidst crowds is sublime; to come down hidden amongst crowds from distant generations is doubly sublime. The first incident in my own childish experience that threw my attention upon the possibility of such dark associations, was the Abbé Baruel's book, soon followed by a similar book of Professor Robison's, in demonstration of a regular conspiracy throughout Europe for exterminating Christianity. This I did not read, but I heard it read and frequently discussed. I had already Latin enough to know that cancer meant a crab; and that the disease so appalling to a child's imagination, which in English we call a cancer, as soon as it has passed beyond the state of an indolent schirrous tumour, drew its name from the horrid claws, or spurs, or roots, by which it connected itself with distant points, running underground, as it were, baffling detection, and defying radical extirpation. What I heard read aloud from the abbé gave that dreadful cancerous character to the plot against Christianity. This plot, by the abbe's account, stretched its horrid fangs, and threw out its forerunning feelers and tentacles, into many nations, and more than one century. That perplexed me, though also fascinating me by its grandeur. How men, living in distant pe riods and distant places-men that did not know each other, nay, often had not even heard of each other, nor spoke the same languages-could yet be parties to the same treason against a mighty religion towering to the highest heavens, puzzled my understanding. Then, also, when wickedness was so easy, why did people take all this trouble to be wicked? The how and the why were alike incomprehensible to me. Yet the abbé, everybody said, was a good man; incapable of telling falsehoods, or of countenancing falsehoods; and, indeed, to say that was superfluous as regarded myself; for every man that wrote a book was in my eyes an essentially good man, being a revealer of hidden truth. Things in MS. might be doubtful, but things printed were unavoidably and profoundly true. So that, if I questioned and demurred as hotly as an infidel would have done, it never was that by the slightest shade I had become tainted with the infirmity of scepticism. On the contrary, I believed everybody as well as everything. And, indeed, the very starting-point of my too importunate questions was exactly that incapacity of scepticism-not any lurking jealousy that even part might be false, but confidence too absolute that the whole must be true; since the more undeniably a thing was certain, the more clamorously I called upon people to make it intelligible. Other people, when they could not comprehend a thing, had often a resource in saying, 'But, after all, pehaps it's a lie.' I had no such resource. A lie was impossible in a man that descended upon earth in the awful shape of four volumes octavo. Such a great man as that was an oracle for me, far beyond Dodona or Delphi. The same thing occurs in another form to everybody. Often (you know)-alas! too often one's dear friend talks something, which one scruples to call 'rigmarole,' but which, for the life of one (it becomes necessary to whisper), cannot be comprehended. Well, after puzzling over it for two hours, you say, 'Come, that's enough; two hours is as much time as I can spare in one life for one unintelligibility.' And then you proceed, in the most tranquil frame of mind, to take coffee as if nothing had happened. The thing does not haunt your sleep: for you say, 'My dear friend, after all, was perhaps unintentionally talking nonsense.' But how if the thing that puzzles you happens to be a phenomenon in the sky or the clouds Being something said by nature? Nature never talks nonsense. There's no getting rid of the thing in that way. You can't call that 'rigmarole.' As to your dear friend, you were sceptical; and the consequence was, that you were able to be tranquil. There was a valve in reserve, by which your perplexity could escape. But as to nature, you have no scepticism at all; you believe in her to a most bigoted extent; you believe every word she says. And that very belief is the cause that you are disturbed daily by something which you cannot understand. true, the thing ought to be intelligible. And exactly because it is not exactly because this horrid unintelligibility is denied the comfort of doubt-therefore it is that you are so unhappy. If you could once make up your mind to doubt and to say, 'Oh, as to nature, I don't believe one word in ten that she utters,' then and there you would become as tranquil as when your dearest friend talks nonsense. My purpose, as regarded Baruel, was not tentative, as if presumptuously trying whether 1 should like to swallow a thing, with an arriére pensée that, if not palatable, I might reject it, but simply the preparatory process of a boa-constrictor lubricating the substance offered, whatever it might be, towards its readier deglutition, under the absolute certainty that, come what would, I must swallow it, that result, whether easy or not easy, being one that finally followed at any rate. The person who chiefly introduced me to Baruel was a lady, a stern lady, and austere, not only in her manners, which