You talk of peace, but your manner of talking of it embarrasses the Directory in making it, and serves to prevent it. Had you been an actor in all the scenes of government from its commencement, you would have been too well informed to have brought forward projects that operate to encourage the enemy. When you arrived at a share in the government, you found every thing tending to a prosperous issue. A series of victories unequalled in the world, and in the obtaining of which you had no share, preceded your arrival. Every enemy but one was subdued; and that one, (the Hanoverian government of England,) deprived of every hope, and a bankrupt in all its resources, was suing for peace. In such a state of things, no new question that might tend to agitate and anarchize the interior ought to have had place; and the project you propose tends directly to that end.

Whilst France was a monarchy, and under the government of those things called kings and priests, England could always defeat her; but since France has RISEN TO BE A REPUBLIC, the GOVERNMENT OF ENGLAND crouches beneath her, so great is the difference between a government of kings and priests, and that which is founded on the system of representation. But, could the government of England find a way, under the sanction of your report, to inundate France with a flood of emigrant priests, she would find also the way to domineer as before; she would retrieve her shattered finances at your expense, and the ringing of bells would be the tocsin of your downfall.

Did peace consist in nothing but the cessation of war, it would not be difficult; but the terms are yet to be arranged: and those terms will be better or worse, in proportion as France and her councils be united or divided. That the government of England counts much upon your report, and upon others of a similir tendency, is what the writer of this letter, who knows that government well, has no doubt. You are but new on the theatre of government, and you ought to suspect yourself of misjudging; the experience of those who have gone before you should be of some service to you.

But if, in consequence of such measures as you propose, you put it out of the power of the Directory to make a good peace, and to accept of terms you would afterwards reprobate, it is yourselves that must bear the censure.

You conclude your report by the following address to your colleagues:

Let us hasten, representatives of the people! to affix to these tutelary laws the seals of our unanimous approbation. All our fellow-citizens will learn to cherish political liberty from the enjoyment of religious liberty: you will have broken the most powerful arm of your enemies: you will have surrounded this assembly with the most impregnable rampart-confidence, and the people's love. O! my colleagues! how desirable is that popularity which is the offspring of good laws! What a consolation it will be to us hereafter, when 'eturned to our own fire-sides, to hear from the mouths

of our fellow-citizens these simple expressions-Blessings reward you, men of peace! you have restored to us our temples-our ministers-the liberty of adoring the God of our fathers: you have recalled harmony to our families-morality to our hearts; you have made us adore the legislature, and respect all its laws!"

Is it possible, citizen representative, that you can be serious in this address? Were the lives of the priests under the ancient regime such as to justify any thing you say of them? Were not all France convinced of their immorality? Were they not considered as the patrons of debauchery and domestic infidelity, and not as the patrons of morals? What was their pretended celibacy but perpetual adultery? What was their blasphemous pretensions to forgive sins, but an encouragement to the commission of them, and a love for their own? Do you want to lead again into France all the vices of which they have been the patrons, and to overspread the republic with English pensioners? It is cheaper to corrupt than to conquer; and the English government, unable to conquer, will stoop to corrupt. Arrogance and meanness, though in appearance opposite, are vices of the same heart.

Instead of concluding in the manner you have done, you ought rather to have said,

"O! my colleagues! we are arrived at a glorious period-a period that promises more than we could have expected, and all that we could have wished. Let us hasten to take into consideration the honours and rewards due to our brave defenders. Let us hasten to give encouragement to agriculture and manufactures, that commerce may reinstate itself, and our people have employment. Let us review the condition of the suffering poor, and wipe from our country the reproach of forgetting them. Let us devise means to establish schools of instruction, that we may banish the ignorance that the ancient regime of kings and priests had spread among the people. Let us propagate morality, unfettered by superstitionlet us cultivate justice and benevolence, that the God of our fathers may bless us. The helpless infant and the aged poor cry to us to remember them-let not wretchedness be seen in our streetslet France exhibit to the world the glorious example of expelling ignorance and misery together.

"Let these, my virtuous colleagues! be the subject of our care, that, when we return among our fellow-citizens, they may say, Worthy représentatives! you have done well. You have done justice and honour to our brave defenders. You have encouraged agriculture-cherished our decayed manufactures-given new life to commerce, and employment to our people. You have removed from our country the reproach of forgetting the poor-you have caused the cry of the orphan to cease-you have wiped the tear from the eye of the suffering mother-you have given comfort to the aged and infirm you have penetrated into the gloomy recesses of wretchedness, and have banished it. Welcome among us, ye brave and virtuous representatives! and may your example be followed by your successors!" THOMAS PAINE.

AN ESSAY

ON THE ORIGIN OF FREEMASONRY.

Ir is always understood that Free-Masons have a secret which they carefully conceal; but, from every thing that can be collected from their own accounts of Masonry, their real secret is no other than their origin, which but few of them understand; and those who do, envelope it in mystery.

The Society of Masons are distinguished into three classes or degrees. 1st. The Entered Apprentice. 2nd. The Fellow-Craft. 3rd. The Master Mason.

The entered apprentice knows but little more of Masonry than the use of signs and tokens, and certain steps and words, by which Masons can recognize each other, without being discovered by a person who is not a Mason. The fellow-craft is not much better instructed in Masonry than the entered apprentice. It is only in the master mason's lodge that whatever knowledge remains of the origin of Masonry is preserved and concealed.

In 1730, Samuel Pritchard, member of a constituted lodge in England, published a treatise entitled Masonry Dissected; and made oath before the lord mayor of London, that it was a true copy.

"Samuel Pritchard maketh oath that the copy hereunto annexed is a true and genuine copy in every particular."

In his work he has given the catechism, or examination, in question and answer, of the apprentices, the fellow-craft, and the master mason. There was no difficulty in doing this, as it is mere form.

