In Germany, the country of phlegm and patience, minds apparently so slow shared with serious and concentrated ardour in the general movement of mind in Europe.  Free thought there assumed the form of an universal conspiracy.  It was enveloped in mystery.  Learned and formal Germany liked to give even to its insurrection the appearances of science and tradition.  The Egyptian initiations, mystic ceremonies of the middle age, were imitated by the adepts of new ideas.  Men thought as they conspired.  Philosophy moved veiled in symbols; and that veil was torn away only in secret societies, from which the profane were excluded.  The prestiges of the imagination, so powerful in the ideal and dreamy nature of Germany, served as a bait to the newly arisen truths.

The great Frederic had made his court the centre of religious incredulity.  Sheltered by his power altogether military, contempt for Christianity and of monarchical institutions was freely propagated.  Moral force was nothing to this materialist prince.  Bayonets were in his eyes the right of princes; insurrection the right of the people; victories or defeats the public right.  His constant run of good fortune was the accomplice of his immorality.  He had received the recompence of every one of his vices, because his vices were great.  Dying he had bequeathed his perverse genius to Berlin.  It was the corrupting city of Germany.  Military men educated in the school of Frederic, academies modelled after the genius of Voltaire, colonies of Jews enriched by war, and the French refugees, peopled Berlin and formed the public mind.  This mind, full of levity, sceptic, impertinent and sneering, intimidated the rest of Germany.  The weakened spirit of that land may be dated from the period of Frederic II.  He was the corrupter of the empire—­he conquered Germany in the French spirit—­he was a hero of a falling destiny.

Berlin continued it after his death; great men always bequeath the impulse of their spirit to their country.  The reign of Frederic had at least one happy result:  religious tolerance arose in Germany from the very contempt in which Frederic had held religious creeds.  Under the wing of this toleration the spirit of philosophy had organised occult associations, after the image of freemasonry.  The German princes were initiated.  It was thought an act of superior mind to penetrate into those shadows, which, in reality, included nothing beyond some general principles of humanity and virtue, with no direct application to civil institutions.  Frederic in his youth had been initiated himself, at Brunswick, by Major Bielfeld; the emperor Joseph II., the most bold innovator of his time, had also desired to undergo these proofs at Vienna, under the tutelage of the baron de Born, the chief of the freemasons in Austria.  These societies, which had no religious tendency in England, because there liberty conspired openly in parliament and in the press, had a wholly different sense on the Continent.  They were the secret council-chambers of independent thought:  the thought, escaping from books, passed into action.  Between the initiated and established institutions, the war was concealed, but the more deadly.