in the language of the present day, is the name assumed, at the beginning of the French revolution, by a party in Paris, which was outrageously democratical, and fanatically impious. This party, which consisted of members of the National Assembly, and of others maintaining the same opinions and pursuing the same objects, formed itself into a club, and held its meetings in the hall belonging to the jacobin friars, where measures were secretly concerted for exciting insurrections, and overpowering at once the legislature and the king. The name of Jacobin, though it was derived from the hall where the club first met, has since been extended to all who are enemies to monarchy, aristocracy, and the Christian religion; and who would have every man to be his own priest and his own lawgiver. Hence it is, that we have Jacobins in Great Britain and Ireland, as well as in France.

Of the proceedings of the French Jacobins, some account has been given, in the Encyclopaedia, under the title Revolution, and the subject will be resumed in this Supplement under the same title. The purpose of the present article is to trace the principles of the sect from their source; for these principles are not of yesterday.

"At its very first appearance, (says the Abbé Barruel), this sect counted 300,000 adepts; and it was supported by two millions of men, scattered through France, armed with torches and pikes, and all the firebrands of the revolution." Such a wide spread conspiracy could not be formed in an instant; and indeed this able writer has completely proved, that this sect, with all its conspiracies, is in itself no other than "the coalition of..." of a triple sect, of a triple conspiracy, in which, long before the revolution, the overthrow of the altar, the ruin of the throne, and the dissolution of all civil society, had been debated and determined."

It is known to every scholar, that there have been in all ages and countries men of letters and pretenders to letters, who have endeavoured to signalize themselves individually by writing against the religion of their country; but it was reserved for the philosophists (a) of France to enter into a combination for the express purpose of eradicating from the human heart every religious sentiment. The man to whom this idea first occurred was Voltaire; who, daring to be jealous of his God, and being weary, as he said himself, of hearing people repeat, that twelve men were sufficient to establish Christianity, resolved to prove that one might be sufficient to overthrow it. Full of this project, he swore, before the year 1730, to dedicate his life to its accomplishment; and for some time he flattered himself that he should enjoy alone the glory of destroying the Christian religion. He found, however, that associates would be necessary; and from the numerous tribe of his admirers and disciples, he chose D'Alembert and Diderot as the most proper persons to cooperate with him in his designs. How admirably they were qualified to act the part assigned them, may be conceived from the life of Diderot in this Supplement. But Voltaire was not satisfied with their aid alone.

He contrived to embark in the same cause Frederic II. of Prussia, who wished to be thought a philosopher, and who of course deemed it expedient to talk and write against a religion which he had never studied, and into the evidence of which he had probably never deigned to enquire. This royal adept was one of the most zealous of Voltaire's coadjutors, till he discovered that the philosophists were waging war with the throne as well as with the altar. This indeed was not originally Voltaire's intention. He was vain; he loved to be caressed by the great; and, in one word, he was, from natural disposition, an aristocrat and admirer of royalty: But when he found that almost every sovereign, but Frederic, disapproved of his impious projects as soon as he perceived their issue, he determined to oppose all the governments on earth, rather than forfeit the glory, with which he had flattered himself, of vanquishing Christ and his apostles in the field of controversy.

He now set himself, with D'Alembert and Diderot, to excite universal discontent with the established order of things. This was an employment entirely suited to their disposition; for not being in any sense great themselves (b), they wished to pull all men down to their own level. How effectually they contrived to convert the Encyclopédie into an engine to serve their purposes, has been shown already; but it was not their only nor their most powerful engine; they formed secret societies, assumed new names, and employed an enigmatic language. Thus, Frederic is called Luc; D'Alembert, Protogoras; and sometimes Bertrand; Voltaire, Raton; and Diderot, Platon, or its anagram Tompla; while the general term for the conspirators is Cacoue. In their secret meetings they professed to celebrate the mysteries of Mysteries; and their great object, as they professed to one another, was to confound the world, meaning J—C—. Voltaire proposed to establish a colony of philosophists at Cleves, who, protected by the king of Prussia, might publish their opinions without dread or danger; and Frederic was disposed to take them under his protection, till he discovered that their opinions were anarchical as well as impious, when he threw them off, and even wrote against them.

They contrived, however, to engage the ministers of the court of France in their favour, by pretending to have nothing in view but the enlargement of science, in works which spoke indeed respectfully of revelation, while every discovery which they brought forward was meant to undermine its very foundation. When the throne was to be attacked, and even when barefaced atheism was to be promulgated, a number of impious and licentious pamphlets were dispersed, for some time none knew how, from a secret society formed at the Hotel d'Holbach at Paris. These were sold for trifles, or distributed gratis to schoolmasters, and others who were likely to circulate their contents. D'Alembert, Diderot, and Condorcet, who was now associated with the other conspirators, flattered the ambition of every man among the great, and especially of the Duke d'Orléans, the richest subject in Europe, and a prince of the blood of France. The first and the last of these three adepts had, by their mathematical knowledge, got such an ascendancy in the Royal Academy of Sciences, that they could admit or exclude candidates as they knew them to be friendly or inimical to the projects of the conspirators; and they had contrived, by matchless adroitness and unwearyed perseverance, to fill almost all the seminaries of education with men of their own principles.

Thus was the public mind in France completely corrupted, when the mason lodges, over which the infamous Orleans presided, were visited by a delegation from the German illuminati; and nothing more was necessary to produce the fact of Jacobins, by whose intrigues and influence, France, as M. Barruel expresses himself, has become a prey to every crime. It was by the machinations of this fact that its foil was stained with the blood of its pontiffs and priests, its rich men and nobles; with the blood of every class of its citizens, without regard to rank, age, or sex. These disciples of Voltaire were the men who, after having made the unfortunate Louis, his queen, and sister, drink, to the very dregs, the cup of outrage and ignominy during a long confinement, solemnly murdered them on a scaffold, proudly menacing all the sovereigns of the earth with a similar fate. Yet think not, indignant reader, that the ways

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(a) This term was invented by Abbé Barruel, and we have adopted it, as denoting something very different from the meaning of the word philosophe.

(b) We do not by this mean to insinuate that D'Alembert was not a man of science. He was perhaps the only man of science in that gang; but he was a master of no science but mathematics; and his birth being obscure, if not spurious, and abstract mathematics not furnishing ready access to the great, his ideas, when compared with Voltaire's, were grovelling, and (as M. Barruel says) he was afraid to be seen. of Providence are unequal. The nations of Europe were ripe for chastisement; and that chastisement these villains were employed to inflict: but their own punishment did not linger. Voltaire died in agonies of responding remorse, which can be exceeded only by the torments of the damned. There is reason to believe that the end of D'Alembert and Diderot very much resembled that of their leader; while the more hardened adept, Condorcet, became his own executioner; and the other chiefs of the rebellion have regularly inflicted vengeance on each other, every alteration of the French constitution (and these alterations have been many) being followed by the execution of those by whom the government was previously administered.