Father Deschamps, on the authority of Eckert and Mislay, gives an
interesting description of all that Freemasonry, under the direction
of Lord Palmerston, attempted and effected after the failure of the
revolutionary movements, conducted by the party of action, under Mazzini,
in 1848. These were fomented to a large extent by British diplomacy
and secret service money manipulated by Lord Palmerston. Under his
guidance and assistance, Mazzini had organized all his revolutionary
sects. Young Italy, Young Poland, Young Europe, and the rest sprang as
much from the one as from the other. But after years of close union,
Mazzini, who was probably hated by Palmerston, and dreaded as the
murderer of Nubius, began to wane in influence. He and his party felt,
of course, the inevitable effects of failure; and the leader subsided
without, however, losing any of his utility for the sect. Napoleon
III. appears to have supplanted him in the esteem of Palmerston, and
would, if he dared, not follow the Carbonari. Mazzini accordingly hated
Napoleon III. with a deadly hatred, which he lived to be able to gratify
signally when Palmerston was no more. As he was the principal means of
raising Palmerston to power in the _Alta Vendita_, so, after Palmerston
had passed away, he introduced another great statesman to the high
conductors, if not into the high conduct itself, of the whole conspiracy;
and caused a fatal blow to be given to France and to the dynasty of
Napoleon. Meanwhile, from 1849 to the end of the life of Palmerston, the
designs formed by the high council of secret Atheism, were carried out
with a perfection, a vigour, and a success never previously known in
their history. Nothing was precipitated; yet everything marched rapidly
to realization. The plan of Palmerston—or the plan of the deadly council
which plotted under him—was to separate the two great conservative
empires of Russia and Austria, while, at the same time, dealing a
deadly blow at both. It was easy for Palmerston to make England see the
utility of weakening Russia, which threatened her Indian possessions.
France could be made join in the fray, by her ruler, and the powerful
Masonic influence at his command: Therefore, the Russian campaign of
1852. But it was necessary for this war to keep Prussia and Austria
quiet. Prussia was bribed by a promise to get, in time, the Empire of
United Germany. Austria was frightened by the resolution of England
and France to bring war to the Danube, and so form a projected Kingdom
in Poland and Hungary. The joint power of England, France, and Turkey
could easily, then, with the aid of the populations interested, form the
new kingdom, and so effectually curb Russia and Austria. But it was of
more importance for the designs of the sect upon the temporal power of
the Pope, and upon Austria herself, to separate the Empires. Palmerston
succeeded with Austria, who withdrew from her alliance with Russia. The
forces, therefore, of England and France, were ordered from the Danube
to the barren Crimea, as payment for her neutrality. This bribe proved
the ruin of Austrian influence. As soon as Russia was separated from her,
and weakened beyond the power of assisting her, if she would, France,
countenanced by England, dealt a deadly blow at Austrian rule in Italy,
united Italy, and placed the temporal power of the Pope in the last
stage of decay. On the other hand, Prussia was permitted to deal a blow
soon after at Austria. This finished the prestige of the latter as the
leading power in Germany, and confined her to her original territory,
with the loss of Venice, her remaining Italian province. After this war,
Palmerston passed away, and Mazzini came, once more, into authority in
the sect. He remembered his grudge against Napoleon, and at once used
his influence with the high direction of Masonry to abandon France and
assist Germany; and, on the promise of Bismarck—a promise fulfilled
by the May laws—that Germany should persecute the Church as it was
persecuted in Italy, Masonry went over to Germany, and Masons urged on
Napoleon to that insane expedition which ended in placing Germany as
the arbiter of Europe, and France and the dynasty of Napoleon in ruins.
In the authorities I have quoted for you, there is abundant proof that
Masonry, just as it had assisted the French Revolution and Napoleon I.,
now assisted the Germans. It placed treason on the side of the French,
and sold in fact the unfortunate country and her unscrupulous ruler.
Mazzini forced Italy not to assist Napoleon, and was gratified to find
before his death, that the liar and traitor, who, in the hope of getting
assistance he did not get from Masonry, had dealt his last blow at the
Vicar of Christ, and placed Rome and the remnant of the States of the
Church in the hands of the King of Italy, had lost the throne and gained
the unenviable character of a coward and a fool.
This is necessarily but a brief glance at the programme, which Atheism
has both planned and carried out since the rule of Palmerston commenced.
Wherever it prevailed, the worst form of persecution of the Church at
once began to rage. In Sardinia, as soon as it obtained hold of the
King and Government, the designs of the French Revolution were at once
carried out against religion. The State itself employed the horrible
and impure contrivances of the _Alta Vendita_ for the corruption and
demoralisation of every class of the people. The flood gates of hell
were opened. Education was at once made completely secular. Religious
teachers were banished. The goods of the religious orders were
confiscated. Their convents, their land, their very churches were sold,
and they themselves were forced to starve on a miserable pension, while
a succession was rigorously prohibited. All recognition of the spiritual
power of Bishops was put an end to. The priesthood was systematically
despised and degraded. The whole ministry of the Church was harassed in a
hundred vexatious ways. Taxes of a crushing character were levied on the
administration of the sacraments, on masses, and on the slender incomes
of the parish clergy. Matrimony was made secular, divorce legalised, the
privileges of the clerical state abrogated. Worse than all, the _leva_
or conscription was rigorously enforced. Candidates for the priesthood
at the most trying season of their career, were compelled to join the
army for a number of years, and exposed to all the snares which the _Alta
Vendita_ had astutely prepared to destroy their purity, and with it, of
course, their vocations; “make vicious hearts, and you will have no more
Catholics.” Besides these measures made and provided by public authority,
every favour of the State, its power of giving honours, patronage and
place, was constantly denied to Catholics. To get any situation of value
in the army, navy, civil service, police, revenue, on the railways, in
the telegraph offices, to be a physician to the smallest municipality, to
be employed almost anywhere, it was necessary to be a Freemason, or to
have powerful Masonic influence. The press, the larger mercantile firms,
important manufactories, depending as such institutions mostly do on
State patronage and interest, were also in the hands of the Sectaries.