made most people dislike her, but also in the character of her understanding and morals -an advantage which made some people afraid of her. Me, however, she treated with unusual indulgence; chiefly, I believe, because I kept her intellectuals in a state of exercise, nearly amounting to persecution. She was just five times my age when our warfare of disputation commenced-I being seven, she thirty-five; and she was not quite four times my age when our warfare terminated by sudden separation-I being then ten, and she thirty-eight. This change, by the way, in the multiple that expressed her chronological relations to myself, used greatly to puzzle me; because, as the interval between us had diminished, within the memory of man, so rapidly, that, from being five times younger, I found myself less than four times younger, the natural infe rence seemed to be, that, in a few years, I should not be younger at all, but might come to be the older of the two; in which case, I should certainly have 'taken my change' out of the airs she continually gave herself on the score of closer logic, but especially of longer 'experience.' That decisive word 'experience was, indeed, always a sure sign to me that I had the better of the argument, and that it had become necessary, therefore, suddenly to pull me up in the career of victory by a violent exertion of authority; as a knight of old, at the very moment when he would else have unhorsed his opponent, was often frozen into unjust inactivity by the king's arbitrary signal for parting the tilters. It was, however, only when very hard pressed that my fair (or rather brown) antagonist took this not fair advantage in our daily tournaments. Generally, and if I showed any moderation in the assault, she was rather pleased with the sharp rattle of my rolling musketry. Objections she rather liked; and questions, as many as one pleased, upon the pour quoi, if one did not go on to le pourquoi du pourquoi. That, she said, was carrying things too far: excess in everything she disapproved. Now, there I differed from her: excess was the thing I doated on. The fun seemed to me only beginning, when she asserted that it had already 'overstepped the limits of propriety.' Ha! those limits, I thought, were soon reached. But, however much or often I might vault over the limits of propriety, or might seem to challenge both her and the abbé -all this was but anxiety to reconcile my own secret belief in the abbé with the strong arguments for not believing; it was but the form assumed by my earnest desire to see how the learned gentleman could be right, whom my intense faith certified beyond all doubt to be so, and whom, equally, my perverse logical recusancy whispered to be continually in the wrong. I wished to see my own rebellious arguments, which I really sorrowed over and bemoaned, knocked down like ninepins; shown to be softer than cotton, frailer than glass, and utterly worthless in the eye of reason. All this, indeed, the stern lady assured me that she had shown over and over again. Well, it might be so; and to this, at any rate, as a decree of court, I saw a worldly prudence in submitting. But, probably, I must have looked rather grim, and have wished devoutly for one fair turn-up, on Salisbury Plain, with herself and the abbé, in which case my heart told me how earnestly I should pray that they might for ever floor me, but how melancholy a conviction oppressed my spirits that my destiny was to floor them. Victorious, I should find my belief and my understanding in painful schism: since my arguments, which I so much wished to see refuted, would on that assumption be triumphant; on the other hand, beaten and demolished, I should find my whole nature in harmony with itself. The mysteriousness to me of men becoming partners (and by no means sleeping partners) in a society of which they had never heard; or, again, of one fellow standing at the beginning of a century, and stretching out his hand as an accomplice towards another fellow standing at the end of it, without either having known of the other's existence-all that did but sharpen the interest of wonder that gathered about the general economy of Secret Societies. Tertullian's profession of believing things, not in spite of being impossible, but simply because they were impossible, is not the extravagance that most people suppose it. There is a deep truth in it. Many are the things which, in proportion as they attract the highest modes of belief, discover a tendency to repel belief on that part of the scale which is governed by the lower understanding. And here, as so often elsewhere, the axiom, with respect to extremes meeting, manifests its subtle presence. The highest form of the incredible is sometimes the initial form of the credible. But the point on which our irreconcilability was greatest respected the cui bono (the ultimate purpose) of this alleged conspiracy. What were the conspirators to gain by success? and nobody pretended that they could gain anything by failure. The lady replied that, by obliterating the light of Christianity, they prepared the readiest opening for the unlimited gratification of their odious appetites and passions. But to this the retort was too obvious to escape anybody, and for me it threw itself into the form of that pleasant story reported from the life of Pyrrhus the Epirot-namely, that one day, upon a friend requesting to know what ulterior purpose the king might mask under his expedition to Sicily, Why, after that is finished,' replied the king, 'I mean to administer a little cor rection (very much wanted) to certain parts of Italy, and particularly to that nest of rascals in Latium.'