It will throw some light on this transaction if we read a letter from Spartacus to Cato about this time.
"One thing more, my dearest friend—Would it be agreeable to you to have me for a brother-in-law? If this should be agreeable, and if it can be brought about without prejudice to my honour, as I hope it may, I am not without hopes that the connection may take place. But in the mean time keep it a secret, and only give me permission to enter into correspondence on the subject with the good lady, to whom I beg you will offer my respectful compliments, and I will explain myself more fully to you by word of mouth, and tell you my whole situation. But I repeat it—the thing must be gone about with address and caution. I would not for all the world deceive a person who certainly has not deserved so of me."
What interpretation can be put on this? Cato seems to be brother to the poor woman—he was unwittingly to furnish the drugs, and he was to be dealt with about consenting to a marriage, which could not be altogether agreeable to him, since it required a dispensation, she being already the sister-in-law of Weishaupt, either the sister of his former wife, or the widow of a deceased brother. Or perhaps Spartacus really wishes to marry Cato's sister, a different person from the poor woman in the straw; and he conceals this adventure from his trusty friend Cato, till he sees what becomes of it. The child may perhaps be got rid of, and then Spartacus is a free man. There is a letter to Cato, thanking him for his friendship in the affair of the child—but it gives no light. I meet with another account, that the sister of Zwack threw herself from the top of a tower, and beat out her brains. But it is not said that it was an only sister; if it was, the probability is, that Spartacus had paid his addresses to her, and succeeded, and that the subsequent affair of his marriage with his sister-in-law, or something worse, broke her heart. This seems the best account of the matter. For Hertel (Marius) writes to Zwack in November 1782: "Spartacus is this day gone home, but has left his sister-in-law pregnant behind (this is from Bassus Hoff). About the new year he hopes to be made merry by a ——, who will be before all kings and princes—a young Spartacus. The Pope also will respect him, and legitimate him before the time."
Now, vulgar Christian, compare this with the former declaration of Weishaupt, where he appeals to the tenor of his former life, which had been so severely scrutinised, without diminishing his high reputation and great influence, and his ignorance and abhorrence of all those things found in Cato's repositories. You see this was a surprise—he had formerly proceeded cautiously—"He is the best man," says Spartacus, "who best conceals his faults."—He was disappointed by Celsus, who had promised him his assistance on such occasions three years ago, during all which time he had been busy in "forming himself." How far he has advanced, the reader may judge.
One is curious to know what became of the poor woman: she was afterwards taken to the house of Baron Bassus; but here the foolish woman, for want of that courage which Illumination and the bright prospect of eternal sleep should have produced, took fright at the disciplini arcani, left the house, and in the hidden society of a midwife and nurse brought forth a young Spartacus, who now lives to thank his father for his endeavours to murder him. A "damned priest," the good Bishop of Freyfingen, knowing the cogent reasons, procured the dispensation, and Spartacus was obliged, like another dim-sighted mortal, to marry her. The scandal was hushed, and would not have been discovered had it not been for these private writings.
But Spartacus says "that when you think him sunk to the bottom, he will spring up with double vigour." In a subsequent work, called Short Amendment of my Plan, he says, "If men were not habituated to wicked manners, his letters would be their own justification." He does not say that he is without fault; "but they are faults of the understanding—not of the heart. He had, first of all, to form himself; and this is a work of time." In the affair of his sister-in-law he admits the facts, and the attempts to destroy the child; "but this is far from proving any depravity of heart. In his condition, his honour at stake, what else was left him to do? His greatest enemies, the Jesuits, have taught that in such a case it is lawful to make away with the child," and he quotes authorities from their books.[7] "In the introductory fault he has the example of the best of men. The second was its natural consequence, it was altogether involuntary, and, in the eye of a philosophical judge" (I presume of the Gallic School) "who does not square himself by the harsh letters of a blood-thirsty lawgiver, he has but a very trifling account to settle. He had become a public teacher, and was greatly followed; this example might have ruined many young men. The eyes of the Order also were fixed on him. The edifice rested on his credit; had he fallen, he could no longer have been in a condition to treat the matters of virtue so as to make a lasting impression. It was chiefly his anxiety to support the credit of the Order which determined him to take this step. It makes for him, but by no means against him; and the persons who are most in fault are the slavish inquisitors, who have published the transaction, in order to make his character more remarkable, and to hurt the Order through his person; and they have not scrupled, for this hellish purpose, to stir up a child against his father!!!"