To Catholics was left the lot of slaves. If permitted to exist at all,
it was as the hewers of wood and the drawers of water. The lands which
those amongst them held, who did not forsake religion, were taxed to an
unbearable extent. The condition of the faithful Catholic peasants became
wretched from the load of fiscal burdens placed upon them. The triumph
of Atheism could not be more complete, so far as having all that the
world could give on its side, and leaving to the Church scarcely more
than covered her Divine Founder upon the Cross.
Bismarck, though assisted in his wars against France by the brave
Catholic soldiers of the Rhine, and of the Fatherland generally, no
sooner had his rival crushed, and his victory secured, than he hastened
to pay to Freemasonry his promised persecution of the Church. The
Freemasons in the German Parliament, and the Ministers of the sect, aided
him to prepare measures against the Catholic religion as drastic as
those in operation in Italy, even worse in many respects. The religious
orders of men and women were rigorously suppressed or banished, as
a first instalment. Then fell Catholic education to make way for an
Infidel propagandism. Next came harassing decrees against the clergy by
which Bishops were banished or imprisoned and parishes were deprived in
hundreds of their priests. All the bad, immoral influences, invented and
propagated by the sectaries, were permitted to run riot in the land.
A schism was attempted in the Church. Ecclesiastical education was
corrupted in the very bud, and all but the existence of Catholics was
proscribed.
Wherever we find the dark sect triumphant we find the same results. In
the Republics of South America, where Freemasonry holds the highest
places, the condition of the Church is that of normal persecution
and vexation of every kind. It has been so for many years in Spain
and Portugal, in Switzerland, and to whatever extent Freemasons can
accomplish it, in Belgium and in Austria. I need not say what it has
been in France since the Freemason Parliament and Government have come
into power. The dark Directory succeeding Weishaupt, the _Alta Vendita_,
and Palmerston, sits in Paris and in Berlin almost openly, and prepares
at leisure its measures, which are nothing short of, first, the speedy
weakening of the Church, and then, I am certain, a bloody attempt at
her extermination. If it goes on slower than it did during the French
Revolution, it is in order to go on surer. Past experience too, and the
determinations of the sect already arrived at, show but too clearly
that a single final consummation is kept steadily in view. The impure
assassins who conduct the conspiracy have had no scruple to imbrue their
hands in the blood of Christians in the past, and they never will have a
scruple to do so, whenever there is hope of success. In fact, from what I
have seen and studied on the Continent, an attempt at this ultimate means
of getting rid at least of the clergy and principal lay leaders amongst
Catholics, might take place in France and even in Italy at any moment.
In France, some new measure of persecution is introduced every day.
The Concordat is broken openly. The honour of the country is despised.
Subventions belonging by contract to the clergy are withdrawn. The
insolence of the Atheistical Government, relying on the strength of the
army and on the unaccountable apathy or cowardice of the French Catholic
laity, progresses so fast, that no act of the Revolution of ’89 or of the
Commune, can be thought improbable within the present decade; and Italy
would be sure to follow any example set by France in this or in any other
method of exterminating the Church.
There are sure signs in all the countries where the Atheistic Revolution
has made decided progress, that this final catastrophe is planned
already, and that its instruments are in course of preparation. These
instruments are something the same as were devised by the illuminated
lodges, when the power of the French Revolution began to pass from the
National Assembly to the clubs. The clubs were the open and ultimate
expression of the destructive, anti-Christianity of Atheism; and when the
lodges reached so far, there was no further need for secrecy. That which
in the jargon of the sect is called “the object of the labour of ages,”
was attained. Man was without God or Faith, King or Law. He had reached
the level aimed at by the Commune, which is itself the ultimate end of
all Masonry, and all that secret Atheistic plotting which, since the rise
of Atheism, has filled the world.
In our day, if Masonry does not found Jacobite or other clubs, it
originates and cherishes movements fully as Satanic and as dangerous.
Communism, just like Carbonarism, is but a form of the illuminated
Masonry of Weishaupt. “Our end,” said the _Alta Vendita_, “is that of
Voltaire and the French Revolution.” Names and methods are varied,
but that end is ever the same. The clubs at the period of the French
Revolution were, after all, local. Masonry now endeavours to generalise
their principles and their powers of destructive activity on a vastly
more extended scale. We therefore no longer hear of Jacobins or
Girondins, but we hear of movements destined to be for all countries what
the Jacobins and the Girondins were for Paris and for France. As surely,
and for the same purpose, as the clubs proceeded from the lodges in 1789,
so, in this latter half of the nineteenth century, the lodges send out
upon the whole civilised world, for the very same intent, the terrible
Socialist organizations, all founded upon the lines of Communism, and
called, according to the exigencies of time, place, and condition, the
association of the brethren of