The new order gained many disciples even among the crowned heads, who were slow to perceive that the very spirit of the organization was centred in hatred of the throne as well as of religion. As soon as the real nature and purposes of the Illuminati became known, efforts were at once made by the civil authorities for their suppression. In this they were aided greatly by the inevitable dissensions introduced into the order in the course of time. In 1784 all secret societies, communities, and confraternities, were prohibited in Bavaria. In 1785 Weishaupt was expelled from Ingolstadt, and after many wanderings finally found refuge with the Duke of Saxe-Gotha. Before his death he had the good fortune to repent and was reconciled with the Church. The order, everywhere fallen into disfavor, was gradually either disbanded, or incorporated into the other forms of the Masonry of the times. Its influence, however, like that of Freemasonry, remained, and was exerted with great vigor in the unhappy events that began in the year 1789.
NEO-PAGANISM.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the youth of Europe, and especially of France, educated to admire merely natural virtue, enamored of the ideal beauty and of the political and civil institutions of other times, found in their schools a spirit of paganism. Little in touch with the true spirit of Christianity, it was easily led by the glamor of resounding phrases and classical figures. These classical studies, in which the excellent and virtuous teachers of the time found only literary and philological exercises, became through the evil influence of outside doctrinaires a subtle poison to the young mind, and brought to a point that rage for pagan antiquity which formed one of the most dangerous and misleading features of anti-Christianism.
From the time of the Reformation heterodoxy had sought its weapons in antiquity, whose uncertainty and obscurity could easily provide material for the desolating revolt against Christian authority. Machiavelli had already denounced modern Christianity as the cause of popular and national decadence; politicians lost themselves in adoration of the Greeks and Romans; to the sophists everything was grand and noble, in as far as it was pagan, everything was barbarous in as far as it receded from the ancient type. It was one of the methods of the war of impiety: anti-Christianism had need of antiquity as a mantle to cover its emptiness: it felt it must needs seek aid in the names of celebrated pagans, and thus strengthened, it might dare to abandon the Christian era, and take refuge around a Roman or Greek civilization resurrected and placed in a position of honor. Classical education unconsciously aided in this mode of warfare, and while the school teacher, with the best of intentions in the world, taught his pupils to admire the great beauties of the classical authors, without attending to the false principles and doctrines, intended for a social order entirely different from the Christian, there were not wanting those who profited by these studies to lead the pupil to a love of the pagan philosophy therein contained. By their efforts the Roman and Greek world was held up as the only condition that could provide true happiness, the only political society worthy of man.
LOUIS XV.
Throughout the whole reign of Louis XV. this mania for paganism invaded every part of society, so that when Louis XVI. ascended the throne, he found it dominant not only in literature, but in art and in life itself. It was reflected in the corruption of the Court, in the sensual epicurism of the people, in the very manners of those whose ecclesiastical dignity ought to lead to more modern types of excellence. The hope of a return to the conditions of pagan Rome and Greece was one of the saddest hallucinations of the new anti-Christianism.