nry was the
direct parent of the Tugenbund, and of those secret societies which freed
Germany from Napoleon. Whatever follies young members of them may have
committed; whatever Jahn and his Turnerei; whatever the iron youths, with
their iron decorations and iron boot-heels; whatever, in a word, may have
been said or done amiss, in that childishness which (as their own wisest
writers often lament) so often defaces the noble childlikeness of the
German spirit, let it be always remembered that under the impulse first
given by Freemasonry, as much as that given by such heroes as Stein and
Scharnhorst, Germany shook off the chains which had fallen on her in her
sleep; and stood once more at Leipsic, were it but for a moment, a free
people alike in body and in soul.

Remembering this, and the solid benefits which Germany owed to Masonic
influences, one shrinks from saying much of the extravagances in which
its Masonry indulged before the French Revolution. Yet they are so
characteristic of the age, so significant to the student of human nature,
that they must be hinted at, though not detailed.

It is clear that Masonry was at first a movement confined to the
aristocracy, or at least to the most educated classes; and clear, too,
that it fell in with a temper of mind unsatisfied with the dry dogmatism
into which the popular creeds had then been frozen--unsatisfied with
their own Frenchified foppery and pseudo-philosophy--unsatisfied with
want of all duty, purpose, noble thought, or noble work. With such a
temper of mind it fell in: but that very temper was open (as it always
is) to those dreams of a royal road to wisdom and to virtue, which have
haunted, in all ages, the luxurious and the idle.

Those who will, may read enough, and too much, of the wonderful secrets
in nature and science and theosophy, which men expected to find and did
not find in the higher degrees of Masonry, till old Voss--the translator
of Homer--had to confess, that after "trying for eleven years to attain a
perfect knowledge of the inmost penetralia, where the secret is said to
be, and of its invisible guardians," all he knew was that "the documents
which he had to make known to the initiated were nothing more than a well
got-up farce."

But the mania was general. The high-born and the virtuous expected to
discover some panacea for their own consciences in what Voss calls, "A
multitude of symbols, which are ever increasing the farther you
penetra