and a metaphysical scale, we measure the present miseries of our fellow creatures, and compare them with the accumulated miseries of former times, occasioned through a course of ages, and ascribed to the ambition of Princes. In this artificial manner are the atrocities of France extenuated; and we struggle, and partly succeed, in reasoning ourselves out of all the feelings which link men together in society.—The ties of father, husband, brother, friend—all are abandoned for an emotion which we must even strive to excite,—universal philanthropy. But this is sad perversion of nature. "He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?" Still less can he love this ideal being, of which he labours to conjure up some indistinct and fleeting notion. It is also highly absurd; for, in trying to collect the circumstances which constitute the enjoyments of this Citizen of the World, we find ourselves just brought back to the very moral feelings which we are wantonly throwing away. Weishaupt allures us by the happiness of the patriarchal life as the summum bonum of man. But if it is any thing more than eating and sleeping, and squabbling with the neighbouring patriarchs, it must consist in the domestic and neighbourly affections, and every other agreeable moral feeling, all which are to be had in our present state, in greater abundance.
But this is all a pretence;—the wicked corrupters of mankind have no such views of human felicity, nor would they be contented with it; they want to intrigue and to lead; and their patriarchal life answers the same purpose of tickling the fancy as the Arcadia of the poets. Horace shows the frivolity of these declamations, without formally enouncing the moral, in his pretty Ode,
Beatus ille qui procul negotiis.
The usurer, after expatiating on this Arcadian felicity, hurries away to change, and puts his whole cash again out to usury.