# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1857_S259
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Real-Encyclopedia for Protestant Theology and Church. 259

In Vol. IV, p. 570, one finds a treatise ninety pages long on Freemasonry, in which among other things it is taught: "In our judgment no ecclesiastical authority has the right, on the denunciations of individuals, to forbid the clergy participation in an institution which the state places under the guarantee and protection of its laws." All the warnings uttered for years against this secret society are struck down with the words that they "partly utter extravagant phrases, and partly belong to the very rare exceptions which can establish no rule." Yet Prof. Dr. Herzog would surely have done well to refute the weighty assurances which an experienced Freemason, who had risen to the twelfth degree, the Royal Prussian General von der Marwitz, has recorded for posterity in his Memoirs of 1854. There it reads: "The secret league is directed against every positive religion, ostensibly in order to set human reason on the throne of this world, — but in fact in order to use those deceived by this fraudulent signboard for the purposes of the intriguers who stand at its head: to overthrow the existing order in state and church and to deliver the rule over both into the hands of those leaders. In the process, instead of the promised liberty and equality, the greatest despotism would be exercised by them, and an inequality such as has never existed would arise, because every right and every property would have to be surrendered to the so-called welfare of the whole and to the purposes of that higher intelligence, that is, to their own arbitrary will. How few deceivers, or how many deceived, there are among the Freemasons only those can know who have themselves climbed the highest steps. Many, however, suppose that they stand on the highest step, while they have not even reached the threshold of the inner temple, wholly unknown to them. On the whole the matter stands thus. At the top stand the worst, who want riches, dominion, and enjoyment for themselves, and to whom everything else is only a means to an end. Then come the enthusiasts, who want to spread the rule of reason, cost what it may. Finally the narrow-minded, who want to do some good with a little money, but at the same time to enjoy themselves. Each of these principal grades believes that the order ends with itself, and a Master of the Chair among the narrow-minded would gape in astonishment if he learned that above him there are still enthusiasts. Just so the sentimentalists would dispute it as a lie if they heard it asserted that the intriguers are their chief directors. How dangerous such a secret league is leaps to the eye. — In times of quiet and order not much was heard of the higher degrees. They reinforced their bands and lived at the expense of the deceived. But already in the eighties they came forward as Illuminati; then as Jacobins in France, as Carbonari in Italy, as leaders of the Burschenschaft in Germany, as juste milieu in France, as Liberals in Spain, as Jovane Italia, as