Ebeling, it appears, had written the letters to Bentley and to Morse at about the same time.[851] A little after the receipt of his letter, Bentley had learned from Ebeling that Doctors Pearson, Tappan, and Morse all were inquiring of Ebeling concerning Robison’s standing as a historian, and that the Hamburg professor had addressed Morse at length upon the subject.[852] Further, he received clear hints from Ebeling as to the precise nature of the communications to Morse.[853] Bentley, therefore, had substantial reasons for believing that he was in full possession of the information that Ebeling had furnished Morse regarding the subsidence of the Illuminati craze in Europe and the unfavorable opinions of Robison that were entertained on the other side of the Atlantic. It certainly was not to his credit, however, that he should permit a letter which he himself had received from Ebeling to be published as a communication from Ebeling to Morse.[854]
Under the circumstances, Morse was placed in a position of embarrassment and humiliation from which he found it impossible wholly to extricate himself.[855] What is more to the point, the cause which in his misguided zeal he had been promoting was thus made to suffer an irreparable blow. With his personal integrity under grave suspicion and his main European ally held up to public ridicule and scorn, even Morse’s obdurate spirit must have foreseen that the collapse of the agitation which he had fostered could not long be deferred. Even without this tumble into the slough of suspicion and contempt, time must soon have brushed aside as groundless the alarm that Morse had sounded. It is not difficult to imagine, however, that time might have found ways less vindictive and scurvy to dispose of the excited clamor of Morse.
Driven to undertake some further effort at self-justification,[856] the belated idea came to Morse to investigate the lodge Wisdom at Portsmouth, Virginia. Accordingly he addressed a letter to Josiah Parker, member of Congress for Virginia, soliciting information from Parker respecting the Portsmouth lodge. Parker responded to the effect that he had lived in Portsmouth until he went to Congress in 1789; that the lodge Wisdom was regarded in that city as a reputable Masonic society, made up of a few worthy people, mostly French; that some of its members were personally known to the writer to be men warmly attached to the cause of the government; that a good many Frenchmen had been admitted to the lodge about the time of the insurrection on the island of St. Domingo, but that the most of these were not now in America; that some of the Frenchmen whose names Morse had incorporated in his fast sermon of April 25, 1799, as members of Wisdom Lodge, were known to Parker to be honest and industrious men; in a word, that he, Parker, considered the lodge in question as entirely harmless as far as fomenting hostility to the institutions of the country was concerned.[857]
The receipt of Parker’s letter left Morse without further resource. Promptly he wrote his friend and adviser, Oliver Wolcott, soliciting his counsel as to whether it would be better for him to remain silent and let matters take their course or whether he would better offer to the public such explanations and observations as he could.[858] The nature of Wolcott’s counsel is unknown; but Morse, in any event, came to the conclusion that there was no further action he could take in the case, and his advocacy of the idea of an Illuminati conspiracy against religion and the government ceased. Henceforth, the reverberations of the controversy, with a single exception, were to be of the nature of jibes and flings on the part of irritated and disgusted Democrats who adopted the position that the controversy over the Illuminati had been introduced into American politics to serve purely partisan ends.
In 1802, the Reverend Seth Payson,[859] minister of the Congregational church at Rindge, New Hampshire, made an effort to revive the agitation. In a volume[860] characterized by dismal mediocrity Payson fulminated against the public stupor that, he admitted, had taken the place of the sense of alarm that the discovery of the Illuminati conspiracy had originally caused.[861] Payson’s book was nothing more than a revamping of the earlier literature, European and American, on the subject. There is no evidence that it made the slightest impression on the country.
4. FREEMASONRY’S EMBARRASSMENT AND PROTEST
Freemasonry in New England, as throughout the United States in general, was very far from being in a favorable condition when the Illuminati controversy broke out. Like every other institution in the country, it had suffered greatly on account of the American Revolution. The membership of its lodges was depleted, and its affairs generally left in a chaotic condition. In the period of reconstruction which followed the Revolution, Masonry experienced the same difficulty in rebuilding its organizations and investing them with a fair degree of importance in the public eye as other social institutions of the times. To no little extent, this was due to internal dissensions and disintegrating tendencies generally. In the main these dissensions developed out of efforts which were made to create grand lodges of native origin, endowed with powers of sovereignty, to take the place in the system of American Masonry that formerly had been accorded to the grand lodges of England and Scotland. The spirit of independence communicated by the revolutionary struggle had to be reckoned with by Masonic leaders in their efforts to give unity and solidity to the system.[862]
But other concerns than those of organization engaged the attention of those who sought the rehabilitation of the institution. In the literature of the times appears more than one stinging reference to the reproach under which Freemasonry rested on account of the low standards of conduct by which the private lives of its members and its assemblies were marked. Coarseness, profligacy, boisterousness, and conviviality, which in the latter case did not stop short of drunken revels, were common indictments brought against the lodges by friend and foe alike.[863] It cannot be doubted that a considerable amount of the kind of rude and unlicensed behavior that displayed itself about many a New England tavern of the period was likewise to be observed in connection with the private and public performances of the craft.
To this must be added another and, from our special point of view, more serious criticism. The spirit of democracy, it should not be forgotten, was working itself out in the common life of the times in manifold ways. The idea of human equality had become the very touchstone of life. New applications of this conception were constantly being made. In such a day it was inevitable that the secret and exclusive character of the assemblies and practices of Freemasonry should make that institution widely suspected. Members of the fraternity were freely accused of supporting an institution that failed to respond to the spirit of the times.[864] As a result of the stir occasioned by Washington’s bold denunciation of “self-created societies,” in 1794, this charge of dangerous and unjustifiable secrecy became a more powerful weapon in the hands of Freemasonry’s enemies, whose blows were by no means easy to avoid.
That a retrograde movement was on in the ranks of American Masonry at the time the Illuminati controversy broke out is, however, by no means to be inferred. In most particulars, the faults and weaknesses which have been noted represented common faults and weaknesses of the times. On the whole, as the eighteenth century drew to its close, Freemasonry in this country appeared to be slowly working its way up out of the state of disorganization and weakness by which its progress had been retarded during the two decades that followed the Revolutionary War. It was in a day characterized by earnest and worthy striving, though not without its tokens of popular suspicion, that the accusation of an alliance with the odious Illuminati fell as a black shadow across its path.