If, said Morse, a contributory cause for the present “hazardous and afflictive position” of the country is sought, it will readily be found in “the astonishing increase of irreligion.”[618] The evidence of this, in turn, is to be found, not only in the prevailing atheism and materialism of the day, and all the vicious fruits which such impious sentiments have borne, but as well in the slanders with which newspapers are filled and the personal invective and abuse with which private discussion is laden, all directed against the representatives of government, against men, many of whom have grown gray in their country’s service and whose integrity has been proved incorruptible. It is likewise to be discovered in the reviling and abuse which, coming from the same quarter, has been directed against the clergy, who, according to their influence and ability, have done what they could to support and vindicate the government. Nothing that the clergy has done has been of such a character as to provoke this treatment. And how “can _they_ be your friends who are continually declaiming against the Clergy, and endeavouring by all means—by falsehood and misrepresentation, to asperse their characters, and to bring them and their profession into disrepute?”[619]
When the question is raised respecting the design and tendency of these things, their inherent and appalling impiety is immediately disclosed. They give “reason to suspect that there is some secret plan in operation, hostile to true liberty and religion, which requires to be aided by these vile slanders.”[620] They cannot be regarded as mere excrescences of the life of the times; they are not detached happenings; they go straight down to the roots of things; they are deadly attacks upon the civil and religious institutions whose foundations were laid by our venerable forefathers. They mean that all those principles and habits which were formed under those institutions are to be brought into contempt and eventually swept aside, in order to give a clear field “for the spread of those disorganizing opinions, and that atheistical philosophy, which are deluging the Old World in misery and blood.”[621]
That this preparatory work has begun, that progress in the direction of its fatal completion has been made, that what is now going on in America is part of the same deep-laid and extensive plan which has been in operation in Europe for many years—these, Morse continued, are reasonable and just fears in the light of the disclosures made “in a work written by a gentleman of literary eminence in Scotland, within the last year, and just reprinted in this country, entitled, ‘Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe’.”[622] The following facts are brought to the light of day in this volume: For more than twenty years past a society called THE ILLUMINATED has been in existence in Germany; its express aim is “to root out and abolish Christianity, and overthrow all civil government”;[623] it approves of such atrocious principles as the right to commit self-murder and the promiscuous intercourse of the sexes, while it condemns the principles of patriotism and the right to accumulate private property;[624] in the prosecution of its infamous propaganda it aims to enlist the discontented, to get control of all such cultural agencies as the schools, literary societies, newspapers, writers, booksellers, and postmasters;[625] it is bent upon insinuating its members into all positions of distinction and influence, whether literary, civil, or religious.[626]