[1] See interview with General Merritt, published in the New York Herald, Oct. 4, 1898.
Chapter III.
The Rebellion Largely the Work of a Secret Organization.
Secret societies, and, above all, that great guild known as Freemasonry, are certainly foremost, if not controlling, factors in the warfare made upon throne and altar during the last one hundred and fifty years.
In saying this we do not intend to express any opinion for or against the sentiments of Protestant Freemasons in England and the United States, numbers of whom, no doubt, reprobate the anti-Christian spirit this association shows on the Continent and in Spanish America. They have been brought up to regard it as a perfectly harmless and beneficent institution, and cannot understand the attitude taken with regard to it by the Catholic Church.
Collection of seals and stamps used by various branches of the “Katipunan,” the secret society of the natives.
It is quite true that Freemasonry may have in these countries kept to its original constitution, which, we may admit, was of a beneficent nature. But what Catholic writers on the subject urgently insist upon is, that on the Continent it very soon assumed a political and dangerous character. For a long time it was not condemned by the Church, and many good Catholics of rank and position gave their names to it. It was only when its dangerous tendencies came to light that it received solemn ecclesiastical condemnation, and that Catholics were forbidden to join it. For more than a century this secret guild has been at the bottom of the revolutions that have desolated the modern world. Some years previous to the French Revolution, German envoys of the Society of the Illuminati advised the French Masons to form a political committee in each lodge; and in time, as Robison remarks, these committees led to the formation of the Jacobin Club. “Thus were the lodges of France,” says this writer, “converted in a very short time into a set of affiliated secret societies, corresponding with the mother lodges of Paris, receiving from thence their principles and instructions, and ready to rise up at once when called upon to carry on the great work of overturning the State. Hence it arose that the French aimed, in the very beginning, at subverting the whole world. Hence, too, may be explained how the revolution took place almost in a moment in every part of France. The revolutionary societies were early formed, and were working in secret before the opening of the National Assembly; and the whole nation changed, and changed again and again, as if by beat of drum.”
In Spain, since its introduction it assumed a sanguinary and virulent character; it brought about revolutions and civil wars, embittered classes against one another, wronged and starved the clergy, robbed, turned adrift, and banished the religious Orders.