These means are secret schools of wisdom, these were from all time the archives of Nature and of human rights, through them will Man be saved from his Fall, princes and nations will disappear without violence from the earth, the human race will become one family and the world the abode of reasonable men. Morality alone will bring about this change imperceptibly. Every father of a family will be, as formerly Abraham and the patriarchs, the priest and unfettered lord of his family, and Reason will be the only code of Man. This is one of our greatest secrets....[539]
But whilst completely eliminating any idea of divine power outside Man and framing his system on purely political lines, Weishaupt is careful not to shock the susceptibilities of his followers by any open repudiation of Christian doctrines; on the contrary, he invokes Christ at every turn and sometimes even in language so apparently earnest and even beautiful that one is almost tempted to believe in his sincerity. Thus he writes:
This our great and unforgettable Master, Jesus of Nazareth, appeared at a time in the world when it was sunk in depravity.... The first followers of His teaching are not wise men but simple, chosen from the lowest class of the people, so as to show that His teaching should be possible and comprehensible to all classes and conditions of men.... He carries out this teaching by means of the most blameless life in conformity with it, and seals and confirms this with His blood and death. These laws which He shows as the way to salvation are only two: love of God and love of one's neighbour; more He asks of no one.[540]
So far no Lutheran pastor could have expressed himself better. But one must study Weishaupt's writings as a whole to apprehend the true measure of his belief in Christ's teaching.
Now, as we have already seen, his first idea was to make Fire Worship the religion of Illuminism; the profession of Christianity therefore appears to have been an after-thought. Evidently Weishaupt discovered, as others have done, that Christianity lends itself more readily to subversive ideas than any other religion. And in the passages which follow we find him adopting the old ruse of representing Christ as a Communist and as a secret-society adept. Thus he goes on to explain that "if Jesus preaches contempt of riches, He wishes to teach us the reasonable use of them and prepare for the community of goods introduced by Him,"[541] and in which, Weishaupt adds later, He lived with His disciples.[542] But this secret doctrine is only to be apprehended by initiates:
No one ... has so cleverly concealed the high meaning of His teaching, and no one finally has so surely and easily directed men on to the path of freedom as our great master Jesus of Nazareth. This secret meaning and natural consequence of His teaching He hid completely, for Jesus had a secret doctrine, as we see in more than one place of the Scriptures.[543]
Weishaupt thus contrives to give a purely political interpretation to Christ's teaching:
The secret preserved through the Disciplinam Arcani, and the aim appearing through all His words and deeds, is to give back to men their original liberty and equality.... Now one can understand how far Jesus was the Redeemer and Saviour of the world.[544]
The mission of Christ was therefore by means of Reason to make men capable of freedom[545]: "When at last reason becomes the religion of man, so will the problem be solved."[546]