In his introduction he says, "The original institution of Masonry consisted in the foundation of the liberal arts and sciences, but more especially in geometry, for, at the building of the Tower of Babel, the art and mystery of Masonry was first introduced, and from thence handed down by Euclid, a worthy and excellent mathematician of the Egyptians; and he communicated it to Hiram, the master mason concerned in building Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem."

Besides the absurdity of deriving Masonry from the building of Babel, where, according to the story, the confusion of languages prevented builders understanding each other, and consequently of communicating any knowledge they had, there is a glaring contradiction in point of chronology in the account he gives.

Solomon's Temple was built and dedicated 1004 years before the Christian era; and Euclid, as may be seen in the tables of chronology, lived 277 years before the same era. It was therefore impossible that Euclid could communicate any thing to Hiram, since Euclid did not live till 700 years after the time of Hiram.

In 1783, Captain George Smith, inspector of the Royal Artillery

Academy at Woolwich, in England, and Provincial Grand Master of Masonry for the county of Kent, published a treatise entitled, The Use and Abuse of Free-Masonry.

In his chapter of the antiquity of Masonry, he makes it to be coeval with creation, "when," says he, "the sovereign architect raised on masonic principles the beauteous globe, and commanded that master science, geometry, to lay the planetary world, and to regulate by its laws the whole stupendous system in just unerring proportion, rolling round the central sun.'

"But," continues he, "I am not at liberty publicly to undraw the curtain, and thereby to descant on this head: it is sacred, and ever will remain so; those who are honoured with the trust will not reveal it, and those who are ignorant of it cannot betray it." By this last part of the phrase, Smith means the two inferior classes, the fellow-craft and the entered apprentice; for he says, in the next page of his work, "It is not every one that is barely initiated into Free-Masonry that is entrusted with all the mysteries thereto belonging; they are not attainable as things of course, nor by every capacity."

The learned but unfortunate Doctor Dodd, Grand Chaplain of Masonry, in his oration at the dedication of Free-Masons'-Hall, London, traces Masonry through a variety of stages. Masons, says he, are well-informed from their own private and interior records, that the building of Solomon's Temple is an important era, from whence they derive many mysteries of their art. "Now, (says he), be it remembered that this great event took place above 1000 years before the Christian era, and consequently more than a century before Homer, the first of the Grecian poets, wrote; and above five centuries before Pythagoras brought from the east his sublime system of truly masonic instruction to illuminate our western world.

"But remote as this period is, we date not from thence the commencement of our art. For though it might owe to the wise and glorious king of Israel some of its many mystic forms and hieroglyphic ceremonies, yet certainly the art itself is coeval with man, the great subject of it.

"We trace," continues he, "its footsteps in the most distant, the most remote ages and nations of the world. We find it amongst the first and most celebrated civilizers of the east. We deduce it regularly from the first astronomers on the plains of Chaldea, to the wise and mystic kings and priests of Egypt, the sages of Greece, and the philosophers of Rome."

From these reports and declarations of Masons of the highest order in the institution, we see that Masonry, without publicly declaring so, lays claim to some divine communication from the Creator, in a manner different from and unconnected with the book which the Christians call the Bible; and the natural result from this is, that Masonry is derived from some very ancient religion, wholly independent of and unconnected with that book. To come then at once to the point, Masonry (as I shall shew

from the customs, ceremonies, hieroglyphics, and chronology of Masonry) is derived, and is the remains of the religion of the ancient Druids; who, like the magi of Persia, and the priests of Heliopolis in Egypt, were priests of the sun. They paid worship to this great luminary, as the great visible agent of a great invisible first cause, whom they styled, Time without limits.

The Christian religion and Masonry have one and the same common origin, both are derived from the worship of the sun; the difference between their origins is, that the Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the sun, in which they put a man whom they call Christ in the place of the sun, and pay him the same adoration which was originally paid to the sun, as I have shewn in the chapter on the origin of the Christian religion.*

In Masonry many of the ceremonies of the Druids are preserved in their original state, at least without any parody. With them the sun is still the sun; and his image in the form of the sun is the great emblematical ornament of Masonic lodges and Masonic dresses. It is the central figure on their aprons, and they wear it also pendant on the breast in their lodges, and in their processions. It has the figure of a man, as at the head of the sun, as Christ is always represented.

At what period of antiquity, or in what nation, this religion was first established, is lost in the labyrinth of unrecorded times. It is generally ascribed to the ancient Egyptians, the Babylonians, and Chaldeans, and reduced afterwards to a system regulated by the apparent progress of the sun through the twelve signs of the zodiac, by Zoroaster the lawgiver of Persia, from whence Pythagoras brought it into Greece. It is to these matters Dr. Dodd refers in the passage already quoted from his oration.

The worship of the sun, as the great visible agent of a great invisible first cause, time without limits, spread itself over a considerable part of Asia and Africa, from thence to Greece and Rome, through all ancient Gaul, and into Britain and Ireland.

Smith, in his chapter on the antiquity of Masonry in Britain, says, that "notwithstanding the obscurity which envelopes Masonic history in that country, various circumstances contribute to prove that Free-Masonry was introduced into Britain about 1030 years before Christ."

It cannot be Masonry in its present state that Smith here alludes to. The Druids flourished in Britain at the period he speaks of, and it is from them that Masonry is descended. Smith has put the child in the place of the parent.

It sometimes happens, as well in writing as in conversation, that a person lets slip an expression that serves to unravel what he intends to conceal, and this is the case with Smith; for in the same chapter he says, "The Druids, when they committed any thing to writing, used the Greek alphabet, and I am bold to assert that the

Referring to the Third Part of Paine's Age of Reason, not published. See Extract from Mr. Paine's Will in the preface to this volume.