will be durable. Women are fickle and impatient. Nothing will please them but hurrying from degree to degree, through a heap of insignificant ceremonies, which will soon lose their novelty and influence. To rest seriously in one rank, and to be still and silent when they have found out that the whole is a cheat, (hear the words of an experienced Mason,) is a task of which they are incapable. They have not our motives to persevere for years, allowing themselves to be led about, and even then to hold their tongues when they find that they have been deceived. Nay there is a risk that they may take it into their heads to give things an opposite turn, and then, by voluptuous allurements, heightened by affected modesty and decency, which give them an irresistible empire over the best men, they may turn our Order upside down, and in their turn will lead the new one."
Such is the information which may be got from the private correspondence. It is needless to make more extracts of every kind of vice and trick. I have taken such as shew a little of the plan of the Order, as far as the degree of Illuminatus Minor, and the vile purposes which are concealed under all their specious declamation. A very minute account is given of the plan, the ritual, ceremonies, &c. and even the instructions and discourses, in a book called the Achte Illuminat, published at Edessa (Frankfurt) in 1787. Philo says, "that this is quite accurate, but that he does not know the author." I proceed to give an account of their higher degrees, as they are to be seen in the book called Neueste Arbeitung des Spartacus und Philo. And the authenticity of the accounts is attested by Grollman, a private gentleman of independent fortune, who read them, signed and sealed by Spartacus and the Areopagitæ.