vate. More circumspect in their
writings, they usually disguise the poison they dare not proffer
openly under obscure metaphysics or more or less ingenious
allegories. Often indeed texts from Holy Writ serve as an envelope
and vehicle for these baneful insinuations....

By this continuous and insidious form of propaganda the imagination of
the adepts is so worked on that if a crisis arises, they are ready to,
carry out the most daring projects.

Another Association closely resembling the _Illumines_, Berckheim
reports, is known as the _Idealists_, whose system is founded on the
doctrine of perfectibility; these kindred sects "agree in seeing in the
words of Holy Scripture the pledge of universal regeneration, of an
absolute levelling down, and it is in this spirit that the sectarians
interpret the sacred books."

Berckheim further confirms the assertion I made in _World
Revolution_--contested, as usual, by a reviewer without a shred of
evidence to the contrary--that the Tugendbund derived from the
Illuminati. "The League of Virtue," he writes, "was directed by the
secondary chiefs of the _Illumines_.... In 1810 the Friends of Virtue
were so identified with the _Illumines_ in the North of Germany that no
line of demarcation was seen between them."

But it is time to turn to the testimony of another witness on the
activities of the secret societies which is likewise to be found at the
Archives Nationales.[650] This consists of a document transmitted by the
Court of Vienna to the Government of France after the Restoration, and
contains the interrogatory of a certain Witt Doehring, a nephew of the
Baron d'Eckstein, who, after taking part in secret society intrigues,
was summoned before the judge Abel at Bayreuth in February, 1824.
Amongst secret associations recently existing in Germany, the witness
asserted, were the "Independents" and the "Absolutes"; the latter
"adored in Robespierre their most perfect ideal, so that the crimes
committed during the French Revolution by this monster and the
Montagnards of the Convention were in their eyes, in accordance with
their moral system, heroic actions ennobled and sanctified by their
aim." The same document goes on to explain why so many combustible
elements had failed to produce an explosion in Germany:

The thing that seemed the great obstacle to the plans of the
Independents ... was what they called the servile character and the
dog-like