I make no reflections on this very remarkable, and highly useful story, but content myself with saying, that this justification by Weishaupt (which I have been careful to give in his own words) is the greatest instance of effrontery and insult on the sentiments of mankind that I have ever met with. We are all supposed as completely corrupted as if we had lived under the full blaze of Illumination.
In other places of this curious correspondence we learn that Minos, and others of the Areopagitæ, wanted to introduce Atheism at once, and not go hedging in the manner they did; affirming it was easier to shew at once that Atheism was friendly to society, than to explain all their Masonic Christianity, which they were afterwards to shew to be a bundle of lies. Indeed this purpose, of not only abolishing Christianity, but all positive religion whatever, was Weishaupt's favourite scheme from the beginning. Before he canvassed for his Order, in 1774, he published a fictitious antique, which he called Sidonii Apollinarus Fragmenta, to prepare (as he expressly says in another place) mens minds for the doctrines of Reason, which contains all the detestable doctrines of Robinet's book De la Nature. The publication of the second part was stopped. Weishaupt says in his Apology for the Illuminati, that before 1780 he had retracted his opinions about Materialism, and about the inexpediency of Princes. But this is false: Philo says expressly, that every thing remained on its original footing in the whole practice and dogmas of the Order when he quitted it in July 1784. All this was concealed, and even the abominable Masonry, in the account of the Order which Weishaupt published at Regensburg; and it required the constant efforts of Philo to prevent bare or flat Atheism from being uniformly taught in their degrees. He had told the council that Zeno would not be under a roof with a man who denied the immortality of the soul. He complains of Minos's cramming irreligion down their throats in every meeting, and says, that he frightened many from entering the Order. "Truth," says Philo, "is a clever, but a modest girl, who must be led by the hand like a gentlewoman, but not kicked about like a whore." Spartacus complains much of the squeamishness of Philo; yet Philo is not a great deal behind him in irreligion. When deferring to Cato the Christianity of the Priest-degree, as he had manufactured it, he says, "It is all one whether it be true or false, we must have it, that we may tickle those who have a hankering for religion." All the odds seems to be, that he was of a gentler disposition, and had more deference even for the absurd prejudices of others. In one of his angry letters to Cato he says: "The vanity and self-conceit of Spartacus would have got the better of all prudence, had I not checked him, and prevailed on the Areopagitæ but to defer the developement of the bold principles till we had firmly secured the man. I even wished to entice the candidate the more by giving him back all his former bonds of secrecy, and leaving him at liberty to walk out without fear; and I am certain that they were, by this time, so engaged that we should not have lost one man. But Spartacus had composed an exhibition of his last principles, for a discourse of reception, in which he painted his three favourite mysterious degrees, which were to be conferred by him alone, in colours which had fascinated his own fancy. But they were the colours of hell, and would have scared the most intrepid; and because I represented the danger of this, and by force obtained the omission of this picture, he became my implacable enemy. I abhor treachery and profligacy, and leave him to blow himself and his Order into the air."
Accordingly this happened. It was this which terrified one of the four professors, and made him impart his doubts to the rest. Yet Spartacus seems to have profited by the apprehensions of Philo; for in the last reception, he, for the first time, exacts a bond from the intrant, engaging himself for ever to the Order, and swearing that he will never draw back. Thus admitted, he becomes a sure card. The course of his life is in the hands of the Order, and his thoughts on a thousand dangerous points; his reports concerning his neighbours and friends; in short, his honour and his neck. The Deist, thus led on, has not far to go before he becomes a Naturalist or Atheist; and then the eternal sleep of death crowns all his humble hopes.
Before giving an account of the higher degrees, I shall just extract from one letter more on a singular subject.