the name of a secret society or order in Germany and other countries of Europe, whose professed object, it is said, was to propagate the purest principles of virtue; but whose real views were to subvert every established government and religion, and, by delivering mankind from the necessary and salutary restraints of civil society, to bring them to an imaginary state of freedom Illumination and independence. Of this order much has been said and written; but that any society existed, regularly organized in the way which this is represented to have been, working in secret, and at the same time possessing extensive power and influence, has not been established by any kind of proof.