-'And then 'said the friend: 'And then,' said Pyrrhus, next we go for Macedon; and after that job's jobbed, next, of course, for Greece.'-'Which done - 'said the friend: Which done,' interrupted the king, as done it shall be, then we're off to tickle the Egyptians.'-'Whom having tickled,' pursued the friend, 'then we -': 'Tickle the Persians,' said the king. -But after that is done,' urged the obstinate friend, whither next?'-'Why, really man, it's hard to say; you give one no time to breathe; but we'll consider the case as soon as we come to Persia; and, until we've settled it, we can crown ourselves with roses, and pass the time pleasantly enough over the best wine to be found in Ecbatana.'—'That's a very just idea,' replied the friend; 'but, with submission, it strikes me that we might do that just now, and at the beginning of all these tedious wars, instead of waiting for their end.'-'Bless me!' said Pyrrhus, 'if ever I thought of that before. Why, man, you're a conjurer; you have discovered a mine of happiness. So, here, boy, bring us roses and plenty of Cretan wine.' Surely, on the same principle, these French Encyclopédistes, and Bavarian Illuminati, did not need to postpone any jubilees of licentiousness which they promised themselves to so very indefinite a period as their ovation over the ruins of Christianity. True, the impulse of hatred, even though irrational, may be a stronger force for action than any motive of hatred, however rational or grounded in self-interest. But the particular motive relied upon by the stern lady as the central spring of the antichristian movement, being obviously insufficient for the weight which it had to sustain, naturally the lady, growing sensible of this herself, became still sterner; very angry with me; and not quite satisfied, in this instance, with the abbé. Yet, after all, it was not any embittered remembrance of our eternal feuds, in dusting the jacket of the Abbé Baruel, that lost me, ultimately, the favour of this austere lady. All that she forgave; and especially because she came to think the abbé as bad as myself, for leaving such openings to my inroads. It was on a question of politics that our deadliest difference arose, and that my deadliest sarcasm was launched; not against herself, but against the opinion and party which she adopted. I was right, as usually I am; but, on this occasion, must have been, because I stood up (as a patriot, intolerant to frenzy of all insult directed against dear England); and she, though otherwise patriotic enough, in this instance ranged herself in alliance with a false anti-national sentiment. My sarcasm was not too strong for the case. But certainly I ought to have thought it too strong for the presence of a lady; whom, or any of her sex, on a matter of politics in these days, so much am I changed, I would allow to chase me, like a football, all round the tropics, rather than offer the least show of resistance. But my excuse was childhood; and, though it may be true, as the reader will be sure to remind me, that she was rapidly growing down to my level in that respect, still she had not quite reached it; so that there was more excuse for me, after all, than for her. She was no longer five times as old, or even four; but when she would come down to be two times as old, and one time as old, it was hard to say. Thus I had good reason for remembering my first introduction to the knowledge of Secret Societies, since this knowledge introduced me to the more gloomy knowledge of the strife which gathers in clouds over the fields of human life; and to the knowledge of this strife in two shapes, one of which none of us fail to learn the personal strife which is awakened so eternally by difference of opinion, or difference of interest; the other, which is felt, perhaps, obscurely by all, but distinctly noticed only by the profoundly reflective-namely, the schism (so mysterious to those even who have examined it most) between the human intellect and many undeniable realities of human experience. As to the first mode of strife, I could not possibly forget it; for the stern lady died before we had an opportunity to exchange forgiveness, and that left a sting behind. She, I am sure, was a good forgiving creature at heart; and especially she would have forgiven me, because it was my place (if one only got one's right place on earth) to forgive her. Had she even hauled me out of bed with a tackling of ropes in the dead of night, for the mere purpose of reconciliation, I should have said, 'Why, you see, I can't forgive you entirely tonight, because I'm angry when people waken me without notice; but to-morrow morning I certainly will; or, if that won't |